Cricket's Historians

Appendix Two Statistics in the Computer Age By David Kendix From the mid-1980s onwards, the work and scope of the cricket statistician, that had remained essentially unchanged throughout cricket history, was fundamentally altered through the advent of the home computer and then the internet. This allowed two significant changes in the way statisticians worked. The computer allowed information on players and scores to be captured on databases or spreadsheets. This data could then be manipulated, allowing searches for records or compilation of averages to be carried out instantly. Then the internet allowed information to be globally accessible, shared and exchanged, updated and corrected. The provision of cricket statistics became a real-time commercial service, with an ever broadening range of outputs and uses. This Appendix covers some of the pioneers in the harnessing of computer power and cricket statistics, generating materials that could not feasibly have been delivered in earlier generations. The building blocks of most cricket statistics are a set of complete and accurate scorecards of international or first-class matches. While it was a founding goal of the ACS to classify all such matches and make their records as accurate as possible, it needed the computer to make this information usable and accessible. However, the original rationale for placing scorecards on computer in a form that allowed statistical analysis, as opposed to merely for typesetting purposes, came from an unlikely source. Although arguments over the relative merits of batsmen and bowlers had raged throughout cricket history, the statistical tools for making such comparisons remained resolutely blunt for well over a century. There were simply batting averages and bowling averages. Of course it was well recognised that traditional averages could never properly distinguish between performances made against 301