Badgers Cricket Club – What’s New Archive 2011

The dinner has passed, the silverware and mementos have been doled out to Mark, and various other deserving parties, and the Badger once again settles down for the winter. Details of who won what can be found on the news page, along with a brief report of proceedings, and the Hall Of Fame Trophy winners page has been updated accordingly. The season report for 2011 is now complete and official, and all of the other pages have been updated with the 2011 figures, including all decade by decade averages pages, the personal pages and the individual records page.

In preparing this update I came to the realisation that I’d announced that Guy no longer had a personal page before making it known that he had!! However, Ben Valentine is now so ennobled, and would have been under both the old and new qualification rules.

For those that prefer paper copies of these things, and didn’t manage to acquire the copy from their table at the dinner last Saturday, I have also uploaded the ‘for print’ version of the 2011 season report ready to be downloaded and printed. You’ll need a suitable program to view or print the PDF file but Abode Reader, which may already be installed on the system you are using, is available as a free download (from the Adobe web site), and there are other free alternatives, of which my current favourite is Foxit Reader.

A lack of time, partly caused by the arrival of Skyrim in mid November, has meant that I’ve not been able to work on integrating the dynamic averages page into the rest of the site. Rather than hold up this end of season update, I will hold fire on doing so until I get a chance to do it properly (probably the next time I have a long train journey, likely to be mid December). In the meantime I will continue to nag away at entering the historical information, with 1986 a fifth complete as I type this, but absent any important news or surprise site updates things will go quiet now until the announcement of either the AGM or indoor nets in the new year. See you then.

Since I had actually completed entry of the 1987 data prior to the previous update to the site, I thought I’d squeeze in another before tomorrow night’s dinner so that the fruit of my labours were available for all to see. These include a season report, scorecards, more comprehensive historical results, complete full batting, full bowling and miscellaneous statistics tables, a list of best performances and concomitant updates to the personal pages.

Whilst I was nibbling away at the old scorebooks Darrell made a comment to the effect that I’d be better off concentrating on things of more interest to the current members and offered the observation that it would be good to be able to sort the averages tables by each column, making it easier to see, for example, who had scored the most runs or taken the most wickets. I have started to rise to that challenge, with a fully dynamic multi-season averages page already written and working, but I’m going to save the great unveiling until after the dinner to allow a little more time to integrate the page with the current static averages pages and to give my ‘beta testing team’ – Darrell, Graham and Andy – a little more time to break things and/or make suggestions for improvements.

To compensate for the lack of output from Darrell’s request I have also responded to a query from Allan at one of the later games this season as to whether there was anywhere on the web site that detailed our records against individual opponents. Whilst I already had a program that calculated the head-to-head records, which I used to produce the little table at the end of the 2004 Old Alleynians match report, I’d never got around to writing the code to create a meaningful output from it. I have corrected that omission now and you can view the end result on the new head-to-head record summary page.

When adding the notes below I noticed that Adrian Cowell did not have a statistics page and this led me to review the conditions by which such a page is created, since he seemed eminently worthy. Previously the rules, arrived at so arbitrarily that I no longer recall the reasoning, required playing in ten seasons and making it onto the lifetime averages, so I’ve relaxed that a little, to be seven seasons playing, but added an additional criteria related to number of seasons qualifying for the averages, which must be five or more. The change means pages have been created for Adrian, Alan Preston, Huw Campbell, Martin Walker and Richard Ward. An equivalent tweak to the short-term criteria, which now requires three seasons qualifying for the averages as well as having played at least once in each of the past five seasons, means that Rakesh, Sahil, Matt and Guy have all dropped off the list, at least for now.

Almost inevitably the entry and processing of the 1987 scorecards identified a number of discrepancies in the end of season averages for that season. Each of those have been investigated but we are left with a number of changes to the final figures, which I document here for the record:

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

The annual presentation dinner, without the dance for the third year running, is a little more than a month away and you should all have received an email (or perhaps a snail mail letter if you don’ have access to the electronic variety) from club chairman Allan Butt with details of that event on November 19th. For completeness I have updated the news page with the details of the evening.

In addition to organising the dinner, Al has very kindly provided a match report for the final game at Leigh but we are still left with a fair few with no words attached, so if anyone has any particular recollections of any of those games then please drop me a few words – a single paragraph is fine – and I’ll share your thoughts with the world.

Now that Darrell and I have finished checking the scorecards generated from the database with the actual scorebook data, you can find historical results for 2011 along with a partial season report plus the personal pages have been updated with all the 2011 performances and partnerships. The season report and personal pages will be updated further once the destination of the various cups has been revealed at the dinner, at which point the full details will also be made available on the decade by decade average pages.

Our checking did find an unusually large number of discrepancies, all of which have been checked and double-checked before being resolved according to the best information available. For the record, we found and corrected the following:

• the fall of the first wicket at Beechwood was with the score on one not zero
• as mentioned last time, Mark actually took two wickets at Sutton with the other belonging to Jake
• Scott was credited with a maiden he didn’t bowl at Dormansland
• Rob bowled four maidens at Roehampton not three and there were only four fielding extras in that game rather than five
• the Cholmondeley game saw Ben debited with 16 runs against when he only conceded 12 and credited with two catches, when one of them was taken by Guy, whilst Pat had been awarded three more runs than he scored, to the detriment of extras, meaning adjustments to 73 and 14 respectively
• the fall of the sixth wicket at Coton Hall was at 168 not 158
• Richard Knew took a catch at Malpas not Rob
• the ninth wicket at Reigate fell at 193 rather than 192
• the eighth wicket at Ripley fell at 179 rather than 183
• the fall of the fifth wicket at Blindley Heath was at 142 not 149, Andy took two catches rather than just one and Ben should have been credited with a maiden over
• in sorting out the fall of wickets for the second Tadworth game I managed to leave Mark and Jake with each other’s runs and modes of dismissal – Mark was caught for six and Jake bowled for one not vice versa

Details of the final three games of the season have now been entered into Play-Cricket, with thanks to Darrell for performing that chore, and loaded from there into the Badgers database, so full details of all this season’s games can be found on the results page along with the pertinent elements from the scorecards for those three matches. Match reports are more of a problem, but I have added statistical musings related to every game since the start of the hiatus. If anyone would like to supply me with a form of words, of any length, about any game that is missing a report then such contributions would be more than welcome.

Darrell and I have started the process of checking the data in the database against what is recorded in the scorebooks, a chore that has turned out to be even more painful this year than usual due to a much higher error count. Once we’ve finished that job then I will add a partial season report and update some of the season on season pages but I thought it better to get this update uploaded rather than wait for the cross-checking to complete. One visible effect of our efforts is that Mark has been deprived of a wicket, with three having been recorded in the Sutton game when one of them was actually taken by Jake.

One side effect of the changes to the Badgers database to cater for more than eleven players per side is that the actual number of players per team is now recorded. For the Badgers this information is complete as far back as the database holds full data (the start of 1988) but the opposition details are more sketchy (only 2009 onwards plus 2004) but where the number is known you may see minor changes to the result text for a match (eg. a game where we won batting second with seven wickets down but only ten players will have changed from a win by three wickets to a win by two, and similarly for the oppo – cf. the 2009 Woldingham game or 2008 at Morden Parish as two of a fair few examples).

One of the background tasks that I have continued to nag away at, in bits of spare time too short to do anything more useful with, is to compare the older matches, often entered by our opposition, in the Play-Cricket database, and tweak information based on the differences that I find. This means that, in addition to 2011 where every game has been entered there in the first instance, the 2004, 2009 and 2010 seasons are now complete and cross-checked with the Badgers database, which may have been updated with total over counts if they were missing before, and with other minor corrections (eg. the NPL game in 2005 had its date changed and Mark’s overs bowled corrected, Mark and Graham were credited with a maiden each in the 2009 Ham game, Darrell was deprived of one at Stoke in 2006 and a couple of recently entered total overs for games played under limited overs rules were swapped around because I’d got me faced and bowled in a twist).

Now that we are using Play-Cricket for all scorecard entry I have added links to those more complete details on our scorecards pages, just under the match heading. If anyone would like to volunteer to assist with back-filling scorebook data for seasons prior to 2009 then feel free to let me know because I’ve decided to concentrate on the considerable chore of entering the pre-1988 data, with the 1987 season being two-thirds finished as I type this. As each historical season is completed I will update the Badgers database with the full details and then compare the resultant season averages with those that were manually entered more than twenty years ago. Once I’m satisfied with the accuracy of the data then this site will be updated with the scorecards and revised results details. No promises on the time frame, especially whilst the preparation of the season averages is going on, but hopefully the fruit of my labours will show up over the winter.

Oh, and for those of you that were wondering about the curtailed sentences in the statistical notes for the Wallington, Ham & Petersham and Cholmondeley games, I have corrected the duff HTML tags and the expected links have now appeared as intended (with my apologies for not having the time to proof-read everything thoroughly enough before uploading in a rush last Saturday).

It is difficult to know where to start, since there really isn’t a a good excuse for the site lying untended for two and a half months but a lack of spare time during July and early August due to work commitments was compounded by the big bugbear of the twelve per side game played on tour, which neither Play-Cricket nor my Badgers database system were programmed to cater for. The little time that I’ve had to spend on the site over the past six weeks or more have gone into trying to cope with more than eleven players and the myriad knock-on effects from that change (and then, once I’d adjusted the Play-Cricket card for the Malpas game to need as few manual changes as possible before importing into the updated system, fixing a couple of things that I had failed to allow for). Anyway, as you will no doubt be able to see, things are sorted out in that respect, finally.

A big thank you to club Chairman Allan Butt, who has taken on the weekly chore of entering scorecard details into Play-Cricket, with a nod of appreciation to Ben and his iPhone, which has enabled us to divorce the chore from the physical location of the book. I had hoped to bring things bang up to date, especially since Darrell entered the two most recent games into Play-Cricket before we left for his graduation ceremony, but time has run out for that and I’ve only just found enough spare to edit the tour match reports so that we are not entirely devoid in that department.

Results have been patchy, with a good winning streak through the tour games, but several recent disappointments (and frankly some fairly awful performances). Full details of all games up to Blindley Heath can be found on the results page along with the match reports for tour and the pertinent elements from the scorecards.

Apologies for the extended hiatus, explanations for which will have to wait until the full update comes along shortly, but I’ve missed out on reflecting the last couple of fixture changes so didn’t want to miss reporting a change to the final game of the season. The traditional season closer at Merrow has been clobbered by a wedding affecting their ability to put out a team but we’ve been lucky enough to pick up a game against old foes Leigh. See the fixtures page for the details, including the usual map link for those that have not played there before.

Sorry folks but I am over a week behind with little chance of catching up in the near future, therefore I’m posting this rather incomplete update. The scorecard for last Sunday’s win at Old Suttonians has not yet been entered into Play-Cricket, therefore there are no details here either, and I have not found the time to write up our victory of the previous week, so…

After the longest unsuccessful run in more than twelve years, and the fifth longest such streak in club history, the first win of the season came in emphatic fashion in the heat at South Park Manor. Full details can be found on the results page along with an empty match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Darrell very kindly agreed to help me get caught up by providing a match report for Tadworth and I’ve also performed my periodic refresh of the personal pages, which affects the best performances and partnerships (something likely to be of interest only to Mark so far this year) but not the averages, and it might be worth noting that I continue to keep both the lifetime averages page and the partnerships page up-to-date on a weekly basis.

Another weekend, another defeat – this time at the hands of Tadworth and their mixture of young and old. The long term effects of this one might well be felt for a wee while as there were a couple of fairly serious looking finger injuries sustained during our time in the field. Full details can be found on the results page along with an empty match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

I have found and fixed the issue that was messing up the page layout when these pages were forced into strict mode and therefore the nickname tooltips now work in all versions of Internet Explorer that I have available for testing (fully patched v6, v7 and v8 plus the latest non-beta v9) – without any further changes to the CSS, which means I was frustratingly close to having this working when I ran out of time last Sunday. Unfortunately there are some strange side-effects of turning on strict mode, so if you spot anything that looks awry then please let me know as I doubt that I’ll have had the time to check every single page for layout issues.

Last weekend’s game was spoiled by the weather, with the game called off by half ten in the morning, and the previous week’s inaugural visit to Horley turned out to be a damp squib too, despite the best efforts of both teams to get a game played. Just twenty overs were bowled, with honours just about even despite some fairly dreadful conditions for bowling. Not much more to say than that but the curious might care to check out the fairly terse match report and the usual subset of the scorecard.

The week before, our first ever visit to Roehampton produced an entertaining game and we even managed to avoid a sixth loss, coming close to the win but eventually having to settle for a winning draw. Full details can be found on the results page along with Andy’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

Those of you using non-Microsoft browsers will notice that I have added a neat little feature to Andy’s latest magnum opus which provides a way of finding out just who the real person is behind the obscure nicknames (hint: just hover the mouse over a highlighted nickname). Sadly I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get this working in Internet Explorer without much success. Since there is now less than five hours to go before today’s game at Tadworth I have had to give up the chase for now, but I have discovered a way around the problem in the last ten minutes or so. Unfortunately the solution is currently worse than the problem, since it breaks the page layout on nearly all of the browsers, adding at least one ugly black bar across the top of the page. I will revisit this when I have more time, but for now you will just have to use Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Apple Safari or some other standards-compliant web browser in order to see the report in its full glory.

Thanks to an eagle-eyed Graham Ward, who spotted a logical error in the fall of wickets details in an old scorecard that I linked to the other week, I have written some code to cross-check those details as best I can and this threw up about another twenty such errors, three-quarters of which I have been able to fix. Therefore all of the historical scorecards have been re-generated with those corrections in place (and one change to a total score, which now doesn’t add up) and hopefully I have changed things so that such mistakes will not be able to creep through in the future.

PLEASE NOTE that Sunday’s fixture with Woldingham has been cancelled, due to their inability to raise a team. Thanks to sterling work by Andy we have managed to find an alternative game against Horley, brand new opponents for the second time in two weeks. See the fixtures page for the usual details.

PLEASE NOTE that Saturday’s fixture with Leigh has had to be cancelled, due to our inability to raise a team for that day. Thankfully we can put out eleven on the Sunday instead and a game has been arranged against Roehampton. See the fixtures page for the usual details.

Yet another defeat in the books, this time a more severe one at the hands of long-time sparring partners Dormansland.

Full details can be found on the results page along with Foxy’s match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard.

The season rolls on, lovely weather and all, but the Badgers have yet to manage anything other than losses. Most of the games have been quite good fun nonetheless and whilst our batting has been extremely variable we have not disgraced ourselves along the way.

Full details can be found on the results page along with contrasting styles of match reports for Sutton (Andy) and Stoke D'Abernon (Allan) and the pertinent elements from the scorecards.

Apologies for the delayed update but I’m rather short of spare time at the moment and have been struggling with the report from three weeks ago. Since this update has been almost ready for over two weeks it made sense to post it and then work on another tomorrow to bring us up to date over the course of a couple of days rather than waiting until all three week’s worth was available in one go.

The second game of the season wasn’t any better from the results point of view, but again we went down swinging, this time against Broadbridge Heath.

Full details can be found on the results page along with a match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard. Unfortunately I’ve still not found the time to do anything with Andy’s report for Beechwood and May is looking fairly poor for spare time so I am not going to make any rash promises.

Proceedings for 2011 got started with more of a whimper than a bang, but a glorious sunny day in Otford made a welcome if unlikely introduction to another year of Badgers’ cricket as we went down swinging against Beechwood.

Full details can be found on the results page along with a summary match report and the pertinent elements from the scorecard. Those of you in the email chain will have seen that Andy has already provided a full match report, but I've not had time to incorporate that one yet due to issues coping with changes to the Play-Cricket scoreboard pages.

With the first game of the new season just around the corner, the AGM having come and gone and a bit of news regarding the tour to Chester, I feel that it is time for a final pre-season update.

A Saturday fixture has been arranged for the tour, and the other games have been finalised, so since we have also received the final fixture confirmation, you can now see the full slate of games for the summer on the fixtures page. I have also created a new Google Map for the Chester tour, keeping it separate from the normal games because of the geographical spread.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this year’s AGM but Allan Butt has very kindly provided a precis of proceedings which you can find on the news page.

With the AGM looming, Pat has distributed the provisional fixture list and I have updated the fixtures page accordingly.

As far as the AGM goes, all members should have received the formal notice and thus be aware that it will be held at 20:00 (8pm) on Thursday 17th March at Rakesh Dawar’s new gaff in Kingswood. Full details can be found in the news page AGM item but the email attachments contain rather more detail, including a copy of the draft accounts.

Much to my chagrin I’ve decided to stop using Multimap for displaying map information and will instead stick with Streetmap for traditional map display and Google for more flexible Web 2.0 style maps. I am sure that the cynical amongst you will suggest that this is because of my perceived anti-Microsoft stance, but my problem with the transition of Multimap to Bing Maps is that it has not been done in a properly backwards compatible fashion, so existing links to Multimap lose some of their features (eg. specifying which scale or zoom level to use, supplying a title) with no obvious way of fixing those issues. I have just spent over an hour digging my way through various links and related pages trying to find proper documentation for the parameters that can be used as part of the URI but even then I am unable to replicate what Multimap was doing.

The New Year has sidled its way into view and we have our first piece of news for the off-season, with the announcement of the details for winter nets, which you can find on the news page.