EXTRA COVER
Steve Kilgallon investigates why club cricket has gone back to scoring with pen and paper.
On Saturday, Mike Plant ensured the volunteers looking after the five junior teams at his cricket club, New Plymouth Old Boys’, had oldfashioned paper scorebooks and pencils.
After years of cricket having fancy live online scoring platforms navigated by ipads, going back to the old way was the only guarantee the score could be kept accurately.
Cricket, probably more than any other sport, thrives and relies on statistics. And scoring a cricket game is a complex skill – but essential for the game to go ahead.
When scoring went online, it made it much easier for mumand-dad volunteers to score a game in real time – and for people not at the ground to follow along.
In the off-season, New Zealand Cricket changed its tech provider, ditching Kiwi company Crichq, which once aspired to be the ‘‘Facebook of Cricket’’, for Aussie newcomer Playhq – and the early-season wobbles of the new boys have caused outrage in scorers’ boxes nationwide.
‘‘It is,’’ declares one club cricketer, ‘‘a complete s... show.’’ He had to phone NZ Cricket’s specially set-up helpdesk just to register himself for the new season.
Plant is more diplomatic, but is also seething about the new burden on his volunteer shoulders. ‘‘We’ve had lots of issues,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s just not ready at all. It’s not comparable in standard [to Crichq].’’
He reels off a list of faults, from the big stuff, like the system not handling junior cricket rules designed to make the game more accessible, to others such as the use of Australian scoring conventions instead of Kiwi ones.
In particular, Plant says, the loss of detailed live scoring cuts their community engagement. On the old system, an average of seven people followed each community cricketer’s play. ‘‘It’s just deflating as a volunteer who has put nearly a decade into junior cricket . . . to have all that goodwill effectively wiped out is really disheartening.’’
After years getting people to learn the old system, he says they now have to retrain on an inferior model. He’s written to Taranaki Cricket and been told it’s being worked on.
In Auckland, Birkenhead City fourth-grade captain Matt Bailey said his team aborted use of Playhq in their opening game, with problems adding guest players and installing the website on someone’s device.
‘‘It’s a real mission to use it,’’ he said (although he admitted they’d never used Crichq much either).
There have been rebellions. Stuff has been told up to seven Wellington clubs, at various grades, planned to use paper scoring or Crichq last weekend.
Cricket Wellington chief executive Cam Mitchell was reluctant to comment, but said he’d received both positive and negative feedback from clubs.
Stuff has seen a list of 30 queries about the platform sent to New Zealand Cricket by Cricket Wellington.
And while most major associations have stuck with the party line, Hawke’s Bay has not.
Hawke’s Bay Cricket chief executive Craig Findlay said: ‘‘We have continued to use Crichq this season and it provides everything that we require in a competition management system. We don’t have any thoughts on the Playhq platform as we aren’t using it this season.’’
Not everyone is miserable. The view from the grassroots seems to be that Playhq is very good at providing club management, a service which some clubs didn’t trust Crichq with, and so they paid for external providers.
One club official said: ‘‘I think it’s a step backwards to take a few steps forward. They could have implemented it so much better – it didn’t seem to be properly tested. But Crichq was awful at first, then it came right . . . Crichq was a great scoring app, but crap at everything else.’’
A story of ambition, failure and recovery
Losing the backing of their native country marks another difficult chapter in the turbulent life of Crichq, a much-celebrated story of Kiwi ingenuity which came to a crashing, but not terminal, halt in 2018.
The original company, founded by Karori Cricket Club stalwart Simon Baker, had big dreams and big names on board: former New Zealand captains Stephen Fleming and Brendon Mccullum were significant shareholders and the company’s frontmen.
A range of cricket luminaries (Muttiah Muralitharan, Michael Hussey and Morne Morkel) and business heavyweights (Michael Stiassny, My Food Bag’s Cecilia Robinson and Saatchi & Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts) took minor shareholdings.
Crichq wanted to be the ‘‘Facebook of Cricket’’, and reckoned it could become a $10 billion business. Signing on NZ Cricket in 2013 was hailed as a ‘‘massive’’ deal, but
Crichq struggled to turn its users into customers: nobody wanted to pay for live scoring.
It burned through its initial investment – including $2 million from Callaghan Innovation – and was forced into marriage with a Singapore private-equity investor, Tembusu Partners.
When the company was liquidated, Tembusu lost most of its $25m investment. It did,
however, sell the intellectual property to a new company – business journalist Rebecca Stevenson, who had tracked Cricinfo’s rise and fall, reckoned the sale price was about $3m.
The purchasers were led by investment banker Peter Dowell, who left an 11% share parcel in a trust for former shareholders like Fleming and Mccullum in the hope they would one day get a payout.
In January, the new company was upbeat: chief executive Erin Walshe told Business Desk’s Stevenson they had turned the corner, beating its own target of 1.6m users to reach 1.93m users, and securing deals with the Hyderabad Cricket Association, Nepal cricket, and, crucially, the Pakistan Cricket Board, which brought an initial tranche of 220,000 Pakistani cricketers.
Under Dowell and Walshe, Crichq stabilised a notoriously wobbly platform and its live scoring system was straightforward and easy to use. The company launched a spin-off, My Action Replay, which enabled clubs to couple fixed cameras at their grounds with the scorecards to automatically record match highlights like wickets and big sixes.
One cricket scorer says the platform was finally ‘‘near perfect’’.
It’s understood profitability remains a long road, but Walshe says Crichq will now focus on expansion in India, North America and England.
Losing New Zealand was upsetting, but he’s taking a sunny approach. ‘‘We don’t want to come across as bitter, because we’re not,’’ Walshe says, stressing they’ve no issue with Playhq (‘‘they’re good guys’’), and intend to partner with them around video replay technology. Last week, he had a beer with Playhq founder Sam Walch in Melbourne.
But his frustration with NZ Cricket is apparent. He said the organisation never allowed Crichq to bid for a renewal, didn’t seem to consult the cricket community, and announced the new deal without telling them. Despite that, he’d happily have provided a parallel scoring service while Playhq found its feet: ‘‘I think the transformation has not been handled properly.’’
Walshe says clubs are telling him they’re returning to his platform, and last week he walked around local grounds and every game was using manual scoring: ‘‘To me, that’s just ridiculous.’’
Awkwardly, Crichq and NZ Cricket remain in negotiations: NZ Cricket wants to transfer Crichq’s player database, which holds a decade of every grassroots cricketer’s precious statistics.
NZ Cricket’s head of community cricket, Kent Stead, said NZC was aware of the optics of switching from a Kiwi provider to an Australian one but focused on finding the best platform, and felt that with the Pakistani deal ‘‘they weren’t leaving them [Crichq] in the lurch’’.
The newcomers also have some big-hitters behind them: Basketball Australia and the Australian Football League (AFL) are shareholders, and the Playhq board includes AFL and basketball execs, plus former Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland, alongside platform founder and CEO Sam Walch.
Playhq offers basketball, AFL, hockey, cricket and netball platforms, with NZ Hockey and cricket its first offshore expansion;
it expects to reach 1.8m to 2m users by the year’s end. ‘‘We think we can scale out to the world in the next five to 10 years,’’ Walch says.
He describes the vision as offering a system for all team sports that makes fixture planning, registration, club management and scoring easier. That seems to be what sold NZ Cricket: Stead says they measured up registration, payments, competition management and scoring, and are delighted with the first three.
But most club cricketers will only see the last item on that list. ‘‘It was one area Crichq did really well,’’ admits Stead, ‘‘but we are also really confident that . . . it won’t take long for the Playhq scoring programme to catch up.’’
Erin Walshe is less certain. ‘‘We know how hard it is to get cricket right,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve seen some of the requests made of them, and they are not minor fixes: this will be ongoing. They will get on top of it eventually, but it will take a long time.’’
Yet Sam Walch sounds a little bemused by the negative feedback, even if he’s ready to accept it. ‘‘I’m concerned people would say we are not ready: it’s not how we feel.’’ He adds: ‘‘Our job is to listen and improve. We have a philosophy to lean into that [criticism].’’
However, he thinks most of the noise is akin to someone switching from an IOS phone to an Android: it’s all a bit confusing – and he hopes most complaints are about inconsequential minutiae that can be fixed later.
Told of the dramas with modified games and suggestions of the system crashing midgame, he sounds surprised.
‘‘We listen to people, we are tuned into customer feedback and there is a backlog of things we are doing. But we don’t feel it’s a disaster, games are getting scored, games are getting played, and people are registering, the community game is still working and functioning well.
‘‘That live-scoring tool is a year in the making, a huge amount of money, time and investment has gone into it, and we are really proud of it.’’
But the dismay can’t be news to him: the same issues appear to be arising across the Tasman, where Cricket NSW chief executive Lee Germon – the former Black Caps wicketkeeper – has issued a ‘‘humble and sincere apology’’ to clubs about issues with the platform, but said they would stick with it.
The message from NZ headquarters is also for cricketers to give Playhq time to improve.
Last Friday, NZ Cricket sent a message to clubs from Stead, cosigned by the chief executives of the six major cricket districts, wanting to ‘‘acknowledge the frustrations and difficulties you are encountering, reassure you that we’ll continue to fast-track solutions and . . . express our very real gratitude for the efforts you’re making’’.
They added: ‘‘It’s true the transition to the new platform hasn’t been as smooth as hoped.’’
Last week, Northern Districts Cricket posted a Facebook message thanking clubs for their ‘‘patience’’: patience, however, looked in limited supply from the comments, which described Playhq as appalling, very disappointing and a joke.
One respondent said the app crashed eight overs into their last game, taking with it all their scores.
Stead, however, says NZ Cricket believes Playhq will be better for cricket in the long run.
‘‘It’s change, so we were absolutely expecting there to be some teething problems,’’ he said, admitting to some complaints, but also a ‘‘significant amount of support’’ that reassured the governing body of their decision.
He said Playhq had significant developer resources it was throwing at the problem and a list of impending fixes: for example, Duckworth-lewis calculations. Duckworth-lewis is a fiendish algorithm for calculating targets in rainaffected games and, right now, teams are using paper charts to work out their targets.
‘‘We absolutely feel this is the best option,’’ Stead said. He appreciated right now, it was tough for the average volunteer, ‘‘but this is going to be fantastic for cricket in the long run, and we are really excited about this new platform’’.
Regardless of New Zealand cricket’s assurances, New Plymouth Old Boys were among those clubs rolling out the oldfashioned scorebooks again on Saturday morning, says Mike Plant: ‘‘The fact is, it is not working.’’
‘‘. . . this is going to be fantastic for cricket in the long run.’’