Win a Mongoose on Spin’s Ashes coverage!

SPIN Magazine has teamed up with Hawkeye to offer cricket fans revolutionary new coverage of this summer’s Ashes on the web. Hawkeye Pulse offers visitors to spincricket.com the quickest updated scores on the web, as well as offering a range of new interactive features – including money-free betting that could win you a Mongoose, the new Twenty20 bat that everyone’s been talking about.

The Mongoose for the first Test was won by Mr Simon Yelland. Congratulations to him.

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SPIN to revolutionise Ashes coverage

SPIN and Hawkeye are to team up to offer cricket fans revolutionary new coverage of this summer’s Ashes on the web. Hawkeye Pulse will offer visitors to spincricket.com the quickest updated scores on the web, as well as offering a range of new interactive features.

The technology, developed by the team behind Hawkeye, has never been used for a sports event in the UK before. However, Pulse has proved a great success during its use in the first two Indian Premier Leagues, as well as the US Open tennis and Australian international games ovr the last winter.

SPIN was the first publication in the world to use the as-seen-on-TV Hawkeye graphics and data, a feature that has been popular from our first issue back in 2005.

Pulse takes that relationship a step further: users will have the latest scores, access to a Hawkeye archive of the day’s play, plus special Hawkeye-themed features analysing the key moments of the day’s play, put together by the SPIN team.

Pulse is the most interactive form of sports coverage on the web, offering users the chance to enter live, interactive Fantasy Cricket-style competitions and to vote on issues surrounding the game, as well as calling up Hawkeye graphics and data.

“Pulse is designed to offer viewers a deeper and richer engagament with a sport,” says Paul Hawkins, the man behind Hawkeye. “It’s built on the same kind of real-time platform used in trading, so the Ashes scores will reach Pulse users quicker than those on any other service.

“It also allows users to express their opinions and to predict certain elements of the game, offering the engagment that a gambling site might offer but without the downside of spending any money!

“We want to offer people a richer and deeper understanding of sport, via match stats and Hawkeye analysis.

“With Spin providing Hawkeye-based news and feature material, the idea is to bring a TV mindset to the internet coverage, offering rolling highlights of all the day’s talking-points.”

Though Pulse on spincricket.com will be a boon to office-bound cricket fans, those watching on TV at home will also get extra value from switching on their computers.

The free-to-enter Fantasy Cricket element of Pulse will have a series of brilliant prizes up for grabs.

Welcome…

In the four years SPIN magazine has been on the news-stand we’ve put together about two million words on the modern game, including the biggest-ever published interviews with the likes of Tendulkar, Pietersen, Afridi and Flintoff; expert columns from Imran Khan, Tony Greig, Navjot Sidhu and Graham Thorpe; exclusive Hawkeye analysis; and plenty of exclusive photography.

Proper, serious, in-depth coverage of modern cricket for people who love it.

The whole idea was to produce a cricket magazine that felt less like a trip to the headmaster’s office and more like a trip to… the cricket. To show modern cricket fans some things they are genuinely excited about - rather than stuff they should care about.

Until now, that archive has not been available on the web at all. It’s been a real case of miss it and miss out. We thought that was a waste.

The whole archive isn’t on here yet – it’s about 5 per cent – but there should be enough to keep you going, along with all our podcasts, some highlights from the current issue that’s on sale now and some web exclusives.

We’ll be adding more archive material on a daily basis, so make sure to check back.

Our notion is that a magazine is not, as has traditionally been the case, an out-of-date newspaper. Instead, we think of SPIN as a tremendously up-to-date book, a glossy souvenir of recent cricket that has the space and time to offer in-depth coverage of upcoming events.

We remain the only independent cricket magazine in the UK. Wisden is owned by Sky - although no-one ever seems to mention this, oddly - while All Out Cricket is funded by the PCA and the ECB.

Whether these titles can comment independently on the major issues that confront our game is not for me to say. I can only say that SPIN can, and does.

Keep coming back to see more info on some special SPIN events this summer and some very tasty offers for our readers.

Let us know what you think: spin@spincricket.com