Cricket's Historians

236 A Rival for The Cricketer later, even in the mid-1970s, when One Day Internationals were up and running and the first World Cup was staged, cricket statisticians as a body paid almost no attention to the records being created by this new form of Limited Overs cricket. The ACS perversely declined to put any One Day records in its Journal. Wisden for 1976 gave a page each to the records in the Gillette and Player competitions, then in the following edition reduced the John Player League section from full scorecards to potted scores. Unhappy with this state of affairs, Terry Alcock and Christopher Fuke proposed a society devoted to One Day records only. The group was formed in 1977 with Alcock as Chairman. Three of the leading lights in what was titled the ‘Limited Overs Cricket Information Group’ were Les Hatton, John Stockwell and Victor Isaacs. The group published a quarterly Newsletter, as well as an annual which gave seasonal statistics in each major limited overs competition for all players. In 1981 a Gillette Cup Record Book was published and the following year a similar book dealing with the B&H Competition. In retrospect their most useful publication contained the full scores of the John Player League matches for 1976. The group merged with the ACS in January 1986, by which time most statisticians had accepted that ‘records’ for the One Day games were useful and in demand by broadcasters and journalists. Concerning the pioneers of this new set of cricket statistics, Alcock and Fuke soon faded from the scene, but three others deserve more than a passing mention. Victor Isaacs was born in Glasgow in August 1944. After leaving school he enlisted in the Army, retiring back to civilian life in 1974 and in April 1975 was appointed Hampshire scorer – he was a supreme ‘figures-man’. He took over as the county’s official record keeper after the death of Desmond Eagar in 1977. Later he became one of the first users of a computer for the purposes of cricket records and certainly the first to type into a computer all the matches ever played by a single county. In addition he was one of the first to compile comprehensive records for One Day Internationals and was the joint compiler of several record books related to these games. As has been noted he was also involved in the statistics for the B&H Cricket Year . A man of decisive principles, he