Ashes will start soon, since growing up Ashes has been my favorite cricket tournament...cause it is Brilliant cricket...too much is at stake and I love when that transcribes into a fierce competetion..after Ashes I like the India/Australis Test series (Border/Gavaskar Trophy)

Back to Ashes...growing up in India, television was only introduced in the early 1980s, so you can imagine there was not much infrastructure available to produce and dessiminate programs...as usual (perhaps for the better part) the Indian govt. relied on foreign programs...

So we got:

Bodyline Series (BBC)
The Old Fox (German detective show)
Star Trek!!!!!
Flas
He-Man (awww)

I can go on, but you know what our media diet was like...

Watcing cricket shows romanticised the entire sport and the concept of watching, playing, understanding and debating cricket....( I have DVDs, taped cassettes, old videos of cricket)..

If someone is looking for literature, Cricinfo.com is great site, as it is tied to Cricket Almanac (Wisden)..

I love their database, I spend hours checking players, their past, their profiles, reading about how they got, what made them...blah..blah...blah...

My favorite pastime though is to look at various old Test scorecards..at Cricinfo.co you can choose various series by year (mostly all cricket happening in that year)..and I spend hours looking various intrnational Test series...

The scorecards tell more than you can imagine...about the game..and the archive articles too they have...some authors are really poetic when it comes to cricket...