Badgers Cricket Club – The Statistical Sett

As time has gone on my ramblings regarding the ‘behind the scenes’ details of the data used to build this web site have been scattered across the various pages of this site, with no rhyme nor reason. When I came to record the differences from the input of the full data for 1985 I decided it was time to create a single home for such trivia, and here it is. The links below break the information we have here down into several categories – currently a handful of unusual statistical categories that are not otherwise visible on the rest of the site, the changes made to the season averages by the retrospective entry of full scorecard information for seasons prior to 1988, other changes made to results between original publication and now, a record of those matches for which we know the full information is unavailable and, for more recent times, changes made to information in the scorebooks in the light of processing the bowling analyses to recreate the whole scorecard – some of which are still held on this main page of the Sett and some of which have been split off to their own pages.

• A treasure trove of unusual gems
• Short to medium term changes
• Full season entry adjustments
• Scorebook corrections and clarifications
• Games with missing details

The links above will either take you to specific areas of this page or to sub-pages amd should land on some sort of mini-index to the information therein. At some point, as the amount of information recorded here increases, I may well split it into more sub-pages – probably based on the list of categories above.

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The Treasure Trove – some less obvious statistical gems

There are a number of statistical milestones that are much prized in the cricket world – centuries, either individual or in partnership, five wicket hauls – and we already have information on those scattered throughout the site. However, there are some achievements that are harder to pin down and either require considerable spelunking through the data, or in some cases aren’t readily identifiable at all.

Furthermore some feats can only be confirmed where there is full individual information in the database for each game, and this is currently only true back to 1984. We have overcome that requirement for best performances and best partnerships by reviewing every scorebook entry and manually creating data to be used to generate those particular pages but other more esoteric examples are dealt with as they crop up, to be included in match reports but then left to fester without further updates unless something similar happens again.

The intention of this section therefore is to gather together such gems into a single location and to try and keep them updated over time.

• Bowling hat-tricks
• Streaks
• Three or more catches in a game
• Players scoring exactly 49 or 50
• Fun facts

Changes made after the fact to published data

One of the disadvantages of publishing the statistics more often than once per year is that mistakes creep in that only get picked up in the end of season cross-checking process. Fortunately in recent times that has generally been mitigated by various changes to the way we handle the scorebook data but this section details changes made under those circumstances, and also other alterations to figures that have been available on the site for some time but which have been changed as the result of investigations into particular areas or the manual filling in of missing information.

• June 2020
• November 2016
• October 2016
• October 2015
• 28th November 2014
• 30th October 2014
• 27th October 2013

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June 2020: Superbase replacement project

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic the summer of 2020 looked like being a complete wash out as far as cricket was concerned, although in the end we managed to get some games played in the latter couple of months of the season, but it had one small positive from the Badgers web site point of view in that Darrell and I decided to spend at least some of the Sunday afternoon time that we would have spent cricketing in doing things related to the website. This started out with my explaining how the existing setup hung together, making sure that Darrell could access all of the source material, making sure that he could use and understand the tools that I used to pull everything together and generally just trying to ensure that, morbid as it might sound, he would be able to take over were anything to happen that meant I could no longer act as webmaster.

Once the initial burst of enthusiasm had waned somewhat we agreed that the best use of our time was in eliminating the ancient 16-bit Superbase for Windows from the tool chain. Superbase, in its various forms down the years, has been the bedrock on which the Badgers database has been constructed – dating all the way back to 1988 and the Atari ST on which the first thirty seasons of averages data were initially digitised and the thirtieth season report produced. However, it has become increasingly difficult to keep a 16-bit program, with no meaningful official upgrade path, running in a 64-bit world (requiring a 32-bit Windows 10 virtual machine running on my 64-bit Windows 8.1 system under Hyper-V).

The database itself had been cloned into a mySQL (now MariaDB) equivalent more than a decade ago, so that I could start working on dynamic web pages, but it was the 30,000+ lines of Superbase Basic spread across 67 different programs that presented the road block to getting rid of the program altogether. After some strategic thinking and a brief discussion we agreed that the best bet was to rewrite the essential (12 programs that accounted for roughly half the lines of code) and useful (another 25 programs of just over 6,000 LOC) routines in Python, primarily because it might be beneficial for Darrell to learn the language for his working life and as one of the top half dozen programming languages in the world in terms of various measures of popularity, and open source to boot, it represented a mainstream long-term base for the web site in the future.

Inevitably rewriting code throws up anomalies that need to be reviewed and either fixed (nothing to see here, honest) or accounted for. Sadly one of the errors that I found, whilst rewriting the code for the season record included in every season report, was rather egregious in that the average per game calculation for both total runs scored and total runs conceded was using the number of games played up to but not including the season being reported upon. This has now been fixed so that all such season report sections, like the 2019 version, now show the correct averages per game for all seasons combined.

That is the most serious issue I found and many of the problems identified were of lesser importance and had no material effect on the information currently visible on this web site. For example, the new season averages calculator threw up a few cases where the, only recently tracked, wicket keeping details did not cater for the new flags introduced when I added support for a change of keeper in mid innings, so that was fixed by awarding each player who took the gloves half a game kept instead of a whole one.

The program also processes the fall of wickets data to build the best partnerships for each wicket in each season and that too threw up some fairly recent anomalies related to player retirements, which turned out to be bugs in the existing logic. Fortunately none of the stands involved were considered significant enough to show up on either the associated partnerships pages or anyone’s personal pages, so in this case it was just the database data that was out of whack.

However, I have come across one or two things that needed to be corrected here – the most significant of which was the fall of wickets for the June 2000 game at Loose, where David Aldwinckle scored 48 unbeaten runs batting at number four, but the fall of wickets had him fifth out. Checking back with the score book I suspect that I must have perpetrated this one as it looks to me like the dismissed batsman numbers for the last five wickets to fall were added after the fact. To make matters worse, not only is the scorcard wrong but the eighth wicket stand was the highest scored in that season and has been credited to Greggy for the past twenty years, when it should have been David who shared the glory with Graham Davenport.

The Blindley Heath game in September of that same year also has an error in the number of the batsman dismissed for the fifth wicket, showing 5 when it should have been 6, but that has fewer implications since it was the last wicket to fall and the last pair only added 20 odd.

One other item that was fixed during the same time period, but doesn’t really relate to the project, was that I corrected which Phil Smith played in the Reigate Cavaliers game in 2010. The odd thing is that I had spotted at the time that there was already a Phil Smith in the database, communicated with the new Phil to get a distinguishing middle initial and created a unique entry for him but then chose the wrong entry when I entered the data {sigh} As a side effect I have also corrected a Blindley Heath game on Play-Cricket where the wrong Phil Smith had been selected when they entered the match details (looks like someone else has been busy on data related work during lockdown).

Credit for spotting that anomaly originally goes to Wardy, who apparently commented during one of the lockdown quiz teleconferences that he felt my mention of the gap between catches by Phil – in last year’s Stoke D'Abernon match report – was almost certainly spurious because the Old Sutts Phil was unlikely to have turned out for the Badgers before Wardy himself had ever done so. Darrell reported this back to me at some point but it didn’t trigger a response until I was checking up on parent sibling relationships following Nat Cibardo’s catch off his Dad in the 2020 Newdigate game and noticed that there were two different Phil Smiths in the players table but that one of them had no games played.

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November 2016: corrections from best performance filling in

As a side effect of building a manual database of best performances for seasons prior to 1984 there were a significant number of best bowling figures added to the season averages – too many to detail here – plus one correction, to Phil Walters’ best bowling figures for 1977 which had been incorrectly entered when the historical data was first input back in 1988 as six for 24 rather than the six for 25 shown in both the scorebook and the 1977 end of season report.

In addition the high score details for Brian Hodges in 1959, Brian Moore in 1974 and Brent Noble in 1979 were changed to reflect that they were not out in the innings concerned.

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October 2016: corrections from end of season checking

The end of season checking for 2016 involved a three-pronged approach with each Play-Cricket results page being compared by program code to the Badgers database and a similar process performed between the database and the scorecard checking program’s version of events. Once that was completed the scorecards were printed out from the database and Darrell and I had the lovely chore of checking that version of events with the paper scorebook. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, that process found 75 discrepancies which needed to be investigated, most of which were errors in the scorebook that had been corrected by me whilst checking the photographed version of the book without physical acccess to it to make corrections.

All of the anomalies have been checked and double-checked before being resolved according to the best information available, normally involving a review of one or both scorebooks. For the record, the following mistakes were found and corrected:

• many of the differences we found related to corrections that I had made after the fact, most of which were already documented on the Statistical Sett scorecard queries page, especially from the first Tadworth game onwards, but I have added entries for Beechwood, Beddington, Ham and Iscoyd in order to explain some of the problems that we found
• twice this year – at Old Whitgiftians and at Westcott – we have had the situation where a Badgers innings has been completed with a player absent and unable to bat. Historically I have taken the stance that this does not constitute all out, merely a completed innings as per Law 12, section 3(b) – cf. elsewhere on this page regarding the full season adjustments for 1985 – and I still think that that interpretation makes sense, otherwise why would the law makers have separated 3(a) and 3(b) under Law 12?? The innings at Westcott was recorded as all out and I’m left with the dilemma of making a choice – I feel that I have to change one or the other for the sake of consistency – and whilst standing by my interpretation it is also apparent that other sources disagree (I have been able to find several instances where Cricinfo records an innings where players were absent as all out – eg. 3rd Test: South Africa v West Indies at Durban, Jan 10-12, 2008, 2nd Test: South Africa v India at Cape Town, Jan 2-6, 1997 and 4th Test: West Indies v India at Kingston, Apr 21-25, 1976 (the infamous test where Bedi effectively refused to play and five Indians were recorded as absent hurt) – and it even seems to do so for situations where a batsman retired hurt and did not resume their innings – eg. 3rd Test: Australia v South Africa at Sydney, Jan 3-7, 2009 – which is contradictory under the Laws, where such a situation is described as ‘retired - not out’ (as per Law 2 9(a)). So, weighing up all of the evidence I have decided to be stubbon and stick to my original determination that under these circumstances a side is not all out and I have changed the Westcott innings accordingly.
• Amy took a catch in the second Tadworth game for which she has not been credited, and which I am unable to fix in the short term because it would involve some significant internal changes to both the database and the associated program code
• there were three one ball differences in the balls faced uploaded by the CricHQ scoring App for the Iscoyd & Fenns Bank game, which ought to have been impossible had the same events been entered into both the scorebook and the App. However, the detail available on the tablet is insufficient to work out why there are differences so I have taken a ball faced away from both Rob Knew and Ben Valentine whilst leaving Matt Mann unchanged as I discovered a missing seventh ball from the eighth over of the game that was recorded in the book

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October 2015: corrections from end of season checking

The end of season checking, for the first time since I’ve been doing the averages, did not involve trawling through the scorebook(s) – which was a good thing as I had no willing volunteer(s) to help with the process this year. Instead, because I’ve processed every game played through my scorecard checking program on a week-by-week basis, I decided that it made more sense to check the data in the database against the output from that program. Since the weekly process involved manually entering and/or cross-checking the output from that program into Play-Cricket, that was where errors were going to be introduced. This involved writing seven hundred or so additional lines of code into the program to read the database version of events and perform the comparisons.

The resultant validation found four discrepancies, which was slightly more than I had anticipated. All of the anomalies have been checked and double-checked before being resolved according to the best information available, normally involving a review of one or both scorebooks. For the record, the following mistakes were found and corrected:

• the byes and leg byes values for Ham did not tie up with their scorebook and there was no way to be sure of whether the missing extras were one or the other. Being the wicket keeper I have chosen to add the missing run as a leg bye
• Mark has been deprived of a maiden over in the Whiteley Village game because he did not actually bowl one despite their scorer crediting him with one in their book
• the Addington 1743 scorebook was something of a disaster (as detailed elsewhere) which I could not get to add up. Rather than rock the boat too much I have stuck with the running total from their book despite the fact that, however I cut it, I can only find 130 runs
• one that isn’t likely to bother anyone, if nothing else because I do not yet expose the information on the scorecards here, but nonetheless was wrong on Play-Cricket was Jake’s balls faced at Horsley & Send, which I had somehow contrived to enter as 77 when it was actually 76 (although the scorebook only shows 75!?)

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28th Nov 2014: corrections from Play-Cricket scorecards

All seasons with complete results entered into Play-Cricket (1986-7, 2004, 2008-14) now have full Extras details, where they are available from the scorebooks, and some information held by Play-Cricket but not historically part of the Badgers’ database (eg. boundaries hit, balls faced, wides and no balls bowled) have also been filled in for those seasons (although not yet exposed anywhere on this site).

There were also two minor corrections made on the back of re-visiting those scorecards, with Graham Davenport being awarded a maiden that had been missed during the 2004 Woldingham Village game and Daniel Ward allowing one less run during his bowling at Reigate in 2012 where a bye had been incorrectly recorded against his analysis.

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30th Oct 2014: corrections from end of season checking

The end of season checking found around twenty discrepancies, most of which were a case of the paper scorebook not being available to update when I made decisions about discrepancies or logical inconsistencies during the course of the season. All of the anomalies have been checked and double-checked before being resolved according to the best information available, with a couple more games being fed through my scorecard checking program to validate the numbers. For the record, we found and corrected the following mistakes:

• the byes and leg byes values for Cheam were transposed and have been corrected to be one bye and two leg byes
• a delivery has been removed from both the total overs and Matt Smith’s individual bowling figures at Leatherhead because an incomplete over containing a wide, a dot and the final wicket of the innings had been recorded as .3 rather than .2
• the extras recorded for our innings at Leigh were jumbled up and have been corrected to be seven byes, two leg byes, three wides and two no balls
• the score at the fall of our seventh and eight wickets against Horley was high by one run, due to a disagreement between the two scoring records and upon review has been changed to the lower figure. This results in the highest ninth wicket partnership of the season, between Mark and Darrell, being one run higher
• Ricky had been deprived of a maiden over in the final game of the season at Westcott, which I found when processing the scorecard but failed to correct on Play-Cricket before scraping the data

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27th Oct 2013: corrections from end of season checking

Our checking did find the better part of fifty discrepancies, many of which arose because, absent any evidence to the contrary, I generally chose to go with the CricHQ version of a card when there were differences with the paper scorecard but often without changing the latter to bring it in line, whereas the checking was done from the scorebooks. All of the anomalies have been checked and double-checked before being resolved according to the best information available, which sometimes involved feeding the bowling from a whole innings through a program that I created which then builds the batting and fall of wicket details. For the record, we found and corrected the following:

• the order in which Jake and Pete were dismissed at Beechwood, which is almost certainly irrelevant to most everyone
• Bill had been robbed of a four at Leatherhead, a fact which is only visible on Play-Cricket anyway
• Allan has been credited with the missing catch at Iscoyd and Rich Knew has been given the maiden that he bowled. Following a complete review of that game I have also adjusted the distribution of byes and leg byes for our innings and as a side-effect Play-Cricket now has balls faced, which it normally would not for games not scored on the tablet

For completeness, the following differences between CricHQ and the paper scorebooks were resolved by accepting the data entered on the tablet, which matched the data already entered on Play-Cricket and reported here, because of lack of proof that one or other version of events was correct:

• a difference in leg byes recorded mean that both Mark and Alec have a run less at Beechwood than shown in our book. I have asked for a copy of Beechwood’s pages in order to confirm this one
• there were significant differences between CricHQ and the opposition book at Wallington, but the latter was a mess. Ultimately it only made a difference of a run or two to about half of those that bowled that day
• our book at Old Suttonians featured considerable confusion over the symbol for byes versus leg byes, so I have accepted the version of events on the tablet
• the South Park Manor book shows minor differences with CricHQ, with the tablet shifting a run from Amy to Jake, depriving the latter of a maiden and adding an extra ball for Mark
• finally, the closest I came to not accepting the tablet’s story was at Westcott where it was a straight up contest between Bill and Jacqueline. The former recorded one more bye than the latter, which resulted in an extra run for Vinny. No doubt Foxy will be astonished to learn that I came down on the side of the batsman in this instance, despite my gut feeling that it is more likely that my daughter missed a signal than that Bill imagined one

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Adjustments made to statistics after entry of full season data

When this site was first put together I had ‘full’ data (ie. details of all Badgers batting, bowling, catching and fall of wickets) for games going back to the 1988 season and in recent times I have slowly started to back-fill the preceding seasons. For those wondering why I would be doing such a thing, when I first created the Badgers database back in 1988 (using Superbase Personal on an Atari ST with a massive 1MB of RAM and 1.44MB floppy disks for permanent storage!!), in order to produce lifetime averages for the thirty year report, I minimised the chore by only entering full data for that season (since I also needed to create a season report for 1988) and using the existing season average reports to provide the bulk of the information for the preceding 29 seasons. This had the effect that when I created the historical areas of this website the seasons were split into two groups, with the older ones not appearing for other than the batting and bowling averages at that time (summary results for 1959 to 1987 were added in September/October 2002 and other gaps have been filled in since) and the newer ones having more complete information either from the beginning or as features were added that required full data.

The areas affected by that missing data are fairly minor these days (because I’ve found ways, often involving a lot of scorebook spelunking and manual data entry into the database, to mitigate the other elements that used to be limited, including partnerships, individual batting and bowling performances, fielding dismissals and games played) but there are facts that cannot be identified without full data (eg. games bowled, average batting position, plus games played and best bowling for those not added by hand). It has always been my intention to add those missing details over time, although progress has been slower than I’d have liked it to be and enthusiasm for the task is often tempered by the fact that the data will never be complete due to the missing 1981 scorebook.

The idea is that as each historical season is completed (by entry into the ECB-supplied Play-Cricket system) I will update the Badgers database (now held in MariaDB rather than Superbase) with the full details and then compare the resultant season averages with those that were manually entered thirty-five and a half years ago. Once I’m satisfied with the accuracy of the data then this site will be updated with the statistics, scorecards and revised results details. No promises on when 1983 will appear, as there is considerable effort required simply to enter the information from the scorebooks into Play-Cricket, let alone the cross-checking and other peripheral activities that are necessary before the information lands here.

Almost inevitably the entry and processing of the old scorecards throws up a number of discrepancies in the end of season averages for that year. Each of those has to be investigated but we are generally left with a number of changes to the previously published figures, which are now documented here for the official record:

• Adjustments for 1984 (Aug 2020)
• Adjustments for 1985 (May 2015)
• Adjustments for 1986 (Dec 2013)
• Adjustments for 1987 (Nov 2011)

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Adjustments made to statistics after entry of 1984 season data

The full 1984 season details took a long and tortuous route to get here, with the first game being entered into Play-Cricket some time after the end of the 2016 season, that process stalling because of discussions with the API developers around player naming in early 2017 (they didn’t like me using year numbers in the player names), not picking up again until after the 2018 season when I completed the data entry but then fell foul of the fall of wickets issue at Hook Norton, expanded on below. The complexity and wide-ranging nature of the fixes for that meant that it wasn’t until August 2020 that I have finally put myself in the position to finish this off.

The following changes were made to the 1984 statistics following the entry of the scorecards for that season into Play-Cricket (the alterations described are also generally marked on the image of the scorebook page using an obviously computer generated text overlay in red):

• our bowling analysis for the Vinyl Products gane in our scorebook clearly shows Foxy taking the last three wickets of their innings in the first four balls of his second over which means that he should only have been credited with 1.4 overs and no maidens
• the fall of wickets for the first ever visit to Hook Norton caused some fun and games because Dave Tickner and I opened the batting but the first wicket to fall was recorded as batsman number three (Dave’s brother Alan as it happens). At this remove I have no recall of what actually happened, but there is a cross in Dave’s batting record which suggests that perhaps he retired hurt (or ill – it was tour after all) and returned at the fall of the first wicket. This is what I have ended up assuming, and fortunately the partnerships involved were not large enough for it to be of concern, but this scenario broke my fall of wickets checking logic so badly that it took me the better part of two years to get everything sorted out to the point where I could load the data into the database and finish these words of explanation
• the total score for the Badgers innings against Sutton Railway was shown as 140 but the bowling totalled to 141 and when I cross-checked everything Dave Tickner had only been credited with 48 runs rather than the 49 that can be tallied from his runs scored in our scorebook. Since the game was won with a three increasing the total to 141 changes nothing and thus I have chosen to go down that route too
• our book for the Dormansland game has Badgers losing 7 wickets but there are eight dismissals shown with Alan Tickner quite clearly recorded as run out not as not out. Since it was recorded that way in the end of season summary too it makes sense to stick with it and I have adjusted the wickets lost accordingly
• Alan is also involved in another discrepancy in the same game with our scorebook recording his overs bowled as 5 instead of the 4.4 he actually sent down
• in the Old Alleynians game Steve Card is recorded in our scorebook as having bowled one maiden, but his tenth over also has no runs recorded against it. I infer that the ‘circle with a dot in it’ symbol is intended to represent a wide (there were no no balls recorded in the total extras, the only other instances of the symbol occurs in Charles Lakeman’s first over, and both Charlie and Steve have marks in the wides column) and since back in those days wides and no balls were not counted against the bowler’s analysis I have concluded that Steve needs to be credited with an extra maiden by the Laws of the day
• our bowling analyses for the Newdigate game were a little confused. Dave Clarke is shown as having taken three wickets but his name appears four times in the dismissals and there are four Ws in his analysis. Conversely, Adrian Cowell was given two wickets whereas his name appears only once in the dismissals and there is only one W in his analysis. In addition his overs were recorded as 6.3 but should have been exactly 6, with Dave delivering the final over, his twelfth, with the coup de grace from its last ball
• the wickets lost for the Old Josepians game was recorded in the end of season report, and thus in the database, as ten with the Badgers consequently all out. However our scorebook, whilst clearly showing ‘for 10 wkts.’ also shows Chris Morgan as having retired hurt (or retired not out in modern parlance) and thus our wickets lost should be nine and the innings completed without all out
• the second Wallington Cottagers game was not properly recorded, with only our player’s names and their scores but no how outs or fall of wicket details. This has always been recorded as ten wickets down but the entries in our scorebook show Dave Tickner as a did not bat (perhaps it would more accurately show him as absent) and thus the wickets lost should be nine and the innings completed without all out

This has the following knock-on effects that show up as differences between the manually entered season averages and those generated from the newly added scorebook details:

• Adrian Cowell loses three balls bowled and a wicket, due to the Newdigate bowling analyses errors, but also gains a catch which was missed by whoever collated the catches for the season that I used when adding the fielding data back in 2002, since he quite clearly also caught one at Sunallon
• Alan Tickner always seems to lose out when I do these exercises, and this time he loses two balls bowled due to the error in the Dormansland bowling analysis above, gains two runs allowed because he was given 416 in the season report even though the end of season summary shows a total of 417 and that should have been 418 because his runs allowed for the Malden Wanderers game should have been 29 not 28 (an understandable error given the writing in the analysis, but the 29 written under the final over box is definitely correct). He also loses a not out in a more oddball manner because the batting summary shows him with a 54 not out against Stockwell, that should be against Wallington Cottagers, and another against Malden Wanderers where he was quite clearly run out instead. Sorry Al
• Brian Moore sees his best bowling for the season improve from 3 for 43 to 3 for 34 and since there were no best bowling figures in the end of season report I suspect that this one lies entirely at my door and I swapped the digits around when adding Brian’s best bowling figures after the fact
• Chris Morgan was missing his score from the Old Josephians game in the end of season summary and consequently gets an additional innings and not out for his retired hurt for nought which also results in an extra game played because of the way I back filled that information in June 2013 (by adding did not bat counts to innings). Since the season report had no also bowled his two bowling performances in 1984 had not previously been recorded either so he gets 10 overs, 1 maiden, 38 runs and 2 wickets added to his bowling stats (which are not extensive). On top of all that he also gets given a catch behind the wicket from the Meadowbank game (only Roy Gordon was listed with any wicket keeper catches in either the catching summary or the end of season report)
• Dave Clark gets an extra wicket taken, as per the Newdigate game above
• Dave Tickner gains a run courtesy of the miscounting in the Sutton Railway game described above
• Steve Card gains an extra maiden as per the Old Alleynians game above
• Simon Fox loses 32 balls bowled, due to a combination of the two balls lost at Vinyl Products, as described above, and a tallying error in the bowling summary which has all of the right game by game entries but adds them to 94.5 instead of the 89.5 they actually make. As a result of the Vinyl Products correction he also loses a maiden
• Steve Goldman gains two wicket keeper catches, one in the Vinyl Products game and another against Abbey
• finally, courtesy of alphabetical order by initials, yours truly has also been given a caught behind from the Sutton Railway game
• there are also a number of individuals who now appear in the full statistics tables that were not included before with Roy Fletcher playing three times, batting in all of them but not bowling, Nick Watts playing twice, batting twice and keeping wicket at least once, Derek France and B China playing a game each and both getting to bat and bowl and a gentleman recorded only as Witmarsh playing one game without doing either. In addition, I have chosen to interpret the number eleven in the batting order in the game against South Beckenham, recorded only as Mark, as being the first ever appearance by a then nine year old Mark Gordon. My reason for doing so, absent any concrete evidence in that scorebook that this was a first name and not a surname, is that I have a vivid personal memory of a very young junior Gordon fielding in a game for us on a recreation ground that I have no recollection of playing at before or since. Now this is fairly circumstantial evidence but I am confident enough in this memory to enshrine this game as Mark’s debut for the club
• I will also note here that we have three more instances of incomplete batting orders probably resulting in missing players (and thus games played) with the Newdigate, Englefield Green and Sun Allon games all being afflicted by the problem and getting the new ‘missing players’ comment in their respective scorecards

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Adjustments made to statistics after entry of 1985 season data

Generally the problems found during the entry of full data are either tallying errors in one of the original score sheet or the season summary, or the incorrect transposition of data between the two. However, with 1985 there were a couple of unusual issues that cropped up multiple times. Firstly, whoever did the summarising chose to ignore partial overs, so we have a number of bowlers with extra balls bowled. Secondly, this was one season that had a number of long time Badgers amongst the also batted or bowled lists and thus I entered a number of additional season statistics records manually. Unfortunately in several cases I mistakenly included performances from the President’s eleven game, which obviously should not count towards the averages.

The following changes were made to the 1985 statistics following the entry of the scorecards for that season:

• the results entry for the Old Josephians game in the original paper 1985 season report shows the Badgers as effectively all out, and when I entered that information in late 2002 I saw it as nine wickets down, and all out, but the scorebook quite clearly shows Brian Moore as absent hurt and thus the score should be eight down and not all out. I did wonder whether this might be a Laws difference prior to 2000 but the older copies of Tom Smith’s that I have access to do not contradict my interpretation and thus I have gone with the modified version
• I had a similar dilemma with the St. Peter’s Old Boys innings where the scorebook has their score as 128 but the batting and bowling both add up to 131. In this instance I have chosen to leave the official score unchanged as it is by no means unusual for there to be discrepancies of that type and the scorecard quite clearly flags up the mismatch
• the Rowan game has a difference in their innings – with the scorebook quite clearly showing six dismissals in both the batting and bowling sections, whilst the existing result only showed five down – and in our innings, where the fall of wickets were missing for the last three wickets and had to be extrapolated from the rest of the scorebook
• Simon Fox gains an extra three balls bowled where his incomplete over in the game against South Beckenham was not copied from the scorebook to the bowling summary sheet
• Steve Card gains an extra five balls bowled where his incomplete over in the game against Lingfield was not copied from the scorebook to the bowling summary sheet
• Mick Willmott loses a game played, an innings, a run and that run as a highest score, because when I added his details by hand I mistakenly included the President’s XI game
• James Chignell loses five runs scored, and from his highest score, a game bowled, theee overs and nineteen runs allowed, all again thanks to errors by yours truly when adding missing performances
• Keith Miller gains a caught behind not previously recorded
• Dave Tickner has four more balls bowled, but one less maiden. The latter is a transcription error for Sutton Railway where the scorebook quite clearly shows zero maidens but the end of season summary shows one. The extra balls were not copied from the scorebook for the Newchapel game
• Dave Clark is missing a maiden, and should be missing an over, but due to a bit of luck isn’t – as with some others this relates to partial overs in that he bowled 5.1 at Temple Sheen, by virtue of taking the final wicket with the first ball of a new spell, which was recorded as 5 in both the bowling analysis and the season summary, and 3.5 in the abandoned innings against Stockwell recorded as 3) – because I’ve chosen not to include the Old Walcountians game (sorry, no photograph for that one but it is line 12 in the season summaries) that lasted just fourteen balls and for which I’ve no idea who the other nine players were
• Dave Bowerman is also affected by the removal of that game, losing an over and a run allowed
• Chris Preston has two less balls bowled since whilst checking the discrepancies in the Wallington Cottagers game it became apparent that his second over consisted of only four good balls and two wides, the second of which ended the game
• Chris Morgan gets an extra game bowled, with figures of 2-0-15-0, because I must have missed the Malden Wanderers game when collating his bowling figures manually. However, only 12 runs are added to his total runs allowed due to an apparent error in the Wallington Cottagers bowling figures (albeit that our runs allowed are some way off the batting total, even factoring in the fact that wides did not count against the bowling figures in those days)
• Alan Tickner must curse every time I do this but he now has ten extra runs allowed, courtesy of an error in the scorebook for the Old Alleynians game where 11 was added to 43 to make 44 instead of 54, plus two extra balls bowled, via a slightly weird route – he bowled 15.5 at Malden Wanderers, recorded as 15 on the summary sheet, and 12.3 in that Old Alleynians game, which was recorded as 13 in the bowling analysis for some reason – and one less maiden thanks to a transcription error between the summary and the scorebook for Rowan
• Adrian Cowell has five less runs allowed because of a discrepancy between the scorebook for the Wallington Cottagers game and the summary, which could be accounted for by the writing in the book, a transcription error in the summary or subsequent shenanigans with the book because of the fact that things don’t add up
• the highest eighth wicket partnership has changed – previously the 12 run partnership between Steve Card and Dave Clark at Dormansland had been recorded as the best of the season, but the fall of the last two wickets in the Old Josephians match had not been recorded and once I’d extrapolated them it became apparent that Dave Bowerman and Richard Gambel must have added at least 19 runs for the eighth wicket in that game
• there are also a number of individuals who now appear in the full statistics tables that were not included before with Glyn Lister, J Preston and Roy Fletcher all playing in a single game and having one fruitless innings each, E Lister playing and batting twice, Stuart Gambel thrice and his brother Richard four times, batting in all of them (and topping the averages, although he didn’t qualify) and somehow managing to bowl three overs across three of those games
• we also have another instance (with plenty more to come) of not knowing exactly who played in a game, since the scorebook for the game against Blindley Heath only includes the first four in the batting order. Four other names can be gleaned from the other half of the scorebook, since they either bowled or took catches, but whether or not we fielded a full eleven that day we will never know. I have chosen to assume that ten played and we are missing two names, but it could be any number from eight to eleven (NOTE that later work in this area means that we now visibly hedge our bets, as per our current scorecard for the game)

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Adjustments made to statistics after entry of 1986 season data

The following changes were made to the 1986 statistics following the entry of the scorecards for that season:

• in a move that will no doubt causing sage nodding in the Fox household, Dave Tickner has been deprived of two runs in the game at South Beckenham with an equivalent reduction in the Badgers total score for the innings from 125 to 123 – this is a pure tallying error in the scorebook with Dave’s runs scored adding up to 53 and the Badgers total out of sync with the running total, the last fall of wicket and the bowling totals
• Alan Tickner is also a minor loser since he has lost a catch and gained two runs against. The latter is a mistake in the the score sheet for the Old Alleynians game, where whoever was scoring for Alan’s second spell added eight to 31 and arrived at 37. The catch is harder to figure out because the score card quite clearly (to my eyes) shows a catch off Alan’s bowling as ‘Ct Lee’ (Foster) whereas the catching summary sheet in the back of the scorebook gives the catch to Alan (presumably reading the entry as a caught and bowled). The waters are muddied further by the fact that it would appear that a one in the Foster column has been rubbed out and the total adjusted plus someone has changed Alan’s total from seven to six (after the fact, since it is in pen). You can also see a couple of queries written underneath in my hand, so I have spotted the discrepancy at some point and obviously been confused by it
• in light of the evidence in the previous item, I have credited Lee Foster with that catch at Ebrington, raising his season total from one to two
• Dave Bowerman loses an over and gains a run against. The overs looks like whoever typed up the figures read the total column on the bowling summary sheet as 106 rather than 105, a mistake it is easy to understand given the letter shapes, whilst the runs looks like a mistake was corrected (22 runs is right for Englefield Green), but not reflected when the columns were totalled, with the sum of all runs being 423 not 422
• Huw Campbell both wins and loses, gaining .4 of an over, an extra maiden and a run against. Most of the difference comes from the Wrecclesham match, where some confusion in the scorebook towards the end of the flight lieutenant’s first spell results in an over with no runs not being marked as a maiden and the runs tally reducing by one, culminating in the bowling totals showing 29 instead of 30 and two maidens rather than three. In addition the bowling summary sheet is missing the three extra balls from that game and one from the game against Rowan, with the latter rather more understandable since it was missing from the bowling totals on that score card
• Simon Fox sees a similar set of differences, although his are all positive, also gaining .4 of an over and an extra maiden, but losing three runs against. Once again the four extra balls stem from an incomplete over, in the game against Sunnyside, not being copied from the scorebook to the bowling summary sheet. The missing maiden is from the Temple Sheen game and can be laid firmly at the door of the scorer on the day as the bowling in the scorebook clearly shows Foxy’s fourth over with two wickets but no runs, but doesn’t mark it as such and thus the totals miss it too. The runs discrepancy stem from a transcription error in the bowling summary sheet where the runs allowed at Ebrington look like they were originally entered as 29 rather than 26, corrected by someone after the fact, but not reflected in the total for that column of figures
• finally, just to add to the head-shaking chez Fox, yours truly (Steve Pitts) has been credited with an extra run for the innings at Old Xaverians where the scorecard is something of a mess (and I reckon that the total should be 189) but my score has been corrected after the fact but not amended in the batting summary sheet
• there are also a number of individuals who now appear in the full statistics tables that were not included before, including two – Stuart and Richard Gambel – who now have bowling performances to go with their existing entries in the batting table. Steve Baker, B China, Peter Cook, E Lister, Glyn Lister, J Preston and Tony Shirley all batted just once, with Steve playing in three games and the others only one, Tony bowling one over and Mr. China eight
• we also have the second instance (and there are plenty more to come) of not knowing exactly who played in a game, since the scorebook for the game at Old Xaverians only has the batters for the Badgers recorded down to number seven. Three other names can be gleaned from the other half of the scorebook, since they either bowled or took catches, but whether or not there was an eleventh player we will never know. To avoid A.N. Other getting a game I have chosen to go with ten players but it may be that somebody else played that day (NOTE that later work in this area means that we now visibly hedge our bets, as per our current scorecard for the game)

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Adjustments made to statistics after entry of 1987 season data

The following changes were made to the 1987 statistics following the entry of the scorecards for that season:

• the total score of the opposition’s innings at Newchapel & Horne has been changed from 87 to 86 – the figure in the book had obviously been altered after the fact in such a way that it could have been either number and whoever interpreted it for the end of season report chose one value whereas the individual elements added up to the other figure. Back in 2002 when I manually entered the results for seasons prior to 1988 I chose to do so from the old end of season reports, which meant juggling several sheets of A4 (or foolscap for the early days) rather than the scorebooks and thus the wrong figure was perpetuated
• the ninth wicket pair at Wrecclesham amassed 22 runs not the 18 originally recorded as the best for the season – this figure was wrong in the scorebook and had been taken at face value ever since
• Simon Fox has been credited with an extra appearance – the fault lies entirely at my door as I manually entered appearance data for Simon (and a handful of others) in May 2009 and got this one wrong
• Simon has also had one maiden taken from his tally – most of the mistakes found seem to have been caused by transcription errors and this is one of those, since the bowling summary sheet has Simon with a maiden against Temple Sheen whilst the score sheet for the game shows none
• the innings count for Adrian Cowell has been increased from 13 to 14, with an associated decrease in his batting average – this one is a pure maths error, there are 14 entries recorded on the batting summary sheet but the total shows 13
• Adrian has also been robbed of a maiden over – as with Simon this one is a copying mistake, with the bowling summary sheet showing a maiden at Old Josephians but the score card showing none
• Dave Bowerman is both a winner and a loser since he has gained a maiden and dropped ten runs allowed but lost a wicket, with the latter also affecting his season’s best figures – two of these are mistakes in transcription since the bowling summary sheet shows no maidens at Sunnyside, with the score sheet showing one, and a wicket entered for the Old Alleynians game, where the score card shows none (and all of the other entries for that game confirm that), whilst the runs allowed discrepancy was simply a tallying error, with individual entries in the bowling summary adding to 148 not 158
• there are also a number of individuals who now appear in the full statistics tables that were not included before, including two – Barclay and McCarthy – for whom we have no initials let alone first names. Neither of them batted and nor did Bob Parker, but Pom Bal, Peter Cook and Tony Shirley all did, albeit just once each, and an M Baber bowled five overs
• we also have the first instance (and there are many more to come, of that I am certain) of not knowing exactly who played in a game, since the scorebook for the game at Nat West has a blank entry for the number ten slot in the batting order. It is almost impossible to decide at this remove whether there was an unnamed player there (and if not, why did my old man (for the pencilled in names are in his handwriting – although I have subsequently had contact from Foxy suggesting that it is in fact his hand, not that that makes any difference – Accuracy Ed.) write Mr. McCarthy’s name into number 11 rather than the line above?) or that we only had ten men that day. To avoid A.N. Other getting a game I have chosen to go with ten players but my gut feeling is that that is actually the wrong answer and somebody else played that day (NOTE that later work in this area means that we now visibly hedge our bets, as per our current scorecard for the game)