Badgers Cricket Club – Q & A
On sites with rather more traffic than this one, this page would be called Frequently Asked Questions (itself a misnomer – Frequently Given Answers would be more accurate) or something similar but I can’t bring myself to perpetrate such a conceit. This page contains the answers to a handful of obvious questions about the Badgers Cricket Club web site, none of which I’ve ever actually been asked – at least not in the same fashion as they are posed here. Having said that, if there are questions that spring to your mind that aren’t listed here, then please send me an email and I’ll do my best to provide a suitable answer.
You might also care to take a peek at the about page, especially if your questions are more general in nature, or concern the club rather than this web site.
One of the reasons that you will find quite such a wealth of statistical information on this site is that the club has regularly produced an end of season report which included full details of the results plus averages for batting, bowling and fielding and often information on best partnerships and performances. Those performing that chore did a good job of hanging on to the scorebooks (most of which were used for two seasons) such that when I came to prepare the thirty season averages in 1988 I was supplied with both scorebooks and those end of season reports going all the way back to the club’s founding in 1959. Sadly, one scorebook – containing just the matches from 1981 – had somehow got lost in the shuffle and no amount of searching or asking around was able to turn up that particular book.
In the end this didn’t matter much in 1988 – it was all I could manage to enter 29 seasons of historical batting and bowling average tables into the newly created Badgers database, along with match by match data for the 1988 season, and generate a comprehensive 30 year report from that. However, one of the chores at the time had been to go back through the scorebooks and try to fill in the ‘also batted/bowled’ details for those that had played often enough in other seasons to meet the criteria for the lifetime averages, and thus I was aware that that missing book meant a small amount of missing information (with James Chignell, Brent Noble and Chris Preston definitely affected in one way or another).
When I came to put together the various statistical pages that make up this web site I started to feel the loss of that 1981 scorebook rather more acutely as it means that we have incomplete information on fielding (just the top three outfield catchers and the top two wicket keepers), partnerships (only the best for each wicket, although fortunately none of those are that high and thus are unlikely to be hiding other significant stands) and performances (only the best score and the best bowling, with the latter quite possibly hiding some major figures). It also means that, for anyone that played during 1981, I cannot determine accurate games played and that we will never be able to provide match by match detail and fill in the gaps in other areas (eg. games bowled, batting positions, how out) – although that is still true for any season prior to 1984 since I’ve only managed to back-fill that far from the 1988 starting point.
Back to top of pageSimple answer, because they are built from a slightly different set of figures, but you should only be affected if you played in one of half a dozen matches between 1990 and 1995 or in the three Twenty20 games in the mid 2000s and beyond that were recorded well enough to be input into the database (see below for the full list).
In the early to mid 1990s we played a number of games that were not included in the official averages for one reason or another, and the same criteria has more recently been applied to short format limited overs matches (eg. Twenty20). Those games are flagged in the footnotes on the official batting and official bowling tables and are only included in the complete batting and complete bowling data. In days of yore the details for such matches generally just disappeared, so there are no such instances prior to 1990, but ever since I’ve been holding the data electronically the tendency has been to record everything and exclude from the generated reports, where appropriate.
When I came to build the personal pages I had three choices – include all matches, include only official matches, or include both sets of tables – and I took the unilateral decision to display only the complete figures. Including both would increase the page sizes by fifty percent, and some are already more than big enough, would add very little real value since for most folk the numbers would be identical, and would only serve to confuse. I felt that the full details were likely to be of interest to most of us, so that was what I went with. If you disagree with that then please let me know because I do generate both sets of tables, I just don’t include them in the web pages.
For the record the following games have been treated as ‘not official’, as of the start of the 2021 season:
| Date | Opponent | Reason for omission |
| 29 Jun 1990 | Ebrington | Friday evening twenty over thrash on tour |
| 9 Sep 1990 | G.A.M. | played with only six per side |
| 29 Jun 1991 | Churchill | you had to be there but among other things the wicket was mowed out of a meadow, marked out in gloss paint and half the opposition disappeared after tea |
| 26 Jun 1992 | Ebrington | Friday evening fifteen over thrash on tour |
| 25 Jun 1993 | Ebrington | Friday evening nineteen over thrash on tour |
| 27 Jun 1995 | Vampire Bats | conference arranged fill in that was played over twenty overs for reasons now lost in the mists of time |
| 11 Jul 2006 | Tadworth | midweek Twenty20 |
| 22 Jun 2007 | Martinstown | Friday evening Twenty20 on tour |
| 29 Jul 2011 | Cholmondley | Friday evening Twenty20 on tour |
| 3 Aug 2018 | Upottery | Friday evening Twenty20 on tour |
| 12 Aug 2018 | Old Whitgiftians | normal Sunday game reduced to a Twenty20 before the start due to weather |
| 15 Jul 2023 | Crown | Saturday game on tour reduced to a 22 over game before the start due to weather |
This really should not happen in the modern world but in the days of dial up modems or even the slower early broadband setups did occasionally bite people. The references to Netscape Navigator in the original text below should given an indication of how ancient this particular section is but the ‘Refresh or Reload the page’ advice still holds true if this happens today.
Cruddy monochrome graphic in the top left hand corner, no pull out menus, layout all awry, that sort of thing?? Best guess is that you’re using Netscape Navigator v4 which, for reasons best known to itself, displays the page before it has finished downloading all of the referenced resources (eg. Cascading Style Sheet, Javascript menu code) which are held in separate files from the main HTML page (which decreases the size of every page, and makes it easier to maintain those entities). In my experience the problem disappears if you Reload the page, or indeed if you click on a link and then return Back to the affected page.
If that doesn’t cure it then I suspect that you’re using a browser that either doesn’t support Javascript or doesn’t (properly) support Cascading Style Sheets (or indeed both of those things). One thing to watch out for with Netscape v4 is that disabling Javascript also kills off CSS support, so you lose more than just the menus.
Back to top of pageHopefully in the 2020s everyone knows how to zoom in and out of web pages on whatever device with whichever software they are using, but if not the latter part of what follows would still be applicable even if IE is thankfully a distant memory for most of us.
In all probability because you are using Internet Explorer with text size set to smaller (you’ll find Text Size under the View menu). Unlike far too much of the web, all of the font adjustments on this site are done in relative units. This means that those with sight problems, or who simply prefer to use a larger default font size, are able to adjust the display to suit their requirements rather than being forced to view everything at whatever size the site designer deemed applicable. Other browsers also provide mechanisms for adjusting the default font size, so if you’re not using IE then you’ll need to dig through the documentation to find out how to change it (if appropriate).
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