Twenty-One Years of the ACS

totalled £17,000.which was more than twice what was first promised when the appeal for help was launched. There was also £12,000 available from Sport-in-Print shares previously held by ACS members and others. In what wereequally benevolentgestures,they decided to leave their money untouched. Both the pledges and the formershare money have been classified as loans and arrangements are being made with each donor as to how they should be repaid. Most people have settled for the sums to be treated for the time being as subscriptions paid in advance.These twosources ofsupport have meant that the ACS has been able to take outa mortgage for£20,000instead of£26,000 as was first thought likely; and only £7,000 has been needed from ACS reserve funds ratherthan £12,000,which was feared mightbe the case.The monthly mortgage repayments could be limited to around £300instead of£350 and rent from the maisonette above the shop will defray a large part of this. For the ACS to have become involved in an outlay of more than £55,000 is a far cry from its early days when it operated from an extremely small financial base and at that time, neither corporation tax nor VAT complicated matters for the treasurer. The single,typed sheet listing incomeand expenditure at thesecond AGM on March 22,1975,as an example,showed a turnover of£871,compared with the glossy, seven-page brochure - audited by chartered accountants - which in 1992 revealed the equivalent figure to be around £35,000. Subscriptions realised £496 in 1974 compared with £12,822 in 1992; sales of publications advanced from £150 to £23,000;and cash in hand of a mere£47.92 has been superseded by financial assets of£20,000 and stock worth £24,000. With property values set to rise, the ACS would appear to be in a more than satisfactory position, though, there must be no complacency in a competitive age.The membership seems to have settled at around 1,150,which is lower,one feels, than it should be.Roughly a hundred newcomersjoin each year but they only replace thesame number, who, for one reason or another, fall by the wayside. A record 17 booklets - including four issues of The Cricket Statistician - appeared in 1992 and the total number of publications since the ACS started now stands beyond the 230-mark. It would be unrealistic to assume that 17 booklets will appear every year but it was indicative ofthe ACS's vigour and well-being.A domain that might beexplored by the ACSfruitfully in the years ahead could be to serve as a global clearing house for statistical information - an unofficial,world-wide focal point for researchers as it were - and certainly it has to strive for greater recognition from the game's administrators. The Test and County Cricket Board should surely have involved the ACS when it planned the introduction of computers into daily scoring. The International Cricket Council (ICC), similarly, have been remiss on more than one occasion, such as their retrospective rulings on the 1947-48 Fijian tour to New Zealand and the status of one-day internationals played by Bangladesh in the Asian Cup during the 1980s. The latter brought a plea from John Trye, an ACS member from