Cricket’s Incomplete Ledgers and the Promise of Blockchain: Who Actually Keeps the Records of Young Talent?

A dirt ground just outside Mymensingh town. Before dusk, a coach opened a bound notebook for me. On the same page, the same boy had two birth years — 2026 on the top line, 2026 on the one below. Which page gets read decides whether he plays under-16 or under-19 cricket. The coach smiled, then went quiet. Across the ground a bowler ran in alone; nobody knows his name.

Since my playing career ended and I turned to writing, I have built one habit — keeping a field notebook for the moments the scoreboard forgets. In eight years that notebook has filled with more than four hundred young names: club, position, and one human detail each. That evening it struck me for the first time that my own notebook is part of the problem. However good the notebook is, if the institution’s records beside it are broken, a boy’s future stands on guesswork.

The question now is about records. Who holds the birth year, the scorecard, the club registration, the match fee, the injury history? A word has been circling cricket for some years — blockchain. Fan tokens, NFTs, smart contracts. The words glitter, and that creates an easy temptation: drop an immutable ledger on top of a broken system and everything will fix itself. My field notebook says the story is not that simple.

First, Bangladesh’s youth cricket structure needs to be understood. Age-group tournaments — under-16, under-18, under-19 — then divisional teams, then first-class cricket in Dhaka, then the national side. In between sit academies, district coaches, school grounds, and countless small clubs. Every joint in this chain needs a piece of paper. Paper is lost, paper is swapped, paper is never cross-checked.

On 9 February 2026, in Potchefstroom, South Africa, Bangladesh beat India to win the Under-19 World Cup final. That side, captained by Akbar Ali, was not built in a day; it stood on boys who came up through under-16 and under-18 steps, from districts to Dhaka. Players such as Towhid Hridoy rose through those very steps. Bangladesh therefore has proof the chain can work. The question is who keeps the chain’s paperwork.

The more matches I watch, the clearer it is that cricket rarely lacks talent — it lacks proof. A boy bowls brilliantly at eighteen, but the scorecards from his six under-16 games exist nowhere. A girl plays three good seasons in a row, and nobody has written down her injury history. When a selector decides, he trusts the paper in front of him — right or wrong.

This is where blockchain first becomes relevant. Blockchain is essentially a ledger — immutable, time-stamped, and verifiable across many parties. No one can unilaterally erase a birth year, because earlier entries live on every node. In theory, the day a boy’s name is entered on a school ground, a verifiable identity could begin — birth year, coach’s name, matches played, all in one chain.

The age dispute is cricket’s oldest, most uncomfortable problem — and it is blockchain’s clearest use case. Across South Asia, age verification has been debated for years; in India, methods such as bone testing have been used to settle doubts. But those methods merely catch suspicion; they never touch the paper’s roots. If school admission records, birth registration and cricket registration sat on one common, time-stamped chain, later age-switching would be far harder.

The second area is domestic scorecards. Every ball of international cricket is recorded, but outside Dhaka, in district-level matches, that does not happen. I have seen many games whose scorecards no one filed; the boys played, the result came, the record vanished. This missing data is the graveyard of hidden talent. A verifiable, time-stamped score network could partly fill that gap.

The third layer is commercial, and here blockchain shouts loudest. Around 2026-22 a wave of digital collectibles hit cricket; several India-based platforms worked on ICC- and IPL-linked collections, and football has run fan-token models for years. In theory, a fan token gives supporters a small vote in club decisions; in practice it often becomes a speculative product.

The fourth layer is my favourite, though the least discussed: smart contracts for players’ dues. At district level, match fees, contract money and even injury claims are delayed for years. An automated, verifiable record can release payment the moment conditions are met — no middleman needed, less room for delay. A record that releases money is a record that truly holds power — the rest is display.

The fifth layer hides a danger nobody says aloud: privacy. Immutable means immutable — once wrong data sits on a chain it can never be erased. Putting a minor’s birth year, address and health data on a public ledger means that instead of protecting his future, we publish it forever. In Bangladesh, where guardians often hesitate to trade privacy for protection, this question matters doubly.

I think cricket’s real test for blockchain will be unglamorous. Not a shiny fan token, but a dull registry — one that turns a district coach’s hand-written notebook into something digital and verifiable. The question is not of technology but of will. A cricket board can find money for technology, but finding the will to make records transparent is harder, because transparency redistributes power.

Now to the contrarian side, because my notebook forces me to. The biggest point — a ledger feeds no one. The boy who plays cricket or football in the morning and works in a shop at noon: where will a digital proof of birth year fall from for him? His school barely keeps regular records, let alone internet or a smartphone. If the foundation is weak, an immutable record does not heal a broken system — it cements the breakage.

The second objection is to immutability itself. I have seen rulings later corrected — a wrong age entered, a wrong score logged, a name misspelt. A human system can correct; on a chain that is nearly impossible. A record that cannot be corrected only makes injustice permanent. In the age debate, the person who genuinely lacks a birth record — whose parents could not keep papers — faces an even bigger wall under a rigid ledger.

The third objection is money. In the wave of fan tokens and digital collectibles, the largest gains go to platforms, investors and middlemen; players and fans get very little. In rural cricket its impact is close to zero. Technology built only for the urban, moneyed spectator will not fix a district-level ledger. In my eyes, cricket’s current blockchain use has more to do with market excitement than real need.

The fourth objection is the subtlest, and the real danger. A shiny dashboard easily makes people think the work is done. Someone shows a neat report with ten thousand young names, yet money never reaches the ground, coaches’ pay does not rise, girls get no separate dressing room. Then the record does not tell the truth that the system is hollow. This temptation to pass incomplete data off as complete is my greatest fear — because I have sat holding just such an empty notebook.

One more thing belongs here. How true any analysis or record is depends on how reliable its foundation is. An analysis built on empty data, however beautiful it looks, has every conclusion fabricated. However much blockchain talks about data integrity, before that we must learn a plain habit on our own ground — keep records, tell the truth, admit the gaps.

In the matches I have sat through, what stays is people, not statistics. A teenager walked out to bat in a first-class match, was out in two balls, and on the way back looked at me with a helpless smile. His career is in no database. If blockchain is ever used, my wish is that it is for him, not for the price of a spectator’s token.

The history of technology says a tool that promises to distribute power usually centralises it. The web once promised openness, and ended with information pooled in a few companies. Even if cricket’s records go on a chain, who runs that chain, who enters the coach’s data, who files the village boy’s paper — technology does not answer that; institutions do.

My small suggestion is not for the boardroom in Dhaka but for the coach on the ground: do the boring work first. Keep the scorecard of every district match, verify every under-16 player’s birth year, release every contract payment on time. If those three things are done honestly on paper, blockchain becomes a nice bonus afterwards; if they are not, chain or no chain, nothing will be gained.

I leave one question. We talk so much about cricket’s youth, but how many reach a selector’s hands as a full, true, time-stamped record? The day that answer is yes, whatever the technology is called, the work will be done. Until then I keep it in my notebook — that boy in Mymensingh, two pages, two truths, and one career still absent from anyone’s record.

The only woman in the press box learns to dig quietly, not loudly. The story of cricket’s data is the same — not a loud announcement, but patient accounting. Blockchain may be tomorrow’s tool, but today’s work is still old: writing a boy’s name down correctly.