Cricket's Historians

The Formation of the Association of Cricket Statisticians Whilst this flurry of activity was emerging from the ACS, The Cricket Society, in August 1974, appointed Derek Lodge as its new Statistical Officer. Regular statistical notes by him began to appear in the monthly Newsletter. Lodge had joined the Society in 1970 and in the Spring of 1974 won the inter-society quiz. Aside from The Cricket Society he sent a number of articles for publication in The Cricket Statistician . Derek Harry Alan Lodge, born in Lewisham in January 1929 and educated at KCS, Wimbledon, was a civil servant throughout his working life, latterly with the Office of Arts and Libraries. He was also a Lib-Dem local councillor and was later elected Deputy Mayor of Amersham. By the cricketing public he was probably best known for his column ‘For The Record’ printed as a regular feature in Wisden Cricket Monthly from the establishment of that magazine in 1979. In addition he provided regular quiz questions for the magazine. His various cricketing publications will be noted later. Derek Lodge died in Amersham in July 1996. At the same time as the ACS was being founded, a new English cricket annual was launched, the John Player Cricket Yearbook . The editor was the England Test cricketer, Trevor Bailey – he was by 1973 a well-known cricket journalist and broadcaster – and the statistics were provided by Bill Frindall. The new production could best be described as a deluxe version of the original Playfair Cricket Annual . The first edition was 352 pages in length, cost £1.80 and had many black and white photographs, plus several colour sections. England Test Matches were given in fair detail; there were reviews and averages for each county; potted Championship and one-day county scores; reports from some overseas countries and minor counties and public schools. The Who’s Who of current County players was perhaps the most informative section. This gave the basic ‘Playfair’ style data and then several lines of comment. In 1977 the annual’s title was changed to World of Cricket . The last edition appeared in 1980, by which time the price had increased to £4.95 and Graeme Wright was described as editing and designing it, though Bailey was still the main Editor. In the final years one of the faults was that the informative biographical comments on players 223