Cricket's Historians

Appendix Two Statistics in the Computer Age as significantly, for the first time, averages could be generated in real time and published at any point in the season. So the traditionally laborious process of producing end of season averages was no longer a task at all, being an automatic by-product of computer scoring. Even the intermediate step of typing up scorecards had been removed; statistics in real time allowed commentators to feast on an ever broader range of statistical offerings. So as we move into the second decade of the 21 st century, we find that the capturing and use of scores and records on computer is no longer limited to the first-class game or to ‘serious’ statisticians. Software packages tailored to even the most modest club or village team can allow full searchable records of scores and player biographies to be compiled online, with multiple users updating and enhancing the information. Meanwhile cricket scoring packages such as Total Cricket Scorer allows the subscriber to score the match and provide live online feeds. The publication of cricket statistics research has flourished on the internet. Any number of websites and blogs have appeared with regular and original output appearing from, amongst others, Steven Lynch, S Rajesh, George Binoy and Travis Basevi. Broadcasters such as Sky TV appoint their own statisticians such as Benedict Bermange and Richard Isaacs to keep the commentators nourished with statistics generated from their laptops. The transformation of the cricket statistician from the intricate and laborious hobby to the mass media driven supplier of real time data is complete. Perhaps the most important and pragmatic application of computing to cricket statistics was undertaken by two English academics in the mid-1990s, with their research changing limited overs cricket worldwide. In 1992, the result of an evenly poised World Cup semi-final was decided when rain led to a two over interruption. Throughout the 30 year history of one-day cricket, anomalous or unfair results had arisen once the weather played a part, but such a flaw had become unsustainable in the form of the game that had become commercially dominant. Frank Duckworth (b. 1939) a retired mathematical scientist and editor of the news magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and Tony Lewis (b. 1942) a university lecturer and authority in Operational Research, had met in 1995 and realised that rain stoppages was a problem that needed solving using the tools of their trade. Their key conceptual breakthrough was the realisation that when a team is batting they are trying to maximise their score subject to two constraints, their limited overs and their limited wickets (i.e. being all out). Therefore they 305