Cricket's Historians

Historians Dig Deeper considered of the equivalent to ‘First-Class’ are given ‘List A’ status and used by CricketArchive and other bodies for compiling players’ career records. For the best part of a century, cricket statisticians compiled either first-class records, usually for their particular team, or, from the 1890s, Test Match data. The advent of top class Limited Overs cricket, first at domestic, then at International, level added a whole new raft of ‘records’. The recent emergence of Twenty-Twenty cricket adds two more facets, so that the ordinary cricket follower can be easily confused as ‘records’ fall almost match-by-match. The 2009 Wisden contains the following note in its book review section ‘All first-class counties produce handbooks of varying quality.’ No mention is made of Minor County handbooks, some of which are excellent. A splendid summary of all the first-class counties’ annuals was written by Clive Porter and published in The Journal of The Cricket Society Volume 23, no.2, Spring 2007. The book review section of the Wisden Almanack has still not recovered from the retirement of John Arlott. The major change on the U.K. cricket magazine front was the merger in 2003 of the Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Cricketer . The first hybrid appeared in October 2003 under the editorship of John Stern, but with Matthew Engel as the ‘Editor-in-Chief ’, linking the magazine, in theory, more closely to the Almanack . In 2008 John Stern continued as editor. A number of other U.K.-based cricket magazines have come and generally gone over the past two decades. They have been almost entirely focused on current affairs, usually with a greater picture content. The magazines that regularly feature historical and statistical work are The Journal of The Cricket Society whose current editor is Andrew Hignell and The Cricket Statistician (the journal of the ACS) with Simon Sweetman in charge. Prior to Sweetman taking on the editorship in 2006, both Philip Thorn and Mark Asquith had short spells as editor. Richard Hill launched Cricket Lore at the end of 1991. This was announced as being issued ten times a year and was devoted in the main to historical subjects, but rather like Bowen’s The Cricket Quarterly did discuss current matters. The magazine continued until 2005, but never 295