No Such Thing As A Free Launch: Shane Warne Cricket

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Matt Larnach in Opinion

 

Gambling: it’s pretty awesome. We here at 51allout love a good punt and it doesn’t hurt that we are obviously dab hands at the business. But there are some out there in the wider world who are oblivious to the joys of a healthy wager on a likely thing, those who are either too young, too poor, or too concerned about the ill effects gambling has on the wider community to partake in the joyous activity. For the latter group we have only scorn, because if there were problems associated with gambling surely messers Victor and Morris & co would have let us know, the outstanding bastions of social welfare that they are. Whilst for those lamentably too young there are always the eastern bloc countries, which are typically lax about such things. But we do accept that for some people out there indulging in the joys of gambling can be a difficult business. Thankfully for them, someone has come to their rescue and stepping forward to enliven their otherwise meaningless gambling free lives is Shane Warne Cricket.

When we think of Shane Warne Cricket, we naturally recollect the awesome Playstation game that holds a fond place in our memory, and helped us pass many a beer soaked afternoon back in the day. Sadly this Shane Warne Cricket bears no relation at all to its namesake. It’s not a cricket game, or even a cricket simulation. It is simply a free iOS and android (that’s smart phones to luddites likes us) based app that revolves around predicting winners of IPL games and answering moronic trivia questions, i.e. all the fun of gambling without the hope of actually winning anything, or conversely needing to endure an intervention staged by friends and family after hacking their bank accounts to pay off your mounting debts. By which we mean to say it utterly sucks balls.

But before jumping to such hasty conclusions we should at least describe what the app is all about. Well, after installing the thing you are prompted to nominate your favorite IPL team, which obviously for anyone with even a skerrick of sense is the Pune Warriors. You are then taken into the app proper, which entirely revolves around predicting who will win a given IPL game, plus answering a number of trivia questions, all in the hope of winning points. What those points are good for is beyond us; we tried to redeem ours at the bottle shop for some gin but, alas, with little success. It would appear that all the reward you receive for correctly predicting a result or answering a tedious trivia question, such as ‘who is the current highest runs scorer in the IPL?’ (sadly ‘who cares’ wasn’t an option), is, well, sweet bugger all. Save for bragging rights we guess.

And therein lies the real hook of the app: supposedly Shane Warne is right there with you, predicting match results and generally getting into the swing of things. As the man himself says on the apps website, “I can’t wait to take on cricket fans everywhere – bring on the banter”. From what we have seen so far there seems to be precious little banter on show. Even when Pune were playing not a single “Fuck you Marlon!” was observed. Colour us disappointed. In fact Warne’s involvement with the product at all seems an afterthought at best. Sure his plastic visage is literally plastered over every page, and if you were so inclined to check out the man’s twitter or Facebook pages, links to both just happen to be equally prominent. But for all of the Warne Inc promotional material found throughout, meaningful contributions from the man himself are rather thin on the ground. A bit like the self-created hype surrounding his manifestos, it’s all smoke with very little fire.

Which leads us to believe (sceptics that we are) that the app was initially created without Warne’s involvement, and the developer only sought the outspoken has-been’s inclusion in order to lift it above the multitude of other cricket related apps currently on the market (some of which we might, if we get really, really bored, one day also review). Without Warne the app is virtually indistinguishable from any other cricket app that offers live score updates. With Warne it’s noticeably worse than the competition because nobody (other than seemingly Elizabeth Hurley) wants to have to look at his unnatural face for longer than absolutely necessary.

In conclusion there’s simply absolutely nothing to recommend you wasting the five minutes of your life that it would take to download and install this pile of shit. Yes it’s free, but then so is voting, and you couldn’t possibly convince anyone that engaging in either activity is in anyone’s best interests. Excepting, of course, those egomaniacs who seek to benefit from it and desperately try and convince you otherwise. But they most definitely don’t need encouraging. So perhaps if we all universally decide to just stop voting and downloading rubbish apps like this, people like Shane Warne and David Cameron will just disappear. And what a lovely idea that is.