Cricket's Historians

The World of Cricket over the reins. The new annual, in fact, only lasted to 1968, but in 1971 Thorburn revived it under the title Aitken & Niven Scottish Cricket Guide . The ‘modern’ Irish Cricket Union Yearbook was created in 1979. This gave detailed scores of current Ireland matches, but a Record Section did not emerge for some years. Derek Scott, the then Hon Secretary of the Union, was the editor. The leading historian-statistician in Ireland he was born in Ireland in 1929 and from 1955 had provided a column on Irish cricket for The Cricketer magazine. A survey of the major overseas annuals issued between 1961 and 1970 shows little change from the previous decade. The Cricket Almanack of New Zealand , perhaps the leader in this field, was still edited by A.H.Carman, though by 1970 it was sponsored by Shell and the 1970 edition had grown to 188 pages (148 in 1961) – the Record Section ran to 12 pages. South African Cricket Annual continued under the editorship of Geoffrey Chettle. The Who’s Who of current players and the Record Section remained unchanged in format through the decade. The latter ran to 13 pages in 1970. Indian Cricket saw a change of editorship in 1966, with P.N.Sundaresan taking over. The content remained the samewith theRecords concentrating on Ranji Trophy matches, and other major competitions, rather than all first-class matches, which state of affairs gave rise to some criticism. Dicky Rutnagur launched a rival annual in 1957-58. It had a larger page size – Indian Cricket remained Wisden size. The one major feature in the new annual, which the long-running annual did not contain, was a Who’s Who of current players in Indian first-class cricket. The editor, rather nicely, thanks Gordon Ross when Rutnagur states that the Who’s Who is set out in a similar fashion to that in the Playfair Annual . In reality Rutnagur’sWho’sWho is vastly more comprehensive, including such notes as players’ occupations outside cricket. Anandji Dossa is responsible for the Record Section, which only includes Ranji Trophy matches. Rutnagur has compiled the Test records. He was born in 1931 and was the cricket correspondent of the Hindustan Times , though better known in India for 197