The worst website in sport

Jason King writes: Re. “ABC on a sticky wicket with online broadcasting rights” (Tuesday). It’s all very well for the sports themselves to hoard the online and digital rights to major events, but they at least need to live up to their side of the deal and do things competently. That is where Cricket Australia has consistently failed.

Its website is without doubt the worst of all major sports (and probably all minor ones) — for several days earlier this year it actually claimed that “The Ashes is the pinnacle of Test cricket between Australia and New Zealand …”.

As at the time of this email, the CA email still hasn’t updated the Sheffield Shield table for matches that finished over a day ago (Wikipedia of course was almost instantly updated).

And its Live App is simply an abomination. I stupidly paid $16 for it and have been utterly unable to get it to log into the app, let alone stream anything through it.  Half a dozen emails to the CA “Contact us” inbox have proved unfruitful as well. The fact that it rates less than two stars on the iTune App store, even after the usual paying of uni students to give five-star ratings, shows that I am not alone in my contempt for that organisation.

So the cricket-loving public have every right to be sceptical and even worried about CA’s attempts to get involved in digital broadcasting.  By contract, the ABC is consistently excellent with all its digital offerings.

The other silence on abortion

Michael Byrne writes: Re. “Caro: breaking the silence on abortion and unplanned pregnancy” (November 18). Jane Caro seems to claim a badge of courage and honour in breaking out of the “giant female silence” of the women who have aborted a pregnancy.

I hold that there is a greater silence to be broken. That of the fathers of aborted children.

I experienced it in my youth and saw it as a callous act without any reference to me. I was not given the opportunity to take the responsibility of being a father and probable husband of a woman I loved. I observed from a distance over the years a woman whose life is nothing extraordinary, as is mine. It appears after all to have been an act of quick release from a personal problem where other women, in the main stream of the good life without too much hardship, and not so easy, take it on with courage and honour.

As life flowed forward for me I became a husband and father and thus know the joy of being so. Yet I periodically think of the other that had their opportunity for life taken. I know what age his/her age would be and I wonder of his/her life, without a scent of sentimentality but as a reality not present. It is a wonder in silence. I also wonder whether the mother wonders. I assume she must.

It may be that this break in silence by Jane Caro will let the wondering flow beyond the barriers of suppression to desire healing for all concerned.

What did you expect?

Joe Boswell writes: Re. “Essential: no, there’s no Labor revival” (Tuesday). Bernard Keane’s summary of the recent Essential poll looked at how well people think the government is meeting expectations. Keane said the results “reflect partisanship”, as “34% of Coalition voters think the government has performed better than expected, and 51% of Labor voters think it has performed worse than expected”. This is puzzling. If I am not a Coalition supporter I presumably expect this government to perform badly. If I see it doing so, it is meeting my expectations. So why do most Labor voters say this government is performing worse than they expected? What on earth did they expect? And if they really expected this government to perform well, why are they not Coalition supporters?