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,