Badgers Cricket Club – What’s New Archive 2010

The dinner has been and gone, the cups and shields have been distributed to various deserving parties, and the Badger once again settles down for its winter slumber. Details of who won what can be found on the news page, along with a brief report of proceedings, and the Hall Of Fame Trophy winners page has been updated accordingly. The season report for 2010 is now complete and official, and all of the other pages have been updated with the 2010 figures, including all of the decade by decade averages pages, the personal pages and the individual records page.

It is worth noting that there are now historical averages pages for the decade from 1999 to 2008 with 2009 onwards split out onto separate pages, something that doesn’t happen for the first season of a decade to avoid having that season on a page on its own. This affects all of the decade by decade averages pages other than the best performances, which are not split up by decade. Also the vagaries of the selection system mean that John Larkin and Paul Little no longer have personal pages but Matt Mann is now so ennobled (or was, a later decision on qualification rules removed the page again, although I hope that Matt will play regularly enough for the Badgers to be reinstated – clean up Ed.). I would like to make some tweaks to the qualification rules but will put some suggestions forward at the AGM rather than taking any unilateral decisions.

For those that prefer paper copies of these things, and didn’t manage to snaffle the copy from their table at the dinner last Saturday, I have also uploaded the ‘for print’ version of the 2010 season report ready to be downloaded and printed. You’ll need Abode Reader to view or print the PDF file but it is a free download from the Adobe web site and may already be installed on the system you are using.

Absent any important news or surprise site updates things will go quiet now until the announcement of the AGM in the new year. See you then.

The annual dinner, without the dance for the second year running, is just over a month away and you should all have received an email (or perhaps a letter if you don’ have email) from club chairman Allan Butt with details of that event on November 20th. For those that have lost or cannot be bothered to track down that email then I have updated the news page with the details of the evening.

Once again a big thank you to Jacqueline, who has willingly helped me with the real chore of checking the data in the database against what is recorded in the scorebooks. Her assistance is much appreciated, especially by Janet who used to hate doing it before Darrell was old enough to get involved. Whilst waiting for a time slot in my daughter’s busy schedule I have also been cherry-picking some of the items on my to-do list and the most obviously visible result of that is that both the best performances and best partnerships lists have been tweaked to include flags and footnotes for matches that did not count towards the averages, with the latter also having record stands flagged.

The more eagle-eyed may also spot a change to the total displays on the full batting, full bowling and miscellaneous statistics to go with the change to full names, which has now been propagated across the whole site. Thanks to Brian Moore and Allan Butt we now have a name for the Mr. Edwards who won the bowling cup three times in the early 60s, but having updated all the tables with names in we now have 40 more people, varying from those in the sixties and seventies who qualified for the averages in a season two to those who only appear in a major partnership or perhaps played in a single game over the past couple of decades. I will be sending out a list to all and sundry which I would be grateful if you would take a look at to see if you remember any of those concerned as I’d really like to limit the number of ‘initials only’ entries.

Anyway, the result of all this hard work is that you can now find historical results for 2010 along with a partial season report plus the personal pages have been updated with all the 2010 performances and partnerships. The season report and personal pages will be updated further once the destination of the various cups has been revealed at the dinner, at which point the full details will also be made available on the decade by decade average pages (which will also bifurcate now that we have two seasons in the club’s sixth decade).

The season finished with the usual visit to Merrow, where the hot tea was as impressive as ever but the Badgers managed to lose a game that they really should have won handily. Full details can be found on the results page along with Andy Iwanoczko’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

I have decided to separate this final match update from the end of season updates, which I will probably leave until the data has been fully checked against the scorebooks. The remaining changes to full names (basically all of the season reports and associated averages pages) will wait until then but in the end I changed my mind again regarding the Hall Of Fame trophy winners and Hall Of Fame club officers pages and both have been updated to use full names, with one exception that will have to stay unless one of the regulars from the mid-Sixties can conjure a name from their memory banks.

The penultimate game of the season was at Ockley where two five wicket hauls and another captain’s knock secured the victory. Full details can be found on the results page along with Graham Ward’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Work continues in the background on switching to full names but I’ve decided not to change the results page summaries and am also wavering over the hall of fame pages for trophy winners and club officers, not in the least because there are a couple of instances where I don’t have first names. Most of the rest won’t be visible until I refresh the whole site with the end of season status, which will be with, or soon after, the final game related update at some point over the next couple of days.

Next on the catch-up trail is the annual visit to Headley Heath, where we eked out a fifth consecutive draw – very un-Badgers-like. Full details can be found on the results page along with Andy’s (slightly censored) match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

The changeover to full names continues to trickle in, with all historical scorecards updated along with the Hall of Fame pages for partnerships and lifetime averages.

Since I am still behind the game and, thanks to a misunderstanding over the role of Play-Cricket in the entry of the scorecards, still have four games to enter and generate pages for, I’ve decided to handle things one game at a time and perform several small updates over the coming week or so. Fortunately others have already supplied me with match reports for all of those games, so my role is simply as database manager and editor, which should make an update every other day or so more than feasible.

We start with an entertaining draw at Alleyn Adhoc back at the start of the month, which featured three generations of Ward appearing in the same game for the first time and Amy Gordon fielding for the whole innings at just eight years old. Full details can be found on the results page along with Andy’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Following Ray’s appearance at Alleyns I found myself with another name clash when using just first initial and surname. The use of that format dates back to the days when I was limited to producing the end of season report on an 80 column dot matrix printer with a fixed pitch font and the full names just would not fit into the available space. In these days of widescreen LCDs and laser printers that seems like something of an anachronism, so I intend to update most (if not all) of the data on the site to use the full name. Such an extensive change will take a wee while to implement but you can see the first fruits on the current scorecards page.

I’m really not sure how to start this update, since the final game of the season is due to start in less than three hours time and I still haven’t got a coherent update together, dating back over two months. Suffice to say that I proffer my most abject apologies for a hiatus that has its roots back in my funk over the cancellation of the South Park Manor game, was elongated by some of the events at Seven Sports (no Chris, not the LBW decision, I’d got over that by the time we got to the pub that evening) but has been extended by the mountain that I have left myself to climb to get everything back in order. I thought that I had broken the back of it over two weeks ago, when a return train journey to Sheffield gave me the time to edit all of the outstanding match reports to add to the complete set of scorecards that had been generated from the Play-Cricket versions, but I have made next to no progress since so what we have here now is both incomplete and largely not checked as thoroughly as it would normally be.

Thanks to the efforts of Mark, Rob and especially Andy, we do have a fair number of match reports (with more to come when I get right up to date) so you can read all about events at Ham & Petersham, Windsor Great Park, Reigate Priory and Blindley Heath with full details up to the Blindley Heath game on the results page and the pertinent elements from the scorecards from the Valley End game forwards.

Oh, and for those that are wondering, the update below (attributed to 16th July) never actually made it onto the web, but such is my disorganisation that it is easier to leave the already written text there as a monument to my incompetence.

Another great game of cricket last Sunday for our return to Valley End for the first time in a decade. The Badgers put themselves in a winning position but finished up settling for the draw. Full details can be found on the results page along with an incomplete summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

PLEASE NOTE that this Sunday’s game with Valley End has been moved forward by half an hour to a one thirty kick-off. I would hate to speculate as to the reasons for fear of adding to my grumpy old man reputation. The fixtures page has been updated accordingly.

A fantastic game of cricket last Sunday at Old Suttonians saw the Badgers sneak home with seven balls to spare in a game animated by an almost perfectly timed declaration by home skipper Phil Smith. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

I am disappointed, and somewhat disheartened, to have to report that tomorrow’s fixture with South Park Manor has been cancelled (at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon) because Darrell and I are apparently in the minority in preferring to be outside participating in sport rather than inside watching it. The only positive that I can draw from this is that it has prompted me to find a local side that play friendly cricket on Saturdays, and therefore I have managed to get myself a game for today.

Last Sunday’s trip to Tadworth started as grey and chilly as the day of the fiftieth anniversary game but finished warm and sunny. In between the Badgers took something of a pasting. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Further to the comments last week regarding the footnote tooltips in the Leatherhead match report I have made a tweak to the CSS which greatly improves their appearance in all versions of IE that I’ve tested with. The blasted things still display differently, and in different locations on the page, in pretty much every browser but at least we now have a presentable end result for all of the major (and significant minor) players.

Congratulations to Pat and Nicki who are now the proud parents of a newborn baby. To satisfy the curious who would like to know other pertinent details I have added an entry to the news page with all of the information that has found its way to me.

A new fixture last weekend saw the Badgers visit Leatherhead’s Fetchgam Grove for the first time and sidle off with their third win of the season. Full details can be found on the results page along with Andy Iwanoczko’s debut as the writer of a full match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

I have also found the time to edit Graham Ward’s match report for Woldingham although no doubt most will already have read it since it was attached to last week’s team sheet email.

For those of you wondering why this week’s update is so late, it has taken me all week to lay out the Leatherhead report in a way that I am happy with plus I have tried to do something clever with the footnotes. I would be interested to hear of any bad experiences with the tooltips, but what you see is very much determined by your browser with recent versions of Internet Explorer definitely providing a less pleasant image than all of the others that I have tried (ie. Opera v9 and v10, Mozilla v3, plus the latest versions of Google Chrome and Apple Safari).

A damp start but a sunny finish for Sunday’s trip to Woldingham which resulted in the second win of the season. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

The previous Saturday’s visit to Leigh was stymied by the wet weather, although it has been suggested that we might rearrange for a Saturday later in the summer (a tour of Surrey anyone??) The extra time ought to have made it easier for me to finish off the full match report for Dormansland, but the usual displacement activities meant that it was still a chore that took longer than it should have done.

Something that should have been noted in the last update was that we now have a date for the Twenty20 evening game at Tadworth, details of which can be found on the fixtures page. This update also brings a refresh of the personal pages, which affects the best performances and partnerships but not the averages, and it might be worth noting that I continue to keep both the Hall of Fame lifetime averages page and the Hall Of Fame partnerships page up-to-date on a weekly basis.

A blazing hot day for the trip to Dormansland where a gaggle of spectators saw the Badgers lose for the second time this season. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Apologies if this update is full of errors but I am putting this up in something of a rush before leaving for work today and setting off to collect Darrell from Plymouth later. I will tidy it up and hopefully post a full match report on Saturday morning.

Last Sunday saw the Badgers visit Stoke D’Abernon for the first time in three years and the weather was kind enough – a torrential downpour about an hour after we’d finished left the outfield with large areas of standing water – to allow us to register our first win of the season. Full details can be found on the results page along with Foxy’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Let’s hope that the weather stays fair for the Dormansland game tomorrow, as this is the first of our ‘alumni’ matches, with all past and present Badgers specially invited to attend in the hope that as many folk as possible will turn up on the understanding that there will hopefully be others that they know in attendance. If you haven’t already received an invite by email, don’t worry, just turn up anyway and I can guarantee that you’ll receive a warm welcome – just make sure that you let Simon Fox have an email address via which we contact you, and then we’ll keep you informed of all such events in the future.

Given the tardiness of the previous update I’ve decided to revert to the original intention of the summary match reports, which was to avoid holding up the posting of the factual details by providing a quick summary of the game rather than a condensed report of everything worthy of mention. On that basis I will hopefully be able to update the site by the middle of each week rather than at the last minute before the next game!?

We were lucky with the weather on Sunday, but the performance was a different matter. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Despite the extra week granted by the cancellation of last Sunday’s visit to Broadbridge Heath, I still haven’t found the time or the inspiration to come up with a full match report for the first game of the season, which is a shame because it was worthy of proper reporting. I have been able to check over the new season changes and have finally finished the tidying up process that really ought to have been complete before the AGM, so please let me know if you find anything that looks wrong anywhere on the site.

The new season got underway in splendid fashion against Beechwood the Sunday before last, with the weather being kind to us and the cricket providing an exciting finish to boot. Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Another rushed update, with the first game of the season less then three hours away (assuming the weather improves a little and we actually get to play) and the tenth anniversary of this site having passed without fanfare exactly a month ago. The site remains a labour of love for yours truly, albeit that I am often a lackadaisical guardian, especially during the off-season. Hopefully the in-season updates will be nice and regular again this year, and we start the process with an updated fixture list and an associated Google map of the locations of our 2010 opposition.

You could probably tell that the last update was posted in a bit of a rush ahead of the AGM the day after and as such there were a couple of errors that sneaked through. I have updated the capsule review of the dinner to include a couple of missed milestones and have changed the nets entry to remove a misunderstanding on my part about the normal nets at Nescot running alongside the new ones.

Once again my apologies, but I never actually got as far as posting the update listed below to the public site, despite a fair amount of tweaking and twiddling in the background between the dinner and the New Year. The past few months have been manic – my company was taken over just a couple of weeks after the presentation dinner and the fall out from that has left me with little free time and even less energy to do anything with it – and this update should have been posted a few weeks ago when Allan announced the date of the AGM.

Even now this update is going to be incomplete – I have had provisional fixture details for weeks and there has been an email about the prospect of resurrecting tour – but there is a news item about the AGM tomorrow night and details of nets (albeit that they started more than six weeks ago).

The presentation dinner has been and gone and once again the Badger settles down for its winter slumbers. Details of who won the various trophies can be found on the news page along with a brief report of proceedings. The season report for 2009 is now complete and official, and all of the other pages have been updated with the 2009 figures, including all of the decade by decade averages pages, the personal pages and the individual records page.

For those that prefer paper copies of these things, and didn’t take their copy home on the Saturday of the dinner, I have also uploaded the ‘for print’ version of the 2009 season report ready to be downloaded and printed. You’ll need Abode Reader to view or print the PDF file but it is a free download from the Adobe web site and may already be installed on the system you are using.

A minor panic in the run up to the event made it apparent that I had misattributed the destination of ‘Wang Fu’, which was in fact awarded to Richard Ward last year, and I have corrected the two erroneous references. The historical trophy winners page reflects that change along with another for the 2006 winner of the same trophy and the details of this season’s lucky recipients.

Since we have just completed our fifty-first season it did not seem to make sense for the main page to still be bearing the fiftieth anniversary image and related text, so we’ve reverted to the old layout (although the fiftieth anniversary page still exists as an archive of the event). If anyone has any good ideas on improving the visual appearance of the home page, or indeed any other aspects of the site, then please get in contact and explain your ideas as that is the weakest area of my web design skills and I would be more than happy to receive assistance.

As ever I have some fairly grandiose plans for the site, taking advantage of the improved facilities that we have access to since the change of hosting provider, but I will avoid making any specific statements for the time being especially given my track record in regard to such things. Watch this space over the winter and hopefully I will find the time to bring at least one of the ideas to fruition.