The Summer Field

150 of scoring shots off each bowler, if the scorer clicks on a computer screen where the ball went. If you press the right buttons, you can compare a batsman’s scoring shots with the same innings a year before, or any innings. The mystery of cricket scoring is that after 150 years we have made no progress, and show no sign of progressing, in how to measure intangibles: the value of an innings at the crucial start or end of a match, a spell of bowling, or runs saved (and even more intangibly, deterred) thanks to a fielder. The digital collection of numbers reinforces the untruth that all wickets taken and all runs made count the same. Only to a computer does a number eleven’s slog at the end of a hopeless T20 chase mean as much as a boundary by Bradman. Only in our human memory — and because human, imperfect and doomed to decay — can we go beyond the score book, to judge what is great. ‘I think of some desperate sticky wickets in Australia where Hammond and Hutton have played fine innings,’ Cowdrey wrote, ‘nothing to show for themselves in the record book that will never be forgotten by those who watched them.’ Umpiring and Scoring