Cricket's Blockchain: The Technology That Does Not Let Us Forget, but Will It Allow Us to Forget?

Bengaluru, March 23, 2026. That night no longer glows on my screen, but it glows inside the screen—when Mushfiqur Rahim's sweep kissed the edge and turned away, the whole of Bangladesh seemed to stop breathing. The scorecard later said: Bangladesh 145/9, India 146/7; defeat by one run. But does that one-run arithmetic ever tell which over holds the tears of the spectator beside me? I have watched matches for thirty-five years; from radio booths, press boxes, now digital feeds. Experience has taught me that the scorecard does not always tell the truth of the game. The truth lives in the gaps between deliveries, in the long breath of the stadium, in the minds of the crowd.

Now blockchain has arrived to keep account of that memory. To many, this is economics; but looking at cricket, I see a new capital of memory. In 2026, the ICC announced FanCraze as its official NFT platform. According to the joint ICC-FanCraze release, T20 World Cup boundaries, wickets and records became digital collectibles called Crictos cards. When I first saw that news, I thought it was turning the game's memory into cartoons. But then, over months, I watched fans searching for their own moments inside those cards.

Actually, each block on a blockchain is chained to the previous one; change one record and the whole chain changes. Is cricket not the same? Each ball is a block, each over one knot in that chain. The bowler's run-up, the batter's footwork, the fielder's anticipation—together they form one continuous ledger. As a match commentator, I often say that if even one entry in that ledger is wrong, the entire narrative shifts. When DRS changes a ball from out to not out, we are sending one block back. Cricket, like blockchain, is a public memory; its truth depends on how many people see the same moment the same way.

At the Kop I learned that return is a kind of memory. Listening to the breath of 54,000 people at Anfield from that Liverpool pub, I understood that great sporting moments return—on radio waves, through open windows, in the folds of an old scarf. Blockchain technology makes that return permanent; once a moment becomes an NFT, it cannot disappear. But the question remains—does the moment belong to the fan, or to the owner? Old albums belonged to everyone; new collections make the price of the image the main thing.

From years of watching matches, I can say that a spectator's memory is not ownership. On the night Bangladesh qualified for their first World Cup by winning the 2026 ICC Trophy, there was no NFT. Yet every person in that stadium had built a block inside themselves. Twenty years later, when those people share the same photograph on social media, each sees their own memory, not someone else's post. Crictos cards make that private memory expensive, and in doing so turn memory into merchandise.

The biggest promise of this technology is transparency. Match fees, tickets, broadcast rights, transfer agreements—all can be written on one ledger. The Chiliz fan-token model in football already shows fans participating in club decisions; cricket boards are moving that way too. But I have watched the cricket transfer market, and there is a silent danger there. Loan-with-obligation-to-buy deals have become the new pain of smaller clubs. A small club develops talent, makes financial plans, and the big club takes away the half-finished product. Smart contracts will automate that process, but does automation mean fairness? Whoever writes the code writes the rules.

For someone who moved from Bangladesh to Liverpool, cricket memory is not just sport; it is a map of country, family and identity. Like European nights, cricket becomes a diaspora night—watching the same video for years, sharing the moment on social media. What fascinates me is the digital diaspora: when a young Bangladeshi in a London flat goes silent watching Mushfiqur's run-out, he cannot carry the pain alone; he searches for another block of memory.

Here my Kop memory works again. The art of spotting talent in Liverpool's transfer market was never visible in spreadsheets. The empty stadiums of 2026 taught me that the bigger the silence, the clearer the truth; similarly, the silent clauses of loan agreements hide the real risk of small clubs. If blockchain's smart contracts pull that risk into the light, good. But if it is buried under the marketing language of big clubs, then technology becomes a new costume for old inequality.

I follow transfer news regularly; I have seen small clubs whose entire future of player development is mortgaged by three loan-obligation deals in one season. Blockchain's permanent ledger will remember that, but will it also encode the truth that small-club debt is part of big-club risk management? I doubt it. Because the transparency of code belongs not to institutions, but to the code's creators.

Russia 2026 showed me that a penalty kick can become public therapy. When England beat Colombia, it was not just football that won—a nation conquered its own nervousness. Can cricket's blockchain offer that therapy? If Mushfiqur's sweep became an NFT today, would Bangladesh's wound deepen, or would it find a platform to hold that loss? My answer: preserving memory means preserving pain. Cricket lovers carry sorrow in their chests; if we sell that sorrow as a token, where will the crying go?

The most discussed side of blockchain is NFT royalties. Each time a digital card changes hands, the creator earns a royalty. Young cricketers may benefit—becoming commercial partners in their own memorable moments. If a single delivery by Shakib Al Hasan becomes a card, its value will be decided by history, not just statistics. But who decides that history? Selectors? Broadcasters? Or an algorithm that prices viral moments higher? When selection becomes a currency of religious or national feeling, cricket will choose its memories harshly, and the forgotten ones may never find a place on the chain.

Imagine the silence of an empty stadium in 2026. I was in Liverpool, hearing every echo at Goodison Park during that 0-0 match. That game may seem boring to children; but to those who had waited thirty years for Anfield's title, that silence was a block, a chain, an imperishable history. Can blockchain hold that silence? The hardware says yes, but human memory says something else. Beyond every recorded sound lies a deeper layer we call absence. Technology stores absence as proof, but does not feel it.

This gap makes me cautious. If we think blockchain equals liberation, we will fail again. In the 2000s we thought the internet would free information; in the end, Google and Facebook owned it. If cricket's blockchain becomes centralised around ownership, it may become a new colony for smaller boards and poorer nations. Just as ICC broadcast-rights negotiations limit the decisions of smaller countries, blockchain's node structure can become the digital shadow of that geopolitics. A centralised ledger is only an old empire with a new name.

But I am not entirely pessimistic; I am future-curious. As a 51-year-old commentator, I have seen many technologies rise and fall. After FanCraze or Crictos, the next step may be blockchain-based match tickets—ending counterfeit tickets and bringing transparency to secondary markets. Or every instalment of a cricketer's contract may be written in a smart contract, so no board can withhold payment behind the excuse of financial trouble. When I imagine these forms, I feel cricket's old honesty—the umpire's hand, the scorer's pen—returning through the spectacles of code.

But, as with all technology, the real question is: for whom is this ledger? Will the fan who still watches on television, who may not own a smartphone, find a place in this chain? Who will build the memory block of the worker from the 2026 ICC Trophy night, of the student from the Bengaluru night in 2026, of the attendant in the empty stands of 2026? Blockchain belongs to those who have enough data; no one else.

Today, the more I write, the more I remember my start as a match commentator. From a tiny television booth in Dhaka, then hours of talking on Liverpool radio. There was no blockchain in those days; there were only human voices and stadium sound. When I see Crictos adverts now, I think that maybe there is no great wall between technology and story; the wall is in our attention. As long as the story lives in human blood, technology remains its servant. The day the story becomes the servant of technology, cricket will no longer be a game; it will be only a transaction.

That night in Bengaluru, Mushfiqur Rahim's sweep failed; but the memory of that failure taught us that defeat is not the end—return comes in the next tournament. That story of return is written in the pubs of the Kop, and on the penalty spot in Russia. Blockchain will be the new notebook of that story, surely; but will the pen be held by people, or by business? I do not fear; I ask—will the technology that does not let us forget also give us the freedom to forget? The answer may already be written in the stands of the 2026 T20 World Cup, where a spectator will hold dear, again and again, that moment of needing two runs off two balls.