Sideline Sid Sports correspondant & historian www.sunlive.co.nz

While there was an almost overload of rugby action at the weekend, with the Baywide club finals played out at Baypark and the Chiefs fantastic come from behind win over the Brumbies.

Watching the Warriors game as the entrée to the action in the Waikato made me think about the use of technology in the oval ball codes.

While I follow the Warriors as our country's representatives in the best rugby league competition in the world, I believe that the technology is ruining the game as a spectacle.

It used to be said that the appeal of league was that the play of ball at the tackle saw more continuous action than union's continuous interruptions of lineouts and scrums.

However, that has all changed, with Saturday night's Warriors games repeatedly blighted by the referees going to the television replay, to check on the legality of every single touchdown during the match.

On-field officials were supposed to do away with the need to go to the television replays when they decided to have two referees on the paddock in each game.

On Saturday night there were a number of tries scored by the two combatants, but the game was blighted by the continued two and three minutes waits of silence before the try was awarded or declined.

By contrast the match-up between the Chiefs and the Brumbies was a fast paced affair that had the Chiefs fans with their hearts in their mouth for three quarters of the encounter.

The difference between the two codes was when the Super 15 referee went for a second opinion, we could hear the questions that he required answered (and the decision) because he was wired for sound.

In cricket, well over a century of history is likely to disappear in the future, with scorebooks likely to be eventually replaced with electronic scoring.

In the early days of the game, in the 1880s, runs were recorded as notches on sticks of wood. Along with players wearing tall hats, cravats and trousers tight at the ankle, the recording of notches has long been consigned to history.

The recording of games in a scorebook became an institution, with legions of cricket fans taking their own scorebooks to test matches, to record every detail as signaled by the umpires.

While (cricket) scoring programs have been available for laptops for a few years, they were just stand alone programs with limited use.

However, the arrival of free apps has opened up a huge new world of cricket scoring and viewing to anyone, anywhere, courtesy of the android marketplace.

Locally, cricket fans are using and tuning in to CricHQ to view live scoring. If the match is being scored live using CricHQ, anyone with an internet connection can view the scoring as it happens.

Not only do you get the live scores, but there is the ability to see the wagon wheels and other statistics. A real time saving tool for teams, is the individual player statistics being tabulated during each game and at the end of the season it takes just a push of a button to complete the competition/s long stats.

Bay of Plenty Cricket put a toe in the water of live scoring last season with the Hawke Cup and some ND games having live scoring.

Western Bay Junior Cricket is trialing the use of laptop and tablet scoring this season. The theory is that at the close of play on a Saturday, all the game results can be collated electronically, with results and points tables available on the Western Bay Cricket webpage the next morning.

Seeya at the Game.