Cricket, no doubt, is a game of skill and sensibilities. It requires an immense understanding of factors like speed, spin, swing, and even the weather conditions to perfectly time a shot and, on the other end, to perfectly deliver a devastating ball. As much as it is a game of skill, it is also a team game. It requires a good understanding between two runners playing the ball or the bowler and the fielder when it comes to delivering a good delivery and coaxing the batsman to play a specific shot that will land a dolly of a catch for the fielder.
All said, there is a certain chemistry that works between people when it comes to cricket. The chemistry could be between two feared batsmen like Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. It could be between two devastating bowlers like Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. It could also be a good understanding between a bowler and a keeper like Ravichandran Ashwin and Mahendra Singh Dhoni!
For all you know, this chemistry could also come from belonging to a team and being in the right hands for the person to hone their skills and become better in the craft of cricket. This is perhaps why we see some skilled players being sidelined in one team and the same players becoming a powerful game-changer for another team.
It is, therefore, important to define the precision of ‘belongingness‘ when it comes to players.
Defining ‘Belongingness’
The same concept of belongingness also applies to people who can claim their ownership over certain players who have a certain set of skills. I am sure no one can ever forget the kind of competition that went into acquiring Mahendra Singh Dhoni in the first ever auctions of the Indian Premier League.
For common people, it was never about acquiring the players to play for their team with millions and billions of dollars. They might have played street cricket with players who they had wanted on their side. It is easy to see captains of street cricket teams yearn for one of the most powerful players… And in some cases, it is the one who owns the bat and the ball!
People in India are quite familiar with the concept of cricket cards. It is a simple game of non-commercial gamble played with cards that contain statistics of the players. If the player holds out a card and reads out a certain stat and if the opposite player has a lower value than them for that particular stat, the opponent’s card belongs to the person who called the stat. It was so intense and the knowledge about the game of cricket for an average cricket fan in the subcontinent made them happy when they got certain cards like… Obviously… Sachin Tendulkar or Anil Kumble or Wasim Akram!
The cards, however, neither did hold any real-world value nor were they authenticated in any way. They were just cards and nothing more!
Fast forward to the electronic gaming era, certain players came bestowed with some special powers and it made those electronic game players go for those particular batsmen or bowlers in cricket. This again, however, was not a very engaging or entertaining affair because it was, to say the least, not very thrilling. It did, however, give the joy of playing and the joy of winning either with a computer or with another player who would probably sit by the side when playing the game. These games were probably played on the Intranets and it was more of bringing the game of cricket to the confines of an air-conditioned gaming parlor.
Enter NFTs
The Meta Cricket League, or MCL for those who think Meta Cricket League is too many syllables, brings you quite an elevated experience that gets the best of everything from every era of the game and from every level of defining belongingness, giving you the ultimate cricketing experience that you can get sitting in front of a computer or a mobile device.
In MCL, you get to own players with interesting statistics that define their capacity to play against certain people or in certain conditions. These statistics, however, are not going to be just confined to a gamble but they will be put to good use in the game.
You might have seen franchise leagues trade players for staggeringly huge sums of money. It might not be possible for a lay person to trade players in that magnitude of finance. However, you can get the same joy and thrill of trading players and even participating in auctions to get the player that you would like to own in MCL on the Jump.trade NFT marketplace.
And last… But not the least, the reason why franchise team owners spend so much money on acquiring players of their choice is that they have a possibility to earn returns multi-fold. Every match that the team wins and every powerful performance put by a particular player in a team is bound to give them rewards and of course, recognition. With MCL, it is also possible for you to earn rewards with every game that is played and you can also win bigger rewards if your team wins the match. You also have an option to monetize every run that you score and every boundary that you hit.
To make it even better, you can even upgrade your players with every match… something that is not possible in your usual real-world cricket.
To Conclude
MCL is one of the most significant milestones in the evolution of cricket. For a lot, it might not be central to cricket but it does represent the joy and thrill of owning a cricket team and earning money from managing a cricket team being brought to the common people (which was just confined to a few millionaires and billionaires until now!).
Unlike the classic card game where you could just say you own a card, the classic electronic game where you could just say you played a game, unlike the auction systems where you just watch players being acquired and traded, you can now experience all of it… First hand in MCL!
