India, the ‘tweet champion’ of three world cups

Many of you would have tweeted your expression the moment Indian cricket captain, MS Dhoni, stumped Mustafizur Rehman of Bangladesh in that nail-biting finish of the T20 World Cup match on March 23.

Your real-time expression was one among the 10,000-plus tweets generated on India-Bangladesh match at that moment — 11.22 pm to be precise.

Though India did not win Cricket World Cup (CWC) of 2015 and T20 World Cups of 2014 and 2016, it remained ‘champion’ in most of real-time Twitter activities like the one mentioned above. It is difficult to imagine a tournament without a clash between archrivals India and Pakistan, and these matches always generate more real-time Twitter activities.

In fact, highest number of tweets was generated from these clashes both in CWC and T20 World Cup.

While 1.7 million tweets related to #INDvPAK were generated during the match on February 15, 2015, the March 19 T20 clash this year saw around 1.12 million tweets. A Twitter blog said that this is the biggest T20 match ever on Twitter.

It may be interesting to compare these figures with the total number of tweets related to the official hashtag -- #wt20 -- sent during the 2014 T20 World Cup. It remained at 1.73 million during the match window of March 16-April 6 of 2014.

If India-Bangladesh T20 match recorded tweets per minute (TPM) of 10,000 on March 23, the highest number of TPM was recorded in the match between India and Australia.

Around 16,000 tweets related to #INDvAUS were generated at 10.59 pm on March 27 when India beat Australia by six wickets to reach semi-final.

India’s win against Pakistan by six wickets in the T20 match on March 19 generated 12,400 TPM at 11.24 pm. During the CWC 2015, the highest TPM of 9987 was recorded when India beat Pakistan by 76 runs on February 15 2015 in Australia.

The number of Indian players has gone up in a Twitter XI ‘dream team’. A Twitter blog said that the dream team was based on the most-mentioned players on Twitter during the tournament.

The Twitter XI of CWC 2015 had four each players from India and Pakistan followed by South Africa with two. Australia had only one representation. The number of Indian players increased to six in the Twitter XI ‘dream team’ for 2016 T20 World Cup. The winner West Indies had only two representations on the team, followed by Australia, England and Pakistan with one each.

Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni have found a place in the most-mentioned players’ list in the three world cups from 2014-16.

It was neither a player nor a celebrity who got the most re-tweets for a tweet on cricket world cups. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tweet congratulating India’s win against Pakistan in CWC 2015, and against Bangladesh in 2016 T20 World Cup got the most number of re-tweets.

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