Well as the story goes, I didn't really know too much about Zimbabwean cricket until they toured Australia in 2003. It struck me as unusual how many white players there were in a team from Africa (then and now, it's something of an anachronism), so I paid closer attention. Grant Flower was actually the first player I got behind, not Brendan Taylor.
The early to mid 2000s were obviously a pretty politically charged time in Zimbabwe, so by following the cricket it went without saying you were also following the political situation. It seemed every other week Steven Price would have some story about a ZANU-sympathiser digging up a pitch somewhere... so basically Zimbabwe cricket was an
interesting thing to follow. His and Cricinfo's articles generally had too narrow of a focus for my liking though.
Long story short, I earmarked Taylor as a good player pretty early on (I've had a pretty good strike rate with my calls - I was on the Michael Clarke bandwagon from day 1 and never strayed, and I've been a Graeme Cremer fan for a long time).
I think I recognised Taylor's potential before that last-ball 6 game, but I can't say for sure. I was on the bandwagon long before the T20 win vs Australia, I know that. But it was that game that prompted me to get my act together and put up a website. The motivation was not so much to make a fan site dedicated to my favourite player (I just thought that would be a cool way to go about it), but rather the idea dated back to the Kenya series in 2006. Cricinfo were a "bunch of useless" back then as well, and the only website that had live scores (every 10 overs or so) for that shocker of a series was BBC. I thought that was ridiculous, and thought if I'm looking for live scores for Zim cricket there must be others. It's been a long time since I updated it obviously, but you can still see that original intention in the "live scores" column on the right. A slightly better Cricinfo and the advances in social media made that more or less redundant pretty quickly though.
The other thing I wanted to do was focus more on domestic stuff and things that couldn't be found elsewhere. I recall maehara's site was very good for news articles and the comments section, so I did more historical pieces and club details. For example the
club player database I put a lot of work into at the time with the help of a few people on the ground who sent me scorecards or overviews. Again with the advent of a site like CricHQ something like that would be redundant now, but at the time I was proud of how it turned out and certainly there was a level of detail there that you would never get from ZC, Cricinfo or anyone else. Something like
the profile of Khawulani Ntuli for example, some of it is just common sense from looking at the stats but bits like "considered to be one of the fastest bowlers in Zimbabwe" I could only include because a local batsman emailed me to tell me that. Basically, a much condensed version of the sort of thing John Ward did for Cricinfo in the late 90s - his stuff is unparalleled.
I was also fortunate to get a few exclusive interviews for the site. Again, I mainly cared about stuff that you just couldn't find elsewhere hence why I'd ask questions like "who is the fastest bowler on the club scene", "what are the crowds like at FC matches", etc. I was just looking through the list then (it's been a long time) and I think there were some genuinely insightful things to come out of it... I'd forgotten all about
this interview for example. I doubt if Cricinfo or any of the major outlets would ever have bothered to talk to someone who left ZC.
The thought honestly did cross my mind to register agcremer.com a few years ago! But I figured I've already got one Zimbabwe cricket site I don't update (I'm not sure what brmtaylor.com as a website could offer in 2017 that other websites already don't), a second is probably superfluous.