Badgers Cricket Club – The Statistical Sett Scorecard Queries

 

Historically (certainly between my taking over the creation of the end of season report in 1988 and the addition of scorecards to this web site back in June 2002) the information in the scorebooks was processed annually, between the completion of the season and the end of season awards presentation. This tended to mean that we had to take the scoring record as gospel unless there were obvious errors in tallying. Once the scorecards started to be displayed on the web site then things changed and the scorebook data was entered as the season progressed, often weekly, which meant that mistakes were more likely to be spotted immediately.

There were often anomalies in the scorebooks that had to be dealt with ‘by hand’, a process that would either be performed on paper or using a spreadsheet of some kind, but back in June 2012 I got fed up with that approach and started work on a scorecard checking program that took a ball-by-ball input (from the bowling analysis) and recreated the whole scorecard. In recent times (starting at some point fairly early in 2014) it has been my habit to use this program to process every match, not just those with issues, and thus to fill in all of the details that Play-Cricket caters for.

Sometimes the processing of the scorebook data goes without a hitch but often there are queries thrown up that need to be resolved, some of which require a bit of detective work amongst the various elements of the scorebook whilst others have necessitated picking the brains of those who were present. Most of those deliberations and decisions are lost in the mists of time but I have started trying to record them here, partly for our own history and partly so that I have something I can point our opposition at in order to explain why what I’ve entered into Play-Cricket differs from what they have in their book.

For the time being this is a single page, with each of the links above taking you to the area of the page with information for the season concerned, each of which have their own links to individual games from that season. Since I only created the program to check the scorecards back in the middle of 2012 there won’t be any information prior to that point (and prior to the 2016 season I had only taken the time to record a few egregious examples from the last few weeks of 2015) and obviously not all games have queries. Whether this page goes the way of the clubhouse, table keys or photo gallery and falls back into disuse, who knows, but for now I intend to document all of the queries and compromises from the 2016 season onwards as I process the scorebook data each week.

The rest of the Statistical Sett resides elsewhere, and the links below will take you back to the other top level categories:

Scorebook queries from the 2024 season

The following matches in 2024 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved and often requiring a certain amount of detective work.

4th Aug 2024 – Bookham

I have not had cause to create any of these entries in the past couple of seasons, partly because it is my guess that no one other than me ever reads them and perhaps more importantly because Jacqueline has scored every game that counted towards the averages over that period. However, this past Sunday she had a bit of an off day (at least during the first innings) and the opposition were scoring using Play-Cricket Scorer on a tablet and it too (or the folk working it) had a problematic period.

The first innings in our scorebook and the Play-Cricket ball by ball (a print of which I have saved in case the version on the Play-Cricket site is affected by subsequent changes to the result) proceed in lock step for 32 overs before things go astray in over 33, Amy’s second which Jacqueline has as a single off the fifth ball followed by a dot whereas the Play-Cricket record has a second single off the sixth ball. Our book must be wrong because otherwise the wrong batter will be on strike in the next over when a wicket falls. This error has a knock-on effect on the end of over totals for the rest of the innings and for the fall of wickets from the sixth wicket onwards.

Overs 34 and 35 tie up again but the Play-Cricket goes to pieces from over 36 onwards, Ricky’s last, where the first ball is shown as having been bowled to opening bat Adam, no run scored, but the next to captain Danyal. The scoring recorded in that over bears no resemblance to what is in our book possibly because the next over bowled by Amy, in which three singles were scored, is not recorded at all.

Play-Cricket over 37 is really over 38 but then over 38 has another anomaly regarding batters on strike, with Danyal shown as scoring singles off two consecutive deliveries whereas our book has a dot on the second ball.

Finally Play-Cricket over 39 is actually the last over of the innings and ties up with our book if we accept that Jacqueline missed a dot ball off the second delivery, in an over that she records as a ball short.

We know that the maiden over recorded to Amy as over 40 of the innings was added by Danyal during the tea interval, since all parties were aware of problems having occurred entering into Play-Cricket, and if we accept the record for overs 36 to 40 from our book then we end up with a logical scoring sequence (with the expected batters on strike at the expected times) and the following discrepancies from the result originally uploaded to Play-Cricket:

There were also a handful of changes in the other innings, but nothing of significance (a couple of balls faced values changed by one and a wides bowled was decreased to reflect reality – the latter suggests that Play-Cricket Scorer is recording runs from wides not wide balls against the bowler, which is just plain wrong).

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11th Sep 2022 – Chipstead, Coulsdon & Walcountians

Both scorers recorded Billy as having hit wicket but my own recollecton, confirmed with the man himself after the fact, was that he played it on and thus I have recorded the wicket as bowled.

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Scorebook queries from the 2022 season

The following matches in 2022 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved and often requiring a certain amount of detective work.

18th Sep 2022 – Horsley & Send

Nothing serious in this one but something was missed on the field during the game that impacted on my entering the record cleanly. The fifth ball of the 17th over, Vinny’s third, was (correctly) recorded in both scorebooks as a five but to get the scoring record to make sense I had to swap the batters around such that Dave Gilbert was on strike for the next delivery too. The ball had been turned behind square and the call for a run caught the non-striker unawares (perhaps unsurprising since it was his call). Dean threw hard at the stumps but the throw went a little wide to my right, I missed it and nobody was in position to back up so it rolled all the way to the boundary. With the wonders of hindsight it is clear that the batters, having kept running in case the ball was hauled in before reaching the rope, ended up at the wrong ends afterwards because Dave was on strike still and said something to me about ‘should that be six’ which I didn’t grok at the time.

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11th Sep 2022 – Chipstead, Coulsdon & Walcountians

Both scorers recorded Billy as having hit wicket but my own recollecton, confirmed with the man himself after the fact, was that he played it on and thus I have recorded the wicket as bowled.

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30th Jul 2022 – Overbury

The Saturday game on tour was scored on their part using Play-Cricket Scorer running on a club supplied tablet by the father of one of their youngsters. Upon recreating the record a couple of days after tour had finished I discovered two mistakes in their innings, with Hari Gregory being credited with an extra run – because he was run out at the striker’s end trying to stretch a single into a two but was recorded as simply run out – whilst Lee Diamond lost one – he retired hurt after falling to the ground two or three yards from the wicket but was credited with a single despite the fact that he didn’t attempt to complete the run and the new batsman faced the next ball at the same end.

There was also a dispute between the two records for the second innings, that we knew about at the end of the sixteenth over because the two scorers – the aforementioned father operating PCS and yours truly scoring in our book – suddenly differed by one. This was resolved in favour of the paper scorebook (you can see the anomaly in the Play-Cricket ball by ball where Mark faces a single leg bye off ball 15.6 but then does not start on strike for the next over – the error was that a single recorded from the fifth ball did not happen and should have been a dot) and in addition to reducing the total had the effect of lowering Darrell’s score by one and Adam Blunt’s runs allowed too whilst decreasing the score at fall for the fourth, fifth and sixth wickets.

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3rd Jul 2022 – Oxted & Limpsfield

I did not think too much about missing a game this season because Ian was playing in this one and thus Cheryl Estall would be available to take on the scoring duties, and I knew from previous visits to Banstead and earlier games in 2022 that her scoring records were more than good enough for my purposes. However, if you have come along to any of the beer festival games at Oxted you would know just how loud it gets and just how hard it is to communicate, not just between the field and the scorers table but also just between scorers. When I came to process the first innings in the resultant scorebook upon returning from my holiday…[to be completed when there is the time and the will]

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Scorebook queries from the 2021 season

The following matches in 2021 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved.

12th Sep 2021 – Christchurch

For the first time in more than two seasons I did not attend a Badgers match and therefore nor did Jacqueline act as scorer, and boy what a mess. It was obvious from a quick glance at the opposition book that I was going to have trouble getting things to make sense, with the following issues immediately apparent:

Once I actually started trying to recreate the innings other more serious problems became apparent:

  1. things go astray almost immediately with the running total for the second over showing as six, but the first over shows a single run, the second only a four and if we insert a bye or leg bye then either the wrong batsman is on strike for the dismissal in the second over or the subsequent runs scored make even less sense than they do anyway
  2. the third over is not much better, showing two twos but neither batsman gets credit for a pair of twos at the start of their innings. Things are confused further by the end of over tally going up to 10 but the runs in over also showing 10, but I will ignore the latter
  3. the location of the first run out is not made apparent but from anecdotal evidence and changes made in the bowling analysis and end of over totals I have assumed that it was the last ball of the fifth over and the on strike batsman was out trying to turn a single into a two. Tariq’s score is then correct bar the fact that he did not get credit for the first run before the run out
  4. the missing entries in the end of over figures for overs nine and ten are problematic because over nine, Vinny’s fifth, is a maiden, over ten, Rob’s first, shows just a two and over 11 has a five (via a single and four overthrows) but the new total after over 11 is 42 which requires eight runs to be scored. If I add a bye or leg bye then the individual batsman’s scores end up incorrect, so I have left things as they appear in the bowling
  5. I cannot give Hameed exactly the runs the score book shows for him, but a pair of extra twos either side of his only four give him a total of 20 instead of the 16 recorded, which seems reasonable (especially given the missing ten runs)
  6. which ever way I interpret what follows the fall of the third wicket I cannot end up with numbers four and five scoring exactly what they are credited with. I can get close to Faizan’s figures by adding a bye into the 22nd over of the innings, Nat’s first, although there is no other evidence for that, which results in the addition of one single and one two along the way, but I cannot have him score a pair of singles before being out and since the over concerned goes 4, 4, 1, 4, 1, W I see no way for it to have happened as shown in the batting. End result is a score of 64 instead of 62
  7. doing things that way means Price ends up with a four and a two in different places and a lost single along the way and thus drops from 27 to 26
  8. part of the reason for that might be that there is simply no way for Usman to end up scoring nothing, assuming that he is fifth man out in the 28th over, Amy’s second – which must be the case with Price falling to Jake according to the book – and therefore must have recorded the single in the previous over given that Price must have scored the twos in the over before. End result is run out for a single
  9. at this point the end of over totals start to make very little sense in relation to what is shown in the bowling analysis and their utility becomes questionable
  10. indeed from here on in things get very shaky indeed. Price and Ebanks both fall in the 29th over, Jake’s fifth, for something close to what they are shown with in the record, taking into account the discrepancies for the former already detailed and by adding a leg bye as one of the first two balls in the 30th over, Amy’s third, I can get Arslan on strike to be stumped but there is no way that I can find for Adbullah Mahmood to score the four that immediately follows (the final over of the innings indicates that the scorer is working across then down, so it can only be scored by the incoming bat, Bilal)
  11. thereafter the runs in the bowling bear no relation to those against the remaining batsmen and to be frank I just gave up having already spent far more time on trying to sort this out than it really deserved. Had I not been on leave from work then I probably would not have spent as long as I did
  12. to jump back a little, since reporting it in the right place would have ruined the flow, the circled numbers in Jake’s second and Amy’s first over have been interpreted as byes, which may or may not be correct but seems to fit

The final end result of all of that can be seen in our detailed scorecard of the game as well as in the updates made to the Play-Cricket version but much of it is not directly comparable with the batting details in their scorebook. Fortunately the only complications in our innings were exactly when Rob retired hurt and the fact that Darrell had recorded two no balls due to a run not off the bat, whereas these days that it is a single no ball penalty and a bye. The rest of it made sense once I had fixed a tallying error that saw Daniel get an extra run. Next time please total everything up and try to cross-check it people – it is always going to be easier to find and fix things on the day than several days later.

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Scorebook queries from the 2019 season

The following matches in 2019 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved.

12th May 2019 – Ham & Petersham

Two competent scorers this week, sitting side by side with one of them scoring using coloured pens to distinguish the bowlers – what could possibly go awry? In the first innings, not a lot, with their book tying up nicely with our monochrome equivalent and everything checking out with the exception of a couple of discrepancies in the detail when I came to upload to Play-Cricket, a chore that they had already performed by hand:

  1. for some reason Hameed is recorded in their book as having scored a six, which he did not (with shorter straight boundaries he almost certainly would have done, with most of his scoring coming in the vee, but Ham Common is short square and long straight)
  2. their scorer had Hameed as facing 110 deliveries, but my code sees 112. This is either a tallying error or a mistaken belief that no balls do not count towards the batsman’s tally (wide balls, off which the batsman cannot score, do not count, but no balls do because they can)
  3. the number of no ball and wide deliveries for our bowlers had not been entered so those were added

When it came to the second innings the scorers were aware that some aspects of the Ham record were out of whack with the Badgers scorebook, especially the individual scores for Darrell and Rod, but Jacqueline was happy to leave it to me sort it out after the fact and thus they didn’t try too hard to get to the bottom of it at the time.

  1. the big problem we have is that Darrell is shown in their book with 37 whilst Rod has 14, and in our book Rod has 18 whilst Darrell has only 32. A quick review of the scoring shots makes it apparent that Darrell’s innings finished with six singles, whereas Jacqueline only recorded five (perhaps missing the one from the run out?) This leaves us with a boundary four that either belongs to Rod or to Darrell, and the reason for the discrepancy becomes apparent when looking at the 12th over of the innings, Maheruj’s sixth and last. Jacqueline has recorded this as 1 4 . . 4 1 whilst the Ham book has 1 4 . 1 4 . both of which are valid in terms of who ends up where but which give the second four to different players. To further complicate matters the peripheral evidence is contradictory, with the running tally in our book looking as if there might have been some erasure, although that might be because alterations were made in the 70s and partially erased the row above, whilst the dot ball from the last ball of the over in their book is given to the wrong batter and thus doesn't add weight to that interpretation. Since there is absolutely no way therefore to decide logically which record of events is correct I have taken the totally arbitrary decision to go with what is in our scorebook. This decision also has a knock-on effect on both players’ fours hit and balls faced and on the not out scores at the fall of the third and fourth wickets and Play-Cricket has been adjusted accordingly
  2. the Badgers’ book has 16 wides in the bowling extras tally, but checking the bowling analysis there are 16 wide deliveries, one of which featured an extra run, so Jacqueline has missed adding one wide to the tally and the total should be 17 as it is in Ham’s book
  3. both books show the fourth wicket as having fallen at 86, but the score at the end of the previous over, the 20th of the innings, was 84 and Graham was run out trying to stretch a single into a two off the fourth ball with two other singles already having been scored. Therefore I am confident that the wicket actually fell with the score on 87
  4. there were a number of differences in balls faced – for Andy, Mark and me – but all have been cross-checked and the values changed on Play-Cricket to match the events in our book
  5. the Play-Cricket not out score for the fall of the 8th wicket is 52 but their scorebook and my checker show 42
  6. the number of no ball and wide deliveries for their bowlers had not been entered into Play-Cricket, so those were added

The final end result of all of that can be seen in our detailed scorecard of the game as well as in the updates made to the Play-Cricket version.

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28th Apr 2019 – Beechwood

Jacqueline scored on her own for this one, in conditions that were not conducive to sitting around wielding a pencil, and everything recorded in our book for the home side’s innings checked out beautifully barring the over in which centurion Adrian Warner’s wicket was taken by Darrell… Their book for the first innings

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Scorebook queries from the 2018 season

The following matches in 2018 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved.

1st Jul 2018 – Ewell

After a couple of weeks with three scorers, including direct scoring into my scorecard checker and immediate upload to Play-Cricket, this game saw both innings scored by the batting sides, in pen, with apparently not much checking or adding up. Their book for the first innings had one obvious blemish but otherwise looked to be fairly complete. However, I did find a number of anomalies:

  1. there are two byes and two leg byes recorded in the Extras section of the scorebook but no indication in the bowling analysis of where they happened. Based on the end of over running totals I see that Vinny’s fifth over, the tenth of the innings, shows only five against the bowler whereas six were added to the total and that Jake’s third over, the 22nd of the innings, is recorded as a maiden but the end of over total goes up by one. I have added one bye and one leg bye into those overs at ‘random’ points which means that the balls faced for the Ewell batsmen at the wicket during those overs might be out of whack. There are no other discrepancies in the end of over totals so I have had to assume that the other two extras did not happen and perhaps were added to balance the books?
  2. whoever started off scoring must have been working down the bowling analysis boxes first (based on the individual scores given to the opening batsmen and the effect that Daniel Allen’s third over, the fifth of the innings, would have had if interpreted the other way) but when I entered the whole innings that way the individual scores for numbers five and six plus the latter half of number three Woolston’s innings were all messed up so I decided that a new scorer took over at the fall of the second wicket – in Darrell’s second over, the 23rd of the innings – scoring across and then down from then until the fall of the fourth wicket – in Danny Glover’s second over, the 36th of the innings – at which point things reverted to down then across. That change of interpretation gives the individual batsmen the same sequences of runs as shown in the batting area of the scorebook
  3. Danny Glover’s first over, the 34th of the innings, contains seven balls and a strange symbol – looking a bit like a fish inside a circle – and the only interpretation I can come up with that ties up with most aspects of the scorebook is that it was a wide. It means that the end of over total for the bowler is wrong but ties up with the total wides recorded and with the end of over total as well as the need for the extra ball
  4. Danny’s second over, the 36th of the innings, is even more confusing in that it has a circle with a W inside it. This must have been a wicket but I have no idea what the circle is supposed to indicate and it has been drawn in such a way as to fill a third of the box and make the rest of the over harder to decipher too. The total runs against the bowler don’t tie up with the runs in the over and the previous total but perhaps that was just the new scorer correcting the previous error because the end of over total goes up by six which ties up with what I see
  5. that odd symbol must have been the dismissal of Hayes, who I see as scoring 25 but the book only credits with 24. However, the previous over to the dismissal, Darrell’s eighth, contained six singles so Hayes must have scored three of them between the two in Danny’s previous over and the four immediately before he was stumped which accounts for the difference
  6. the score at the fall of that wicket is shown in the book as 169 but that was the end of over total from the previous over so the four needs to be added to make it 173
  7. the end of innings adding up left something to be desired with eleven extras recorded but ten being added to the 188 batting runs. The bowling adds up to 196 which is why I only see the possibility for two byes or leg byes and with the extra run awarded to Hales only need nine total extras to make up the 198

The scorebook for our innings is sadly incomplete in terms of adding up but when that information is filled in seems to be an accurate record with no logical anomalies. However, there is considerable confusion around names with Vinny not having been entered as the eleventh batter, two Farooqs bowling despite there being only one in the batting, and the probability (having discussed with Darrell who was scoring at the time) that the seventh bowler was Malik not the sixth. I have made the best of it based on what I have been able to figure out but if anyone from Ewell would care to sort out what has been uploaded to Play-Cricket, including adding wicket keeper and catcher information, then I will happily feed that back into my process so that our detailed scorecard of the game gets corrected too.

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10th Jun 2018 – Newdigate

Jacqueline was back in the scorer’s seat for this one, which always gives me a better chance of an easy ride, and so it proved for the first innings which threw up no queries whatsoever. When it came to the book for our innings the picture wasn’t so clear cut since the batting was missing a run so we knew that something was wrong, although in the end I found four differences:

  1. Mark had been given a two that belonged to Jake (a mistake that I’m surprised doesn’t happen more often given that it is so difficult to tell the pair of them apart, especially when kitted up for batting), the first runs in Bennett’s fifth and final over, the 28th of the innings – with a leg bye separating the two doubles in that over, confirmed by the running tally, there is no way that Mark can have scored both of them – and therefore Jake ends up with 54 runs scored
  2. Mark was also robbed of a single (which turned out to be the missing run) – impossible to say which of the next two singles are missed, but it must either be the one off the sixth ball of the same Bennett over or the one from the second ball of Bowley’s fourth over, the 29th of the innings – and the give and take leaves him with one run less on 27
  3. there were two tallying errors in the home side’s bowling figures, with Monjur Elahi being burdened with a run too many – his first over, the second of the innings, contained ten runs off the bat and a fielding extra, with eleven added to the end of over total but he was debited with all eleven – and thus I have changed his runs allowed to 41
  4. whilst Matt De Vrij was a beneficiary in the opposite direction – with his second over, the eleventh of the innings, containing eight runs, all of which were added to the end of over total, but only seven of them being added to his bowling total – and therefore his runs allowed have increased to 31
  5. at this point I also feel it necessary to point out that the second ball of Bowley’s first over should also have been a no ball, since it was a head high beamer that I slapped away for a boundary four. However, Jacqueline says that she did not see a no ball signal so we will leave things as they are

In addition, when I came to load the game to Play-Cricket Newdigate had already done so and there were the following discrepancies to be checked and accounted for, in addition to supplying information that they’d not bothered with or been able to provide (like our fall of wicket details, wides and no balls for each bowler):

  1. our total had been entered as the 240 that the batting added up to rather than the 241 of the running tally and bowling analysis. I have changed it to 241
  2. Darrell’s wicket had been credited to Flower when it was most definitely Fulcher. I have corrected that, even though it breaks my ‘no effect on our data’ rule, as I suspect it was a genuine mistake
  3. Flower had also been given the wrong runs allowed, 23 instead of 25, and again I have chosen to correct that

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3rd Jun 2018 – Teddington Town

On the surface this all looked straightforward enough but was complicated by one or two problems when I came to process their book and even more when I came to upload to Play-Cricket, which the home side’s skipper had already updated. Our scorebook for the first innings had not been properly finished off but checked out fine once I had reviewed the adding up:

  1. Mark was given 32 in the book, but that turned out to be a simple tallying error and there were 34 runs against his name

However, when I came to load the game to Play-Cricket there were the following discrepancies to be checked and accounted for:

  1. our overs faced had been entered as 39.4 but was definitely 39.3, so I have corrected that
  2. their fourth bowler, Naushad Samnani, bowled that incomplete final over but was given eight complete overs. Although it doesn’t affect our data I have changed that to 7.3
  3. opening bowler Philips was shown with two wides to his name but actually bowled just one. This is a matter of interpretation but my belief is that number against the bowler should be how many wide balls they delivered not the total value of the runs from those wides
  4. fifth bowler Levell has been given a no ball but his analysis only records a wide and a leg bye. My suspicion is that this is a symbol interpretation issue, which affects the next item too, and therefore I have corrected his no balls to zero
  5. sixth bowler Elliott has a related discrepancy, in that he is missing a no ball and I have corrected that one too
  6. Elliott is also showing 21 runs allowed rather than the 27 that can clearly be seen in the scorebook and again I have chosen to correct this

My heart sank a little when I saw their book for the second innings since it was scored in pen, which often results in a mess when something is changed or misinterpreted. Their scorebook layout almost demands three across and two down and with the way things like wides have been handled I have made the assumption that their scorer(s) worked across first. In checking the bowling analysis I found a number of queries:

  1. despite there only being 26 balls to the first wicket, things go awry almost immediately, in that I can find no way for the bowling analysis to result in the opening batsmen recording the individual scores they have been credited with. If I interpret the entries as down then across then D Singh would end up hitting both of the fours and thus end up with 12 runs to his partner’s 3. Working left to right first, as I have already stated looked to be the actual flow, then A Singh must score one of the two singles before the four in Vinny’s second over, the third of the innings, and must score both the subsequent single and the only run in the fourth over, Rob’s second. Therefore Apurv scores seven runs to Daljit’s eight, not the six and nine respectively that the book records. I have chosen not to change this on Play-Cricket and instead leave it up to the home side to decide how they would like to handle it
  2. the end of over totals go awry with the tenth over, which the book shows as 23 but the bowling analysis requires 24, with Rob’s fifth and final over clearly showing a single and a two. The running tally looks to have been tweaked at that point, with a single being recorded for 22 but replaced with a two to cover 22 and 23. This has a knock-on effect on the fall of the fourth to sixth wickets, which should all be one run higher
  3. the sixteenth over, Danny’s third, has to be interpreted to make sense and I have assumed that the four top right was written in after all of the other balls otherwise we have the over ending with two non-legal deliveries, and thus the over is three dot balls, a pair of singles, a wide, a wide with an extra run (thus seeing the batsmen change ends) and finally the four
  4. Danny’s fifth over, the 20th of the innings, contains a square symbol that I have guessed at being a leg bye since his running total only increases by one, but the end of over total goes up by two whilst there is a single leg bye recorded against extras in the batting record
  5. the end of over totals go completely out of whack for the 34th over, the sixth of Darrell’s spell, having tracked one behind since the tenth over, with the total at that point being recorded as going from 125 to 132, despite the over containing 12 runs in the shape of two singles, a two and two fours and Darrell’s bowling figures increasing by the correct amount. Checking the running tally suggests that the first single and one of the fours were not recorded there which accounts for the missing five runs
  6. all of the preceding items pale into comparison when we come to the 35th over of the innings, Jake’s second, and account for the fact that I typed this paragraph more than three weeks later with still no prospect of getting this one put to bed and didn’t finalise my handling of it until more than three months after the fact with the end of season looming and the statistics needing to be completed. As written in the book it contains seven balls with four byes off the second ball, which I remember, wickets from balls four and five and a stray single that is unlikely to have been the fourth ball of the over (since no other over has four symbols on the top row unless there were wides and/or no balls involved) but was recorded that way. The first thing wrong with this is that those two wickets were definitely taken off the fifth and sixth balls of that over, because it caused amusement at the time that Darrell might take the remaining wicket and deprive Jake of a chance at a hat trick in the game and we brought the field in at the start of Jake’s next over for the hat trick ball. Setting that aside for the moment I am left with the problem of what to do with that single that looks like it has been grafted onto the over after the fact. It is recorded in the batting against Sandeep but he must have scored the two at the end of the previous over and thus would not have been on strike at any point in the over and both of the wickets were bowled so there is no way that the batters could have crossed … after much agonising over this (it took me months, after all) I eventually decided to cheat Sandeep on strike at the start of the over, suppose that he scored a single off the fourth ball and pretend that the dot ball after the wickets was not actually there, which enables things to pretty much map to the numbers in the scorebook (barring the preceding and following adjustments) {sigh}
  7. upon coming to add it all up after the fact I also discovered that Mark has been given one too few runs allowed, with his final over, the 31st of the innings, containing three singles and a wide, increasing the end of over total by four but his total by only three, thus he actually conceded 28 runs
  8. their book also shows Jake as having bowled three overs, but the last of those was incomplete and thus it should be 2.5

The Play-Cricket upload showed even more differences than our innings, but many of them relate directly to the running tally being out of sync and are covered above. We are left with:

  1. their overs faced had been entered as 37.5 but was definitely 36.5, so I have corrected that
  2. their first two batsmen were shown in the fall of wickets as being dismissed the wrong way round, but A Singh definitely fell first since he was Vinny’s first victim in the over before Rob took his two wickets, and the book has batter number two as being the first wicket, so I have corrected that and the second wicket
  3. since the fall of wicket details for the seventh wicket in the book were obviously intended to be for the eighth wicket the not out batsman’s runs were recorded as 30 when they should have been 18 and I have corrected that
  4. because Vinny and Rob were only given a single maiden each in the book that is how their figures were entered into Play-Cricket, but both bowled two maidens – Vinny his third and fifth, Rob his third and fourth

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20th May 2018 – Dormansland

No scorer for either side again this week, but the home side’s scorebook for the first innings was tidy enough despite being recorded in pen and being the work of at least two people. Having entered the bowling into my scorecard checker it all played out beautifully with one exception:

  1. the scorebook has Beeson scoring 11 and Ruxton 26 but I can find no way to interpret the bowling analysis to make that true and after a manual re-analysis have come to the conclusion that the single in Ned Rowland’s second over, the sixteenth of the innings, must have been credited to the wrong batter. Therefore I have recorded into Play-Cricket that Beeson scored 12 runs and Ruxton 25.

I knew from checking during and after our innings that there were at least a couple of issues with our book for the second innings with six runs missing from the total, four of which I was fairly sure were mine, since I came off the pitch expecting to find 26 against my name:

  1. my score is four light, Rod and Danny one each
  2. Holmes final over looks like it has a second no ball in it but must have been a bye
  3. Murray's first over shows a no ball with a dot in it, implying an extra run was taken, but...
  4. Bailey did not bowl two overs in his second spell
  5. no indication of where the run out took place but must have been in the over assigned to the wrong bowler
  6. fall of 7th wicket is 161 in the book and 163 by my reckoning

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13th May 2018 – Old Wimbledonians

Nothing major this week but fortunately I spotted an error in the opposition scorebook for the first innings whilst scoring our innings and thus was able to increase our target from 69 to 70 without causing any confusion or consternation.

  1. The batting originally added up to 68, which tied up with the running tally, but the bowling had 69 runs and a quick review made it apparent that the last Wimbledonians batter must have recorded a run which had not been included in his score or the team total
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Scorebook queries from the 2017 season

The following matches in 2017 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved.

24th Sep 2017 – Westcott

Two scorers sitting side by side and cross-checking as they went along, so no major issues until the end of the game when the bowler of the final delivery, Alan Pickering, came off insisting adamantly that the four off that delivery should not count as the batsmen had already crossed on the first run and thus the game was over at that point. At the time I had forgotten that the ‘guillotine effect’ applied to boundaries as well as other further actions and thus did not investigate the situation as I should have done. In hindsight I am unsure as to whether the first run was completed, but given the slowness of the outfield it is quite possible that it was (if the batters didn’t stop running because they thought the ball would go for four) and thus I have decided to accept Alan’s interpretation of the situation and have changed the final scoring shot to a single (sorry Monty).

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17th Sep 2017 – Horsley & Send

Unusual situation this week in that the home side had two scorers – one using nxCricket on a phone and the other a paper scorebook – whilst Jacqueline put in her final appearance of the season for the Badgers.

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5th Aug 2017 – Box

One simple mistake this week, courtesy of yours truly scoring on his jack jones. I knew that the batting for their innings was light by four runs, and when processed it became apparent that I’d failed to give Ian Doyle one of his two boundary hits resulting in him scoring 29 not the 25 in the book.

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16th Jul 2017 – Oxted & Limpsfield

Bad combination this week since I was not around to sort things out after the game and both innings were scored in pen!? Thanks to Rod we have good quality images but there are some discepancies spread across the game. Oxted batted first and despite being in pen the scorebook for that first innings looks reasonably neat and tidy. The devil, as it often is, was in the detail in both innings though:

  1. Vinny’s fifth over, the 18th of the innings, has a symbol for the sixth ball that looks to be the inverted triangle used for leg byes. That ties up with the total number of leg byes in the innings recorded in the fielding extras box, but five runs have been added to the bowler’s total runs rather than the four that ought to be. Given that everything else ties up if I record a leg bye then I have done so and consequently reduced Vinny’s runs allowed by one
  2. more significantly Greggy’s third over, the 26th of the innings, shows one ball short. If I enter it as is then the individual scores for the batsmen go awry in a way that is impossible to explain other than by their changing ends between the two fours. I can only surmise that the scorer missed something which would probably have increased the score, but to keep things simple I have merely added an extra ball, after the first four and before the two dots, and swapped the batters over from it as that gives the closest match to the runs scored detail for both G Miller and Gray. This has no material effect on the individual or total scores
  3. Greggy’s fifth over, the 30th of the innings, includes a dot inside a circle, which ought to indicate that a bye was run from a no ball, but only one no ball is recorded in the bowling extras and the total runs from the over would be messed up if I interpret it as anything other than a no ball from which no additional scoring took place
  4. the scorebook shows the fifth wicket, which fell during Jake’s first over which was the 32nd of the innings, as having fallen at 187, but I make it 188. Since the total score after the 31st over has obviously been changed from 186 to 187 after the fact I can only surmise that a mistake was rectified but the fall of wicket not adjusted accordingly
  5. finally we have some confusion over the runs scored by Trayner and Gray after the fall of that fifth wicket in that the only twos during that span come from back to back deliveries in the 33rd over, Jake’s second, so there is no way that different batters can score one each. Therefore I have given both of them to Trayner, thus increasing his score to 4 and reducing Gray’s to 55

The scorecard for the second innings is also quite neat, but again has some question marks over it.

  1. There is no indication of who kept wicket for the home side in either scorecard
  2. as with the first innings we have a dot inside a circle, in Barney’s third over which was the 17th of the innings, but all other elements indicate that this one must also be a no ball with no runs scored from it
  3. the end of over total after the 23rd over, Barney’s sixth, increases from 51 to 61 but the bowling analysis quite clearly shows eleven runs in that over and those runs tie up with the individual batters’ scores. Therefore all later fall of wickets and the final total need to be one higher
  4. We then have a little mystery between the fall of the seventh wicket in Heaver’s fifth over, the first of his second spell and the 29th of the innings, compounded by whatever symbol is recorded from the fifth ball of that over, which I have chosen to regard as a leg bye (which makes sense in various respects)
  5. However, there is no way that Matt Smith can record the dot balls and single run he is given in the batting based on what is shown in the bowling for overs 30 and 31, Trayner’s second and Heaver’s sixth and last. Yet again the best I have been able to do is cheat and swap the batters around at the end of the 30th over so that Greggy then scores the single at the start of 31st over and leaves Matt on strike to be dismissed by Heaver later in the over
  6. Finally the scorebook credits Vinny with 31 runs, but I see 32 and indeed this one looks to be a tallying error as there are 32 there in the book too

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9th Jul 2017 – Horley

This one really ought to have been no problem at all – an opposition scorer who obviously took the job seriously with coloured pens and a full book – but I suspect that in my absence we rather shot ourselves in the foot by not providing anyone to sit with him to provide names and the reassurance that he’d identified the correct player for runs scored and the like (Dormansland did the same thing to me earlier this season and there is no doubt it makes the job that much more difficult). Darrell spotted the situation a little while after he’d finished his innings but not before the ‘damage’ had been done. The areas of confusion listed below were complicated by both Jake and Rod commenting to me that they felt their individual scores had got muddled up, especially at the start of their partnership and thus I was left with something of a mess to sift through, a process that did not get fully completed until long after the season had finished (I am typing this in early November) and resulted in the web site lying fallow for the last three months of the season.

The first innings batting and bowling scorecards look about as comprehensive as can be but once I’d fed the bowling details through my scorecard checker it became apparent that there were discrepancies between the two halves (and the running tally, come to that):

  1. There is no indication of who kept wicket for the home side in either scorecard. What was uploaded to Play-Cricket has Andrew Reid as the wicket keeper but he bowls late on in the innings, so perhaps he split time like Amy and Jake did in our innings??
  2. Darrell is shown in the batting as having scored three runs with a two immediately before being dismissed, but there is no such two in the bowling analysis for the seventh over of the innings, Cosham’s fourth. Since he is adamant that he scored a two before getting out and both the fall of wickets and the running tally corroborate that, I have chosen to accept that version of events and thus Cosham (if indeed he was the bowler – see later comments about what has been entered on Play-Cricket) concedes two extra runs and records one less maiden than in the book
  3. the only one of the remaining balls in that same over (three of them once we have given Darrell his two, or four as was originally recorded) that show up against a batter has been recorded against Ricky but for that to happen he and Rod must have contrived to change ends twice, especially since Darrell was bowled, so instead I have assumed that Rod faced all of them
  4. Rod came in at number three and Jake at four, but the scorebook shows their batting lines crossed over. However, when Ricky is out from the last ball of the eighth over, Callum Tester’s fourth, Jake must have come in to replace him and since Ricky was bowled Rod must have been on strike but that does not tie up with what has been entered against them in the batting. The suspicion is that some initial segment of what is given to Rod should have been given to Jake and vice versa, but since there are no logic errors in what then follows the best I have been able to do is swap them over immediately and then the details recorded match the scorebook thereafter
  5. the eleventh over, Childs’ second, is recorded as a maiden in the bowling analysis but clearly has a two to Jake in the batting amongst the corret number of balls faced, so again I have chosen to add the runs to the bowler’s analysis increasing his runs allowed by two and reducing the maidens bowled
  6. regardless of what we do in the eleventh over, Jake’s final score does not tie up with the scorebook where he is shown as having scored 70 rather than the 69 (or 67) that results from the bowling. This turns out to be a tallying error in that he is shown as having scored 70 but there are only 69 runs in the batting. Given the previous decision we will give him 69
  7. the end result of the innings in the scorebook is all over the shop, with the end of over total finishing at 208, the running tally at 203, the bowling added up to 209, then changed to 213 by incorrectly increasing Reid’s runs allowed to 32, and actually adding to 207 whilst the batting totalled 213. The higher number was presumably accepted as the target for the home side, but I reckon that the actual total was 212

The second innings batting and bowling scorecards are equally comprehensive but caused me slightly less grief, since there were no differences that really impacted the numbers that matter to the Badgers, nevertheless there were still question marks:

  1. neither scorebook records the names of our outfield catchers and after the fact nobody was able to recall who caught which catch, only who took catches in the game, thus the names against a given batter might be incorrect but the overall catches in the match are not
  2. this might be an image quality issue, but to my eyes it looks like Johns was recorded as having scored a single from the sixth over of the innings, Rob’s third, but the bowling only shows dot balls and the batsman’s total runs do not include said single so I have accepted the bowling analysis
  3. it looks like Greggy’s occasional wildness gave the scorer some grief, with his second over, the fourteenth of the innings, showing as two wides followed by five dot balls in the bowling but as three wides and four dot balls in the bowling. Since the bowling ties up with the extras total box and the end of over scores I have accepted that version of events
  4. Greggy’s third over also gave me pause but I have interpreted the symbol in the middle right of the box as a four byes, which seems to tie up with everything else. That over does appear to be a ball short in both the batting and bowling, but that happens
  5. things go a little more seriously astray at the fall of the fifth wicket in the 29th over, Mark’s fifth, where Byles-Wilding comes to the wicket, at the non-striker’s end given the mark under the W in the bowling and the fact that Waddington scores the subsequent four. However, Jake’s next over is a maiden but those dot balls are not recorded against either batter and for the rest of the batting to make sense Byles-Wilding has to change ends in order to score the runs from Mark’s next over. Since it seems unlikely that Waddington would have played out a maiden over at this point in his innings I have chosen to swap the batters around at the start of Mark’s sixth over, but obviously there has to be some doubt about the accuracy of the balls faced
  6. at some point between the end of Jake’s final over, the 30th of the innings, and Amy’s first over, the 32nd, they must have swapped wicket keeping duties. Since I have no idea exactly where that switch took place, I have recorded it as happening immediately, but the important element is that the wicket keeper catches are recorded against the correct Gordon
  7. the total score boxes in both batting and bowling record the final score as 200, as does the running tally, and the final end of over total might be 201 or 200. However, the total extras were tallied incorrectly, and should read 24 whilst Bill’s runs allowed were recorded wrongly for his sixth over and thus his total runs allowed should be 13 not 12. Therefore I have recorded the final score as being 201

Phew!? Finally, when I came to upload my final interpretation of all of this to Play-Cricket there were other differences with what had been entered there to be resolved:

  1. Dave Childs is credited with Darrell’s wicket, which quite clearly fell to Cosham in the scorebook. However, Cosham is also shown as having bowled one less over and one less maiden than he did in the scorebook, whilst Childs has been credited with one more of each, so absent any other information I have assumed that this was changed deliberately and that Childs replaced Cosham an over earlier but the scorer did not pick up on the change of bowler
  2. Because of the runs recorded in the batting but not the bowling the fall of wickets for our innings were out, by two for the second wicket and four for the rest
  3. Opening bowler Callum Tester is recorded as having conceded 22 runs but his bowling analysis makes it apparent that there was a tallying error for his sixth over where five was added to 13 to get 17 and thus the total should be 23
  4. the Horley bowlers have been entered into Play-Cricket in the wrong sequence by reading directly down the right hand panel in the scorebook. Therefore I have had to check the last six bowlers by eye
  5. Reid is recorded as having conceded 34 runs, not the 32 in the scorebook or the 28 he actually allowed
  6. the total wides allowed in our innings was recorded on Play-Cricket as 11 but there are 12 shown in the scorebook and this also affects the total extras figure
  7. Greggy was shown as having bowled 11 wides but that column in the bowling details is supposed to record the wides bowled not the runs from them so has been changed to five

The end result of all of that is that I have decided to change only the values that affect the Badgers and not those that are only of interest to Horley. Which is which can be gleaned from the text above by watching out for the use of was/were versus is/are.

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25th Jun 2017 – Tadworth

Naively I assumed that two competent scores would give me a nice easy week – just bash the data in double-quick time and get on with updating the rest of the site, but life isn’t always that simple. The discrepancies during the Tadworth batting and our bowling are all cosmetic, but the Tadworth scorebook for the first innings shows two byes and three leg byes in the fielding extras totals box whereas our scorebook for that innings has three byes and two leg byes. To confuse things further, whilst the two scorers have those five individual extras occurring at the same point in the innings, Jacqueline has actually recorded four byes and one leg bye in the bowling analysis and the two byes that I was definitely able to recall the morning after the game are the two that Sharon had recorded, so no help from me either. Since I cannot know which entry is wrong I have decided to accept what the Tadworth scorer recorded since that is consistent.

When it came to the second innings I knew that the scorers had fallen out of sync at some point and that there was a one run difference from the 34th over onwards, with our book showing one run less than theirs. Unfortunately things go awry before we get that far along, with Rod and Matt getting each other’s runs from somewhere in the middle of their partnership. The Badger’s book for the second innings has several differences from the equivalent home scorebook entries:

  1. Everything rolls along logically and in sync until we get to the seventeenth over of the innings, the fourth and final over of Mark Baldwin’s first spell, where both books appear to coincide and the running totals are aligned, but if I accept a single from the second ball and a four from the third then Rod gets the single and Matt the four, which doesn’ tie up with their runs scored in the batting analysis nor do they then get the correct runs thereafter and therefore the wrong batsman is on strike when the next wicket falls. Looking at our scorebook it is obvious then Jacqueline changed something else to the one which leads me to believe, in conjunction with the fact that I was umpiring at the time and remember something odd happening, that actually Rod scored a two involving an overthrow, rather than Matt (who would not have been on strike) scoring a single. Therefore, to avoid too much change, I have given Rod the single, but crossed the batters back over again so that he correctly scores the four and things are right for the remainder of their partnership. On that basis Rod gets an extra run and Matt loses one (although arguably Rod should get two runs not one)
  2. The next significant difference comes in the 24th over, J MacPherson’s third and final over, where Jacqueline records a two to Rod from a no ball, whilst the home scorer records a three and gives it to Jake. However, at that point I definitely have Rod on strike and using my usual principle that it is more likely that one scorer saw a signal that the other missed than that one of them imagined a signal, I have gone with our scorebook. This change accounts for the fact that we give Rod 25 and Jake 11, rather than the 23 and 14 in the home book, and also for the one run difference in the no ball extras total
  3. When it comes to the known discrepancy in the the 34th over, the sixth of Charlie Bawden’s overs and the first of her second spell, the home scorer recorded an extra run but if I accept that version of events then the remaining runs end up assigned to the wrong batters, so I have gone with our book, which accounts for a one run difference in Charlie’s runs allowed and Mark’s runs scored between the two books

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28th May 2017 – Old Whitgiftians

Hardest situation of all this week in that I was away and thus have only the photographs to go on. Sadly, things are not straightforward (not helped by the fact that both books were completed in pen) and I have found the following problems in the opposition scorebook for the first innings:

  1. things go awry almost from the get-go and the only way I can have the number two and three batters make the individual scores they’ve been credited with is to swap them over at the end of the fourth over of the innings, Bill’s second, so that Ayuub scores both the final four in that over and the single at the start of the next. This implies that either something very strange happened or the scorer missed a run of some description off the final ball of that over
  2. barring that, hardly minor, hiccough things proceed swimmingly through to the 31st over where the end of over total suddenly goes out of sync. The bowling analysis shows Greggy’s final over as containing a single and a bye, which the fielding extras dictate should be four byes. However, the running total only increases by four and the tally only shows the four runs not the single
  3. the next two overs contain the right number of runs and seem to tie up with the running tally but Mark’s final over makes no sense as it appears to have been written, consisting of a four, two byes (a two inside a triangle), a no ball (a circle which might contain a dot), a single, a dot, a two and a final dot. There was obviously a change of scorer for the last couple of overs, the extras box shows no no balls and no two byes whilst the running tally shows a four, a three, a two, a one and another two so I’ve decided to interpret the triangle as a wide with two extra runs and the circle as two byes – which is something of a stretch but matches the running tally, almost gets the batsmen their recorded scores and ties up with the extras totals recorded
  4. all in all the final total might be 203 or 204, but no matter because 203 was the score that was recorded on the day, and thus what we were chasing

Our book for the second innings looks almost as much of a mess, but proved to be slightly easier to interpret:

  1. I can only make sense of things if the first scorer works across then down in each box, although a second scorer takes over later in the innings who goes down then across
  2. in Mehran’s first over, the fourteenth of the innings, there is a no ball with a number one inside it. If I accept that then Rob ends up with an extra run and no balls one less so I’ve chosen to accept the totals and record it as an extra not off the bat
  3. the sixteenth over, Mehran’s second, is the one potential source of confusion, assuming we are still working across then down, since Amy starts on strike but cannot score the six. I have chosen to interpret the box exactly as written, with a single before the six off a no ball, even though it would be highly unlikely for it to have been recorded like that, so that Amy and Mark receive the correct additions to their individual scores

All of which does not detract in any way from a superb innings from Mark backed up by Bill in a record breaking ninth wicket partnership. Finally, when I came to update Play-Cricket with the derived details I found the following differences with what had been entered by Jonathan Higgins on behalf of Whitgiftians:

  1. Drury was credited with three fours, but I see four – both in the derived scores and in their book, and thus would give him an extra one
  2. Higgins himself had been given 43 runs, which is what their book adds up to, but my derived data gives him an extra boundary four (so he scored four fours between the single to get off the mark and the first double) and thus 47, which would also affect the number of fours hit which would increase from 6 to 7
  3. as mentioned above, in order to get things to make sense as recorded I would have to deprive James Schad of a run, so he would be 7 rather than 8
  4. also based on the above confusion over the total score during the closing overs, I would adjust the fall of wicket scores up by one
  5. Matt Smith was shown in the book as conceding 41 runs but that looks like a tallying error, or poor writing, and it should be 40
  6. Mark was recorded as having conceded 19 runs, but his actual total depends entirely on the interpretation of the final over he bowled. On the basis of the decisions I made in resolving that over, and the fact that I have had no response from the oppo about the situation, he ends up with 21 runs against.

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21st May 2017 – Dormansland

I was left to score on my own this week – flattering in one respect but more difficult in others – and did so for the first time using my scorecard checker program at the same time as the paper scorebook. This presented one major difficulty, in that the screen of my HP408 tablet was really difficult to see in bright sunlight, plus several expected minor issues because I am still developing the live scoring capabilities and had some fun with not knowing the batter order of the team batting second at the start of the game.

All of this, and the need to attempt a battery top up during tea, meant that the book was not quite as well curated as it would have been if I’d concentrated on just that record, but it did mean that I was able to upload to Play-Cricket first thing Monday morning. The only blemish that I will need to go back and correct is that first innings wides show only six whereas nine were bowled (both according to the bowling analysis and my program) and Mark’s individual wides bowled tally was missed.

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7th May 2017 – Hampton Wick

Not really sure where on earth to start this week because the opposition scorebook for the first innings was, to put it as politely as I can, something of a mess. The following problems were identified whilst trying to get my scorecard checker to make sense of things:

  1. over number ten, Jake’s fifth, shows only two runs in the bowler box and added to the bowler’s total but three were added to the over by over total. Checking the running tally I see an extra single run between the four at the end of the previous over, which took the total to 25, and the two runs that are all that shows in the bowling analysis. I’ve no idea what to make of this because giving an extra run to either batter messes up their individual scores, and which ends they were at, and Jake swore blind when I talked to him during our innings (whilst I was trying to make sense of our bowling analysis but before I had discovered that different symbol meanings were in play) that he did not recall bowling any wides
  2. no end of over total was recorded for the nineteenth over, and for some reason, thereafter nothing other than the runs were entered
  3. the nineteenth and twentieth overs, Darrell’s second and Mark’s fourth, show just two runs between them, but the end of over total increases by three in that span to 87, a score that is impossible according to the running tally, where the 87th run is shown as the first of a four, which agrees with the game situation as the scorecard checker sees it
  4. ignoring for now the extra run in over ten, things get back into sync in over 21 with the score recorded as 100, an increase of 13, when the over features 14 runs but from that point onwards the end of over scores are all possible in the running tally until we get to the last couple of overs
  5. the thirtieth over, Rod’s first, demonstrates the folly of scoring in pen, since it started with a simple single being turned into a two by some sloppy throwing and wicket keeping (much to the annoyance of the bowler) which resulted in something of a mess in the top left hand corner of the bowling analysis box. It isn’t easy to interpret what is crammed into the rest of the box, but discussions after the game and my analysis of the running tally suggest that the scoring sequence was a two, two singles, a wide (the home team scorers used a triangle to represent wides), a four, another single and a final two
  6. incomprehensibly, over 36 has an end of over total of 222, which is less than the score at the end of the over before. By my estimate it ought to be 228 with the 230 after the following over being correct
  7. the final score is recorded in the book as 234, which is also what is ticked off in the running tally, and yet we somehow ended up chasing 232 to win. Adding up the batting runs in the scorebook results in a score between 226 and 228 (depending on whether we take four or five wides and whether Sadiq is credited with 27 or 28) so perhaps someone decided to split the difference? Darrell tells me that the first innings score of 231 was already entered into the scoreboard at the point our innings started so that might be a reasonable explanation

All of which leaves me with the interesting job of trying to map the runs entered against the batsmen with the information derived from the bowling analyses.

  1. Sadiq is shown in the book as having started his innings with a single – although whoever added his score up seems to have missed out a run – but I see no way that that can be possible from the bowling, so we credit him with 27
  2. taking the bowling analysis as gospel leaves us with the biggest discrepancy of all, which is that the calculated scores for the two main men – Yasir and Fawad – bear no resemblance to what is recorded in the batting. The only way I can get things to line up to a greater or lesser extent is to swap the batsmen over at some point between Darrell taking the wicket, in his second over (the nineteenth of the innings), that brought Fawad to the wicket and the start of his next over. During that time the only runs scored are shown as a two in Mark’s fourth over, which is not shown against either batter. I have chosen to effect this switch at the end of the nineteenth over, and thus to give Fawad the two runs, for no better reason than that he is shown in the batting as having scored three runs before his first four and yet otherwise I only see a single in that span. This gives individual scores of 86 for Yasir and 62 for Fawad (as against the 82 and 59 respectively the scorebook shows), although it also casts some doubt on their balls faced
  3. once the pair retired I have another impossible situation to deal with, in that I am fairly certain that batters 7 and 8 came out to the wrong ends (which ties up with the book in that Haseeb faced a leg bye before Will Taylor was clean bowled from his second delivery) but the leg bye off the final ball of that same over – Matt’s first and the 36th of the innings – and the three singles thereafter, then puts the wrong batsman on strike to be dismissed by the second ball of Matt’s second over (I am absolutely certain that Zubair faced the first ball of Billy’s last over but thereafter I don't recall well enough to be sure). Again I’ve cheated to get the right batting scores as I’ve already wasted far more of my leisure time than is reasonable given that none of this matters to our statistics

After all of that fun and games our book was slightly easier to deal with, which is to say that there was only one discrepancy (which I had spotted whilst I was scoring late in the innings) in that Mark was not credited with four runs that he should have been (I will try to blame Ricky for signalling the boundary late, after some confusion over two or four but really it has to be my fault – poor concentration).

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30th Apr 2017 – Beechwood

Two scorers this week but one minor disagreement to resolve (no scorebook images for this one though, as they were taken in the pub in fairly poor light and simply aren’t clear enough to warrant posting):

  1. Jacqueline had recorded Ricky with 55 and Greggy with 24 but the opposition scorer had 56 and 23 respectively. Once I’d processed the scorebook it proved to be that Ron was right and my daughter had given one of Ricky’s singles to Ian.
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Scorebook queries from the 2016 season

The following matches in 2016 threw up queries that needed to be resolved, either by my taking unilateral decisions or by consultation with others involved.

25th Sep 2016 – Westcott

No scorers again this week and another handful of mysteries to resolve in the scorebook for the second innings:

  1. The first element of possible confusion is that all those who scored for Westcott, and I only detect two lots of handwriting, filled the bowling analysis as three across and two down – something encouraged by the shape of the boxes in their scorebook – and it is not necessarily obvious whether or not they worked across then down or not. I cannot get a perfect match to the batting details either way but have chosen to go with down then across to start with, as that gives a closer match to the early batting entries, changing to across then down from the ninth over onwards because otherwise things go awry in terms of who scores which runs and is at which end to be dismissed (and there is an obvious change of handwriting in the eleventh over). Whilst this sounds like a trivial thing, once we have the batters at the right ends for all significant events, it can also have an effect on the balls faced.
  2. There is an anomaly in the second over of the innings in that the third ball is shown as a W in the book, but from memory the non-striker was run out by a direct hit from Amy at long off, trying to stretch a single into a two. Therefore Harman should be given that first run, which increases all of his total, Mark’s runs against, the team total and the fall of wicket. Isted is shown as having faced three balls but it can only be two (which also helps to confirm the down then across scoring method at this juncture).
  3. Bill’s seventh over, the first of his second spell and 29th of the innings, is recorded as just a maiden, with no obvious symbols underneath, but the end of over total goes up by one and Andrews, who is on strike at the start of that over, has a bye symbol in the batting just before the dot and two prior to his dismissal in the next over, Jake’s first. So, there must have been a change of ends and since I did not let through other than the four in Westy’s first over and a one in Jake’s last. and there is a leg bye shown in the Extras section of the book, I have made the final ball in the over a leg bye.
  4. Finally, Jake’s third over, the 34th of the innings has conflicting information, with seven marks in the bowling analysis box – four singles and a six plus two dots, making ten runs in all – but only nine is added to the bowler’s total underneath and to the end of over total. I tried ignoring the final single, but that did not play out right in relation to the batting, and removing the fourth symbol from the top row did not work out either. In order to get the best possible match I have had to assume that the fourth symbol from the top row was actually the seventh ball of the over!! This has the effect of increasing Hart’s score, the Westcott total and Jake’s runs against by that additional run.
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18th Sep 2016 – Cuddington Casuals

Jacqueline having return to Uni we had no scorers this week and although I was able to score our innings I have ended up with some interesting anomalies to pick over in the scorebook for the second innings:

  1. I can find no way for Julian Radford to score a four in the first few balls of his innings and then score a long run of dot balls whilst Patel scores the figures that he has been given. Radford came in at the fall of the first wicket and must have been at the non-striker’s end whilst Mark Smith scored the four, four dots and a single that put him back on strike to be caught from the first ball of Vinny’s fifth over. The batters may well have crossed on that wicket, a running catch by Mark off a skier at deep mid off, which means that Radford may well have faced the rest of that over, which would match the first few entries in his individual record. However, for the rest of his and Patel’s entries to be correct, Radford must then have faced the maidens in Westy’s sixth and seventh overs whilst Patel scored the runs in Vinny’s sixth and seventh overs, but he is at the wrong end to do so. To stop this getting even more complicated, to have the batters at the right ends for the next fall of a wicket (which memory and the scorebook tells me was Patel not Radford) and to have them on the scores they’ve been given, I have chosen to cheat and swap the batters around at the end of the tenth over. That is quite palpably a fudge, but is the best I can do in order to match up everything else recorded.
  2. By my reckoning there must have been a wicket somewhere in Ben’s third over, the 22nd of the innings even though the end of over scores show a wicket falling in the 23rd over. There are no fall of wickets recorded from the fifth onwards, but Knight must stay in to score the three in Loll’s fifth over so Emond being dismissed in amongst the wides somewhere makes sense. Memory tells me that there were several wickets from that end that fell from the final ball of the over, so I have chosen to guess at that one, but it could have been earlier in the over (although J Sattaur’s individual entries concur).
  3. The exact point at which Mike Stockbridge was run out by a fluky ricochet off Bill’s boot is not recorded, but it must have come in the first over that Bill bowled – the 31st of the innings – and the only difference made by which ball I pick, given that Claude was on strike for the whole of the over regardless, is on the score at the fall of wicket. I have chosen the fourth ball of the over for no real reason other than that I am fairly sure that it wasn’t the first ball and thereafter it really makes no difference.
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4th Sep 2016 – Addington 1743

One significant issue this week, albeit that it makes no difference whatsoever to the result – we still lost. However, our innings has a flaw in the bowling analysis, which means that it is illogical and could not have occurred as recorded, and a couple of possibly related issues with the individual scores for Jake and Matt. The scorebook for our innings has the 34th over (Ali’s third) as containing two singles, and the end of over totals show the score moving from 115 to 117. However, if I process the over as scored then Jake ends up on strike for the following over (Shafi’s first) and thus is not in the right place to be dismissed by the second ball since the first was a leg bye that would take him off strike. We know that Matt Smith was on strike for the two no balls in the 33rd over (Baig’s fourth and last) since he was castled by the second of them and the batting details have Jake scoring the four and two that ended that over. Therefore two singles in that following over are not sufficient to match what actually happened in the game.

To further complicate matters, Jake appears to have been given one too many runs and Matt one too few. We (Jacqueline and I) don’t believe that the two facts are related, since the extra single given to Jake falls after the 4, 2, 4 sequence in Baig’s third over and was followed by a bye that she believes she only belatedly picked up on, and may have given Jake the one for. Matt scored a run of singles between his two fours, and whilst the book only has four of them, I see five (and no way to move that run between the two batters, since if we were to add an extra run to the 34th it would go to Matt as well as being in the wrong place to make sense of Jake’s individual runs in the book).

The one additional piece of information I have is that I recorded the 34th over as containing three runs. Since all I keep is a running tally I have no more detail than that, but all of the evidence leads me to believe that there were actually three singles scored in the 34th over, with the extra one coming from the bat (it seems unlikely that Jacqueline would have acknowledged a signal for an extra of some sort without actually recording it somewhere in the book).

Having said all of that I have decided not to record an extra run, because I don’t like guessing about such things, and instead have just swapped the batsmen around at the end of the 34th over, leaving Jake a final score of 33 and Matt 19. Given that switch their respective balls faced may be wrong too.

21st Aug 2016 – Deando Ruxley

Only one really minor nit this week, in that there was a ball that went through the wicket keeper in the penultimate over, Geoff Bowyer’s third. Matt Mann originally did not signal anything, was then prompted and incorrectly signalled leg byes (which is what Jacqueline recorded) and then belatedly changed it to byes. I have recorded it as byes. No images this week as the poor lighting in which I took the photos meant that they were very blurry.

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31st Jul 2016 – Smallfield Manor

Another interesting exercise for yours truly as a mixture of scorers, handwriting and approaches make the scorebook for the first innings tricky to make sense of, but we will try:

  1. The first problem is that the first ten overs or so seem to have been scored by at least two scorers, interchanging regularly, making it difficult to be certain whether each box has been filled in down and then across or across and then down. After a bit of experiment I chose to stick with down and across even for those boxes (overs 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11) where it looks like there are three symbols across
  2. The first over contains a symbol of which I can make no sense but, given that only one run is shown against both the bowler and the end of over total, I have chosen to interpret it as a wide and two dot balls (there was a bit of grumbling at the time about leg side wides, hence I am fairly certain that there was a wide in that first over)
  3. Matt Smith’s fifth over, the ninth of the innings, looks like it contains a right pointing arrow, but the only interpretation that fits all of the other elements would be a 3
  4. Matt Smith’s sixth over, the eleventh of the innings, needs to contain six runs in order for the bowler’s total and the end of over total to make sense. However, the figure underneath has obviously been altered (possibly from nineteen) and my suspicion is that the scorer missed a wide signal and was then taken by surprise when a seventh ball was bowled and hit for four. We also recall more grumbling about a leg side wide later in Matt’s spell so I have chosen to see the content of this box as a leg bye, a wide, four dots and a four
  5. During Jake’s second over, the sixteenth of the innings, things go from irritating to aggravating since Dom Glossop needs to score the three at the start of the next over (for his individual scoring entries to come close to making sense and for him not to be on strike when the next wickets falls), and is not shown as scoring any fours between his two threes (something that already isn’t true) and yet the nine runs added to the bowling and to the end of over totals mean that different batters need to score each of the fours, whichever way the box was completed. Therefore I have to resort to cheating and just swapping the batters over so that Vikash scores both fours and the single
  6. Darrell’s first over, the 24th of the innings, quite clearly shows eight runs but the end of over total advances by only seven runs.
  7. Rob’s seventh over looks like it has a wide and a two in it, but given the batter’s scores, the extras recorded and our recollection of the game I am certain it was actually three wides (which should be indicated by extra dots around the cross)
  8. In Darrell’s second over, the 26th of the innings, the end of over total goes awry by another run, with ten quite clearly being scored in it but the total only advancing from 68 to 77. Perhaps the confusion arose around the four off a no ball (although quite how a chest high full toss from a bowler of my son’s pace is called a no ball is beyond me – law 42.6(b) quite clearly stating otherwise)

So the end result of all that is that the home side probably scored 129 runs rather than the 127 they credited themselves with; Dom Glossop probably scored 52 rather than 51 (and thus reached his half century before his teammates clapped him for it); Chris Glossop probably scored 15 rather than 16; Vikash probably scored 20 rather than 18; there was only one no ball in the innings, not the four marked in the Extras box, and thus there were only ten total extras; Matt Smith went for 23 runs not 24; and Darrell for 35 not 33 (the latter being a simple tallying error).

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24th Jul 2016 – Ripley

This was a bit of an oddity despite the fact that Ripley had a scorer for the whole of the game, who obviously knew his cricket. However, he did not mark byes or leg byes in the bowling analysis and did not include wides and no balls in the totals for each bowler so the scorebook for the first innings required a fair bit of interpretation:

  1. the first element of confusion comes in the running total at the end of the seventh over which is shown as 17 despite the fact that at least 10 runs were scored from Bill’s fourth over and the tally would indicate that 17 was never the score. It also looks as if the second three in that over was originally missed from the tally and added back after the end of the eighth over. The total number of runs added to the end of over scores and the entries in the tally lead me to add a leg bye from the fourth ball of Bill’s fourth over and another at some point in the first four balls of Rob’s fourth over, which are also necessary for the batters to end up with the same individual scores shown in the batting section
  2. there must also have been two extras during Bill’s fifth over, after the wicket, and thus I’ve added a bye and a leg bye between the single and the wide
  3. everything then chugs along smoothly until the end of over 27, Vinny’s last, when it looks as if the end of over total was not correctly recorded and the book is showing the score at the end of the 28th instead. This error does not get rectified and the end of over totals are an over or two out until skipping a couple to over 34.
  4. the totals shown for overs 27-29 are actually those for 28-30 and another over is then skipped with the total entered for over 30 actually being the score at the end of over 32, and that for over 31 being correct for over 33.
  5. Things then get confused because the 34th over, Mark’s second is shown as containing three twos and a single, but the tally has a four after the second of those twos and thus the end of over score is recorded as 118 rather than 114. However, the batsman (Russell) is only shown as scoring two twos at that point, with no sign of the four or the third two, although an extra two has been added to the end of his score that cannot possibly have been there from the bowling analyses. It doesn’t seem fair to resolve this by giving the batsmen four extra runs and thus damaging the bowler’s figures yet further, so I have chosen to resolve this by adding four leg byes, even though I am certain that that is wrong.
  6. The next over, Greggy’s fourth, starts with a no ball that was hit for four. This is correctly recorded and totalled in the bowling analysis and the four is credited to the batter Russell, but for some reason four no balls have been entered in the Bowling Extras box, which is quite palpably incorrect
  7. Given the end of over scores for overs 36 and 37, and the three single runs recorded in the tally between 128 and 131, there must have been an extra in each of those overs. In order for the batsmen to score the right runs I have added a leg bye from the second ball of Bill’s seventh over and a bye from the second ball of Greggy’s fifth over.
  8. Russell was run out at some point in the 38th over, Bill’s eighth, but no entry was made in the scoring record to indicate when. Bill’s recollection ties up with mine, in that he thinks he bowled one ball at the incoming batsman and thus the run out has been recorded as from the fifth ball.
  9. Over and above all of the issues mentioned above, once everything else had been sorted out we are left with Mulvi(hi)ll’s score being one less than he is shown with in the scorebook. I can see no way that he can have scored two singles between his first four and the three, so 16 runs is what he ends up with.
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17th Jul 2016 – Oxted & Limpsfield

Just a couple of simple ones this week, both related to our scorebook for the second innings since Jacqueline was scoring on her todd. The first concerns a leg bye in the fourth over which was called back by yours truly because Rod did not attempt to hit or evade the ball before Ricky got over-excited and called for a run. Vinny had already signalled the leg bye before my attempts to be heard above the ‘dance tent’ pumping out drum and bass at maximum volume were successful and the batsmen returned to their original ends. Vinny did then signal dead ball but his attempts to communicate with Jacqueline were also drowned out and she assumed that the dead ball signal was for something that had happened afterwards. The leg bye has been expunged from the score, resulting in no leg byes for the innings, one fewer total extras, a lower team total and a reduction of one run to the score at the fall of wickets two and three.

I have also been unable to get the events in the bowling analysis to result in the individual scores given to Ricky and Rod and have had to conclude that a single was given to Rod that was scored by Ricky and thus they scored 13 and 19 rather than the 12 and 20 in the book.

10th Jul 2016 – Malpas

It is very difficult to write politely about the first innings scorecards for this game, but I will do my utmost. The home side very kindly scored the first innings in our book as well as theirs – multiple different people rather than one person doing both books, best as I can tell – but neither book has a complete and useful running tally, neither book shows fall of wickets and neither book (barring a handful of overs in the middle of the innings) has end of over details recorded.

Differences between the bowling analyses:

  1. Rob Knew’s sixth over shows five balls in our book but six in theirs, although the same number of runs so no material effect
  2. Jake’s fifth over shows seven balls in their book but five in ours, but again the same number of runs
  3. Ben Valentine’s first over shows three singles and a four in our book but only two singles and a four in theirs. I have gone with our book because otherwise the individual batter’s scores get out of sync
  4. Paul Reeve’s second over shows three singles in our book but only two in theirs and again I have gone with our book in order to keep things in sync
  5. Ben’s third over is a mess in both books, which is probably the result of runs from a wide, since I remember missing consecutive wides, but an extra run being scored from just one of them. In the end I have made a fairly liberal interpretation of the two scorebooks in order to keep the individual batsmen’s scores roughly correct but without changing Ben’s total runs against in our book
  6. Neither of Matt Mann’s overs look the same in each book and it is difficult to know what to make of those differences, especially given the need for Lewis Neil to score two of the three fours in the first over (including the one from the no ball) and not be on strike at the start of the next one, since Dave Hunt must have been in order to be dismissed in it. In the end I've juggled the sequence such that it might not match either book but gives the desired result in terms of the individual scores, which results in Matt being charged an extra run allowed in comparison with our book, but matching theirs
  7. Mark’s first over is shown as including a single in our book but as a maiden in theirs. Unlike most other instances I’ve chosen to ignore the run because if I include it then the wrong batter is on strike for the wicket. This increases Mark’s maidens to 2 but leaves his runs allowed unchanged from our book due to a tallying/interpretation error
  8. Darrell’s second over has a single and a wicket in both books, but not from the same balls, and his fourth over is missing a single from their book but has one from the fifth ball in ours, which is how I’ve interpreted it. Due to tallying/interpretation differences this leaves him with 25 runs against rather than the 27 I came up with on the day (neither book had the bowling analysis totals filled in)
  9. I remember Adrian complaining after the game that he reckoned he’d scored 13 not the 11 he’d been credited with and that must be the case, which also removes a run from Hodgkinson
  10. neither book has complete information in the Extras boxes but the result of the various guesses etc. above is that there were four wides (one off Matt Mann and two, plus a run from one of them, against Ben) and the no ball that Matt bowled

Remarkably, and thankfully given what happened in our innings, the end result of all of that toing and froing is a total of 208, exactly matching what was posted as the score on the day, despite neither book having either a tally that showed that figure or a final total recorded

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8th Jul 2016 – Iscoyd & Fenns Bank

One oversight in the scoring of the second innings – serves me right for trying to use CricHQ and the paper scorebook at the same time – in that I failed to give my son his first run in the batting section and therefore his score should have been 16 not 15 (there was a run missing at the time, so I knew that I had made a mistake somewhere).

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26th Jun 2016 – Horley

Just one item of note from this one, where we had two full-time scorers who were able to help each other out. There are no scorebook photos to accompany this entry as the quality of the images I took is so bad that I have no desire to share them. Absent the home scorer swapping around the fall of the fourth and fifth wickets in their innings, in terms of which batsmen were dismissed, the only significant difference between the two books was that Jacqueline had recorded two runs off the last ball of Matt Smith’s fifth over whereas the Horley scorer had two leg byes. The most likely explanation is that Jacqueline missed a signal, since she chose not to sit in the scorebox, and thus I’ve gone with the leg byes and taken two runs from Westwood’s batting, two from Matt’s bowling and added a maiden.

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19th Jun 2016 – Tadworth

I did not participate in this game but from what I’ve been sent it would seem that Tadworth had a scorer but we (unsurprisingly) did not and thus I only have their book to process for each innings. There turned out to be a number of discrepancies in both innings, including a couple in the second innings that mean that the scoring record was illogical.

The opposition scorebook for the first innings was obviously the work of a single scorer who cared about their work, but (as I know all too well) it is easy to make mistakes when you are scoring on your own. Whilst running the bowling analysis through my scorecard checker I found the following minor errors:

  1. The extras in the scorebook show 10 wides and 3 no balls, but I see nine wide symbols, two of them with an extra run, and only two no ball symbols, so there is a mistake either in the extras boxes or the symbols in the bowling. I have chosen to assume that the bowling analysis is correct (not in the least because I have no way of knowing which of the wides to turn into a no ball) and the extras totals should therefore be 11 wides and 2 no balls.
  2. The scorebook shows the third wicket as falling at 34, but the end of over totals show the score as 32 at the start of the seventeenth over, Seb Sander’s first, and 37 after and the bowling analysis has three runs scored before the wicket and two after, so the wicket must have fallen at 35. The explanation might be found in the running tally which has two twos and a one marked off and perhaps therefore things were adjusted at the end of over.
  3. The sixth and seventh wickets are shown as having fallen at 124 and 125, but it looks like a mistake was made in recording the first ball of Karia’s first over, the 31st of the innings, which was corrected after the end of the over, and that correction was not copied back to the fall of wickets, which should have been 125 and 126. The first ball, from the running tally and Jake’s batting entry, was a six off a no ball but the running tally only records six not seven runs for it, with the extra being added as run 130, after the two wides, single and two that followed amongst the wickets taken.
  4. The eighth wicket is recorded as 133 but again the end of over totals and the run scoring in the over (Karia’s second) indicate that it should be 134, with the sequence of scores in the running tally suggesting that a correction was made at the end of the over and not reflected back in the fall of wicket score.

NOTE that once I eventually reviewed the above, in conjunction with our scorebook whilst doing the end of season checking, I was able to confirm the fall of wickets details matched my expectation and to track down which delivery had been incorrectly entered as a wide and thus change the no ball and wides totals back to the three and ten that they were in both books. This also affects the number of balls faced by Vinny (since a no ball counts as a ball faced whilst a wide does not) and the number of wides and no balls delivered by Karia.

There are also discrepancies amongst the balls faced and the not out batters and their scores at the fall of wickets, in both innings, but that is a level of nit-picking to which I’m not going to stoop (on this occasion).

The opposition scorebook for the second innings looks to still be the work of the same scorer, but the coloured pens have been dispensed with. Sadly there are two major anomalies and a number of minor issues in this innings:

  1. The first problem occurs in the fourth over the innings, Greggy’s second, where my interpretation has an over consisting of a wide, a dot ball, two runs, three more dot balls, two runs to the batter from a no ball and a four. However, if we look at the batting we see the wide, dot ball and two against Karia, with some or all of the subsequent dot balls but Baldwin is shown as scoring the subsequent two and four. The end of over scores and the running tally all tie up with the number of runs and the sequence in which they are scored, so something must have happened to cause the batsmen to switch ends (and one dot ball has been lost from the batting somewhere along the way). Absent any reasonable explanation (a short run, for example) I have chosen to swap the batters around after the fifth legal delivery of the over, thus attributing all of the dot balls in the over to Karia. This is almost certainly wrong, but is the best I can do.
  2. The second problem crops up in Bill’s first over, the eighteenth of the innings, which the bowling analysis shows as a two, one, one, dot, two and dot. The batting details for Seb Sander and Matthew Perrins, the batters at the time, make it apparent that Sander must have been on strike at the start of the over, since he scored the two and three at the end of Greggy’s last over and the four and one in Paul Reeve’s second over. However, he also needs to be on strike for the first ball of the next over, Paul’s third, in order to be dismissed from it. The only way I can make that happen, and have the individual batting entries make sense, is to swap the batsmen around immediately after Perrin scores the second single (as if there’d been a short run), so that is what I have had to do.
  3. The scorebook shows the fourth wicket as falling at 23, but the end of over totals make it apparent that the scorer missed a run in the ninth over and adjusted the score after the tenth over to correct it, obviously without correcting the fall of wicket which should have been at 24.
  4. Charlie Young has been given a total of two in the book, but the individual analysis quite clearly shows three runs for him and that ties up with the bowling.
  5. The wides total has obviously been changed after the fact, with the final wide being altered to a two bringing the total to four. However, I can find no evidence to support this since if I change either of the wides in Greggy’s sixth over to a two then the batters end up at the wrong ends (and the running tally only shows single wides). Wides have therefore been changed back to three.
  6. Possibly related to the previous point, Greggy’s running total for the sixth over has been changed to add ten but the end of over totals only show nine runs in the twelfth over (and the running tally corroborates the ball by ball scores) and his runs against have thus been reduced to 40.
  7. The totals do not credit Jake with the maiden that he quite clearly bowled.

For the record all of the above changes have been made to the result details entered into Play-Cricket, along with recording the calculated balls faced and not out batsmen and their scores at the fall of wickets.

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8th May 2016 – Ham & Petersham

Just one minor error this week – I scored on my todd and everyone was getting terribly excited towards the close with the usual demands on the scorer for status updates, so I guess that is not too bad – with Bill being shown as having scored 17 when in fact he scored 19 because he was only given credit for a four off the final ball of the 24th over when the signal was changed to a six, which I had corrected in the bowling and running tally but missed in the batting.

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1st May 2016 – Beddingtom

Players did all of the scoring this week so no surprises that there were a few problems. With regard to their scorebook for the first innings I am fairly sure that a) their total should have been 225 rather than 221 and b) something else is missing from their innings as it could not have taken place as recorded (at one point Down and White end up at the wrong ends to score the runs recorded against them). In the end I got things to line up reasonably well by simply swapping the batsmen over after the runs have been scored in the 19th over, Vinny’s fourth.

As far as our second innings scorebook was concerned there were a handful of problems most of which stemmed from one unusual incident, which is where I will start:

  1. At the end of the 32nd over Cooper-Stewart went to continue his second spell by starting to bowl what would have been his ninth over. Despite my shouting out (since Jake, who was scoring, wasn’t quick enough to do so) before he had delivered the ball those on the field decided that the delivery should count and that the over should be completed by another bowler. Mark scored a single off the original ball, although only only a maiden for Horkan was recorded in the scorebook. I have since changed this so that Cooper-Stewart is shown as bowling 8.1 overs and conceding 34 runs, whilst Horkan only delivers 7.5 overs.
  2. This has a knock-on effect on the fall of wickets for the eighth wicket, which is increased by the extra run to 143 and the ninth (which is shown as 145, despite the end of over score for the previous over being 146) which should be 147.
  3. Mark should get credit for that extra single, and another has also been missed from his individual score and thus he made 54 rather than 52.
  4. The correct extras are recorded in the batting and bowling but are missing from the Extras boxes in the scorebook, with the no ball in the last over not recorded, the leg bye in the penultimate over missing and the two byes in the final over not written in either. The end result is one no ball, six leg byes and eleven byes.
  5. In addition to the run missed because of the ninth over shenanigans another has been lost from the last over of the innings, which the book shows as two byes, two runs scored from a no ball, two singles and a four, for eleven total runs but the penalty for the no ball was missed from the tally and only ten were added to the end of over total.

The end result of all that is that we scored 159 for 9 from our 40 overs and still lost by more than 60 runs!!

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24th Apr 2016 – Beechwood

Two scorers this week but still a handful of minor errors to correct (no scorebook images for this one though, as they were taken in the pub in fairly poor light and simply aren’t clear enough to warrant posting):

  1. Our book had Matt Smith conceding 27 runs, as did the Beechwood one. However, Jacqueline had recorded the first ball of Matt’s fourth over as a leg bye whilst their scorer had it as runs. As ever I am inclined to believe that one scorer missed a signal rather than the other imagined one, so those two runs should not have gone against Matt and thus his runs allowed are reduced to 25.
  2. Our book shows 10 runs allowed by Mark but their book has 12 and Jacqueline has made a simple tallying error so 12 is what it should be.
  3. Our book had Morris as bowling 7.4 overs and the innings total as 38.4 but both of those are light by one and correctly recorded in the Beechwood book.
  4. Jacqueline recorded our sixth wicket as falling at 100 but their book has 104 and the latter is correct given that Steve Cooksley’s fourth over, the 30th of our innings, shows a four before the wicket and the end of over total for the previous over was 100.
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Scorebook queries from the 2015 season

Whilst we occasionally have the luxury of a scorer from one side or the other (and even more rarely, both) it is more common for the scoring of Badgers’ matches to fall to those playing in the games. Inevitably that means that the state of the scoring record often leaves something to be desired and the more hands that are co-opted into the job the greater is likely to be the mess…

27th Sep 2015 – Westcott

My heart sank when I saw the opposition scorebook for this game – it looked a mess and the batting, bowling and running total were all different. However, when I came to process the bowling analysis it turned out to be simple enough to interpret but we were left with one anomaly that I could find no way of catering for without the need for adjustments…

Over 16 was bowled by Bill Jenkins and was his second. The book shows a wicket from the fourth ball and four byes from the fifth, which is no problem at all. It also shows a dot for the sixth ball, but that does not gel with Tom Hopkins’ individual score, nor with the need for him to be at the other end in order to hit the six and the single in the next over, Amy Gordon’s fourth, which gets him back on strike to be bowled by a jaffa in Bill’s next over. However, the end of over scores and the running total tick off does not show a single after the four, so I’ve either got to take one off Tom’s score and ‘cheat’ him down the other end or I’ve got to go against everything other than his individual score (and which end the batsmen were at) and add a single to that sixth ball. Of course, that has the disadvantage of increasing Westcott’s team total by one, but this wouldn’t be the first time that the batting and bowling scores don’t up to the designated total score.

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6th Sep 2015 – Addington 1743

This may be one of the worst ever scorebook pairs, and the opposition scorebook contained a number of anomalies:

  1. no indication of where byes and leg byes were scored, so I’ve had to make a guess at when they happened
  2. all three no balls have been written in as a circle with a dot in the middle, which should indicate that the batsman took an extra run from each of those no balls, but I don’t remember that being the case so I’ve assumed that they were all just no balls
  3. the fourth over contains only ten runs but twelve were added to the running tally for both the team score and the bowler – this obviously affects both the bowler’s final analysis and Amjad’s total score
  4. the run out off the first ball of the ninth over is just shown as a W in the book, but to my recollection Amjad sliced the ball down to third man and was run out trying to stretch it into a two, and thus should have been given the first run – this affects his score, the total score, and the bowler’s analysis
  5. the 13th over, Rob Knew’s seventh, shows two runs against the bowler but only a wide is recorded. I have presumed that there was a bye after the wicket, because otherwise the batters are at the wrong ends for what happens next, and that only one run should have been recorded against the bowler
  6. finally, I see no way that Asif Ali can have scored a single and a four. He came in in the sixth over and the only single between then and his dismissal at the end of the eighth over is immediately before the only four, and thus he cannot have scored both. I would give the single to Amjad and reduce Ali’s score to four
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