ACS Oveseas First-Class Annual 2013

Preface It is my pleasure as editor to introduce this, the fifth edition of the ACS Overseas First-Class Annual . Like its predecessors, this edition of the Annual provides full scores of all first-class matches throughout the world during the period under review, with the exception of matches in England and Wales, which are printed in Wisden . A significant change this year is the later publication date. Previous editions of the Annual have been scheduled for publication in September, but in practice this has been a challenging deadline to meet because of delays in the supply of reliable match details from certain countries. This has faced me, as editor, with a dilemma: either delay publication and await more accurate data, or adhere to the September date and accept some of the scores might contain significant errors. In the end a change was forced by revisions to the ACS’s publication cycle, which meant that the September date was no longer available. The choice was either to bring the date forward to August, or delay until the next publication slot in November. The practicalities of obtaining reliable match data mean that the choice of the later date was inevitable. I hope readers will consider that the delay is a price worth paying for the increased accuracy that it allows. Speaking of price, I must express my regret that this edition has seen a further increase, now to £65. I should like to assure readers that this increase, which was decided upon with great reluctance, is the unavoidable result of greatly increased postage costs imposed by the Royal Mail. The ACS has again adopted the practice of inviting orders in advance, and I am grateful for the encouraging support that this elicited. The particular value of this approach is that it allows the Association to gauge with a high degree of confidence what the eventual sales are likely to be, which means that the print run can be set at a level that will satisfy the demand but not result in the waste and additional cost of producing more copies than are needed. A further change this year, and certainly one that has greatly lightened my task, is that Keith Walmsley has generously agreed to share the work of writing the narrative introductions to each first-class season. Our respective contributions are marked by our initials, but I am sure readers would, in any case, have had no difficulty in distinguishing Keith’s easy, gracious style from my own efforts. In most respects, however, the Annual maintains its format of previous years, including distinctive features such as the indication of players on first-class debut and the special treatment of full substitutes. See page 10 for general notes on the presentation of the scores. A recurrent feature of the Annual, and one that is troubling not only to me but also, I am sure, to many readers, is the absence from some countries’ scores of details such as balls faced, duration and boundaries: all features that one would expect to find on a modern card. West Indies, for instance, is extremely patchy in these respects, while Sri Lankan domestic scorers apparently do not record batsmen’s time at the crease. Worse still, most Pakistani scores do not indicate which batsman is out at the fall of a wicket, which means that anyone consulting the scorecard can be left with a tricky guessing-game to try to work out who was involved in a particular partnership. 5