Cricket's Historians

218 The Formation of the Association of Cricket Statisticians this guide and one which was sustained through the subsequent guides was that there were notes on all ‘borderline’ matches explaining why the ACS either included or excluded them from its final first-class list. John Arlott reviewed the book in the 1977 Wisden : “It would be well, in the absence of any further evidence, and in the important cause of uniformity, if statisticians accepted this classification which, if not watertight – what such list could be? – is the product of careful study by as many dedicated researchers as might reasonably be wished.” It would take the Association another 13 years before guides to all the other countries playing first-class cricket were published, or 16 years since the first Committee embarked on the project. There would be even more heated discussion on some of the very tricky decisions required for some overseas matches, but such was the nature of the beast. Much later the ACS would define what was the first-class equivalent in terms of major limited overs matches. This latter exercise scarcely caused a ripple and was principally the work of Philip Bailey. These matches are ‘List A’. The ACS as yet has not published a book detailing ‘List A’ matches with suitable notes explaining why borderline games are included or excluded. Looking back in 2010 it seems almost ridiculous that the brotherhood of cricket statisticians, who had been arguing over the status of matches for sixty years, had not solved the problems of first-class status earlier. Running parallel with the task of listing first-class matches was the project of trying to identify every first-class cricketer – obtaining basic biographical data and in some cases discovering whether two players, were in fact one man, whose surname had been mis-spelt, or initials incorrectly recorded, also the converse, where one man was in fact two separate individuals. As an initial start, the Committee decided to tackle English players on a county-by-county basis. Warwickshire was chosen as the first county to be tackled since Brooke had been researching the biographical data of players for several years and had prepared the career records. The fact that Warwickshire first-class cricket began in 1894 avoided many