Why it doesn’t always pay to be a cricket tragic
The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events
If you read this paper you must be a cricket fan of some sort, but there are those whose possibly obsessive relationship with the game goes deeper, the real cricket tragics, to use a handy Australianism.
To see some of them, you could have come with me last weekend, when I went to the AGM of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS).
In Andrew Samson’s new book The Moon is Toast – A Year in the Life of a Cricket Statistician he suggests this is the most important event of the year. Possibly I would not go that far. I found Andrew’s book immensely interesting, but suspect that for most people it could be a step too far. Imran Tahir became the second quickest South African to reach 50 Test wickets last January…
The world of the statistician has been surprised by the installation of a paywall at CricketArchive, every statto’s favourite website with its database of over 700,000 scorecards built up over some years.
It was not built by its current owners, the Cricketer group, who acquired it a couple of years ago but who lately have been seeking ways of making it pay. They had tried advertising but it slowed the site down, irritated users, and did not produce very much income. So they saw no alternative but to erect a paywall. Even mildly serious statisticians or historians need to use the site and will have to pay up by the year or the month: you may use Cricinfo for your everyday needs but for deep history and cricket below first-class level you need the database of CricketArchive.
Some people have provided great quantities of information to correct and improve the CricketArchive website and now find they have to pay to use it. Hopefully, some arrangement will be made so people continue to correct the site.
The data on CricketArchive informs the cricket records section on the ACS’s own website (we think it’s the best one!).
Research into older cricket has become easier with the internet. Where once researching meant a trek to Colindale, most of what you might need is somewhere online, especially with the increasing number of periodicals to be found through Britishnewspaperarchive.com.
A recent addition to that site is The Tatler (best described as an upmarket version of Hello!). In those days cricket was an important part of the social lives of the idle rich, and so there is information to be gleaned there.
On our own ACS website we have a complete and searchable run of the magazine Cricket, which up until the Great War was the main record of the game.
There was never a better time to be a cricket statto.