Cricket's Historians

304 Appendix Two Statistics in the Computer Age create the relevant search from the required database. The culmination of the computerisation of cricket statistics has been the phenomenon that is CricketArchive, founded by Peter Griffiths and Philip Bailey in 2003 with the original aim of capturing the scorecard of every first-class match and List A match. With this task completed by 2004, it then broadened its scope to almost all levels of the game for which authoritative scorecards exist, including minor counties, club matches, age group and women’s cricket. As at June 2011, it contained around 270,000 match scorecards and 400,000 player profiles and its rate of growth appears limited only by the appetite of statisticians around the world to submit new scores or enhanced details of past matches. An unusual occurrence can be spotted in a first-class match somewhere in the world and within minutes a query can be run on CricketArchive and an email distributed chronicling any precedents for the occurrence in any of the 53,000 first-class matches to have been played over the previous two centuries. Beyond the electronic compilation of historic information, there have been two other uses of cricket statistics made possible by computing power, which have each in their own way transformed how the game is played or reported. Yet in both cases, the pioneers would not necessarily have seen themselves as cricket statisticians, but as people who happened to apply their commercial, computing or mathematical skills to the game of cricket. In the late 1980s, premium rate telephone services began providing live commentary on all county matches. This alerted the ECB to the fact that scores of county matches was an asset valued by millions of cricket followers, yet one that provided no commercial return to English cricket. Journalists had for years phoned through updates from the ground, typically at 30 minute intervals. But if scores could be generated electronically in real time, directly from the official scorers, with access to these feeds beingmade commercially available to themedia, then this would be a service that would have some value. In a joint venture with the Press Association (PA), the ECB introduced in 1993 the mandatory scoring of county cricket by computer, then two years later, once the technology was deemed reliable enough, it was expanded to cover international matches. The official scorer would enter each ball bowled into the ‘Cricket Record’ program, the information would travel through a modem to PA, where it would create instant scorecards that would always reconcile. These could then be placed on the PA website and formatted according to its clients’ needs, providing page-ready copy for newspapers. Without the scope for transcription errors, the reliability of scorecards compiled by Wisden increased dramatically. Just