Cricket's Historians

274 Chapter 19 Biographies Multiply From the late 19 th century, with books such as Coxhead’s Cricket Records , through Lester’s Bat v Ball , Home Gordon’s Cricket Form At A Glance , E.L.Roberts’s numerous publications to Webber’s Playfair Book of Cricket Records and its successors by Bill Frindall, the cricket reading public had been kept abreast of cricket statistics relating to first-class cricket. The growth of Test cricket saw Test record books appear, initially just England v Australia, but then Test cricket in general with Webber’s Playfair Book of Test Cricket and its successors by Wrigley and Frindall. Frindall’s final volumes containing full scores of all Tests appeared in 2000, since when commercial publishers have moved toward so-called encyclopedias which give very limited statistical information. The ACS Who’s Who of Cricketers published in 1982 and reissued in 1993 gave biographies of all first-class cricketers in the British Isles. In Australia Webster’s books containing all first-class match scores in that country was noted in the last chapter; The Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket was published in 1996 with Richard Cashman heading a list of contributors. This was Australia’s equivalent of The Barclays World of Cricket . Through the 1980s there had been a steady interest in the history of Australian cricket. This growth had been, if anything, increased since then. A splendid illustration of this is the Oxford Companion , since it lists no less than 102 contributors. It is impractical to provide data on all these writers and researchers, those who wish to can refer to the three pages of contributors printed in that work. The introduction of the internet was to make these great volumes almost