Cricket's Historians

Biographies Multiply superfluous. County and club yearbooks and their overseas companions gave statistics purely for the clubs they served. The story of how Simon King founded CricInfo in Minnesota in 1993 and how that particular internet bubble expanded and at the turn of the century exploded, with its founder being sidelined by his fellow directors and resigning, is for another place, but King’s initiative had a profound effect on the humble amateur cricket statistician. Through CricInfo and its off-shoot CricketArchive, the detailed score of every match of note was available at the touch of a button and out of that resource came all the basic records and cricketing biographies of the vast majority of players. The innocent hobby of cricket’s ‘anoraks’ was altered beyond recognition. Pure statisticians in the generally accepted cricket definition were sidelined and publishers now moved toward cricket books which were the fruits of historical research. People such as John Goulstone had pioneered in-depth study of contemporary documents and in the process demolished many half-truths. Irving Rosenwater, in a letter to the present writer, commented: ‘The writing of cricket history is not the cavalier process that some people see it as, to be undertaken at a whim, and just copying what is common knowledge. Some writers go through a whole career on that basis. Cricket history is an extremely demanding branch of scholarship, indulged in alas far too frequently – with predictable results – by persons unfitted for this demanding task.’ In England a largely unexplored area of cricket research had been Minor Counties cricket. The ACS had begun to publish books on Minor Counties, county-by-county, containing basic player details and career records. The first to appear, in 1993, was Lincolnshire, largely researched by Ken Trushell, see Chapter 15. There was a three year gap before Tony Percival completed the second county – Cheshire in 1996. Progress was very slow for two reasons. First, unlike the first-class counties, the match scores themselves were not always complete and second, again unlike the first-class counties, almost no biographical research had been done. 275