Badgers Cricket Club – What’s New Archive 2020

We have another ‘home’ game again this weekend, against Stoke D'Abernon at Woodmansterne. Details can be found on the fixtures page.

A glorious sunny afternoon in the confines of Horsley & Send’s Twinns Field ground and an atypical (in recent times anyway) Badgers win chasing down a decent total. The usual summarised details of the game can be found on the results page along with a statistical notes only match report, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecard and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecard.

Our first ’home’ game in almost exactly four years and only the second in 22 seasons saw the Badgers host Ottershaw on the back pitch at Woodmansterne and notch our second win of the season, although we made heavy weather of chasing a small target. The usual summarised details of the game can be found on the results page along with Ricky’s first ever match report, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecard and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecard.

Matt has arranged a ‘home’ game for us tomorrow and we will be hosting Ottershaw, for the first time after five previous meetings at their ground, on the back pitch at Woodmansterne. Details can be found on the fixtures page but for those who played or watched the Sunday before last we are on the other side of the road from the clubhouse and car park on the Woodmansterne Street Recreation Ground.

As close and exciting a finish as you could possible wish for as the Badgers pulled a rabbit out of the hat at Blindley Heath last Sunday to record our first win of this shortened season. The usual summarised details of the game can be found on the results page along with a statistical notes only match report, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecard and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecard.

A low scoring but fun game at Woodmansterne last Sunday ended with the Badgers’ fourth loss in a row but our closest margin so far this year. The usual summarised details of the game can be found on the results page along with a statistical notes only match report, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecard and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecard.

A bonus update this week because I have finally managed to cap off nearly four years of mixed toil and inertial inaction to complete the addition of full information for 1984. That means that there is now a season report, summary scorecards, more comprehensive historical results, complete full batting, full bowling and miscellaneous statistics tables and a list of best performances plus concomitant updates to the personal pages and the completion of the lifetime best performances page.

The inevitable discrepancies were found between the newly entered data and that already published, the nitty gritty of which can be found on the Statistical Sett page, to avoid cluttering up this section with a load of verbiage that very few (if any) actually bother to read. I should point out that the knock-on effects from even minor changes to the details for a single season are felt across the whole site so if you see anything that looks wonky please let me know.

Much to the astonishment of those of us from Hertfordshire, where it rained on and off for most of the weekend, the Badgers managed to complete two games of cricket last weekend with no more than a short period of fairly gentle rain on Sunday afternoon before the weather relented altogether and provided us the most glorious sunny evening. The usual summarised details of the games can be found on the results page along with statistical notes only match reports, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecards and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecards.

We have a game against Woodmansterne this coming Sunday and I have added that, plus a couple of others that Matt has confirmed, to the fixtures page. Still no new Google Map, I’m afraid, and chances are that there will not be.

There has been one other minor change under the covers – no doubt of no interest to anyone – in that, after discussions with Darrell, I have changed the way that games with incomplete batting orders in the scorebook are handled. Rather than adding ‘dummy’ players (as I have done previously) or pretending that we only had ten players (say) the situation is now called out explicitly and the assumption made (absent any evidence to the contrary) that we had eleven on the day. You can see an example of the end result in the scorecard for Blindley Heath in 1985 and there are a handful of pre-1988 scorecards affected, with more to come (three in 1984 alone).

The Badgers have two fixtures slated for today and tomorrow, although the weather may yet intervene to deny us our first non-tour Saturday fixture since 2011, with a game against Tadworth 3rd XI today (at North Holmwood, not on the green) and another against Old Wimbledonians tomorrow. The fixtures page has been updated accordingly, although there is as yet no Google Map for this season.

My apologies for the state of the previous upload, which was the result of doing things in haste and not checking them as thoroughly as I ought to and thus at least one class of issues (flagging of record partnerships in the various lists dotted about the averages pages) got through. Sadly this update, which has now itself been done in haste to announce the fixtures for today and tomorrow, has also not been checked quite as thoroughly as it might be (the end of season rollover makes things much more arduous because the addition of the Current menu items means that every page changes in some way or other) but I have at least found the time to check fully those areas that I subsequently spotted were incorrect last time.

The new season finally got underway with a visit to Newdigate, who were the most friendly and accommodating of hosts – although not enough to actually let us win the game – and provided a competitive game of cricket in the most pleasant of settings. The usual summarised details of the game can be found on the results page along with a statistical notes only match report, the traditional pertinent elements from the scorecard and the not-so new-fangled detailed scorecard.

As ever the start of the new season brings a large number of changes to this site, most of them under the covers and most of them automated in some way or other, but it takes a great deal of time to check everything and we might have missed a mistake or other discrepancy, so please shout if you see anything that looks out of whack.

Just to wrap up the comment from last week, the changes made as a result of the Superbase replacement porject can be found on the statistical sett page as I cannot imagine ayone is interested enough for me to clutter up the front page with them.

STOP PRESS: after a three month long hiatus there looks to be every chance that a 2020 cricket season may break out for the Badgers at Newdigate later today, with the usual caveats about the English weather. Some clubs started two weeks ago, but we were unable to find an opponent that weekend or an eleven last week. Fingers crossed that we finally get underway today and make the most of the remaining opportunities over the next couple of months.

Because of the uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic the fixtures page has not been properly updated for 2020. Matt had put together a slate of games but three-fifths of those have passed unplayed and it is as yet impossible to say whether any of the pre-arranged games for August and September will take place. Updates are most likely to be visible on our Play-Cricket site before anywhere else, but again beware that most of the original slate was entered there and I have been unable to find out from Matt what the state of play is with those.

Whilst it has not been apparent from tbe public site – because Darrell’s first ever update at the beginning of May notifying of the cessation of cricket somehow did not find its way up – Darrell and I have been spending several hours each Sunday working on getting him familiar with the steps involved in updating both the site and the database that informs it and trying to make sure that he could take over in the event of my not being able to do the necessary. As part of those efforts all of the key programs used to create these web pages have been rewritten using more modern tools that run on the current 64-bit systems and are supported by communities of open source developers, hopefully making what we have now rather more future proof than the proprietary 16-bit Superbase for Windows which has been the bedrock on which the site has been built for the past twenty years.

Speaking of which, one of the side effects of the season fizzling out before it had even started was that the twentieth anniversary of the site went unremarked and uncelebrated, which is a bit of a shame (at least for me, maybe no one else is really bothered). When we made our debut on the World Wide Web back in March 2000 there were very few other cricket clubs with web sites and I would like to think that ours remains one of the most comprehensive out there, if not the most modern or attractive looking.

There have been a number of other changes, both to the data and to the site, but I have run out of time (with the game looming in three hours time and other preparations yet to get started) and detailing those will have to wait for the next update, which hopefully will be early next week.

The 2020 Annual General Meeting is scheduled for Monday 3rd February at the Burgh Heath Comrades & Social Club starting at seven in the evening. All likely interested parties should have received email notification from yours truly in my role as Chairman but if you feel you have been left out then please contact me via the details on the club officers page.

Hopefully you will all have noticed the fundamental change in this site, with all pages having been switched to use the new layout that I first teased on the dynamic averages page back in January 2017 and have been using for the detailed scorecards since their first appearance in April 2018. In all that time I have received a grand total of zero comments on the new layout, so I hope it is to everyone’s liking.

Whilst preparing to roll out the ‘new’ menu system across the whole site I have been trying to tidy things up in the background, fixing various anomalies and eliminating as many dead links as seem worthwhile (to me a dead link on a historical news or what’s old archive seems like fair game, but something on an active area of the site, or worse within the site, feels like more of a problem).

There has also been massive amounts of change to the underlying pages and associated database programs used to create the content – most of which won’t be visible unless you are the type that likes to look at the page source of the websites they visit (just me then?!) – which involved making everything as standards compliant as possible. The most visible fruits of those labours are that the textual parts of the pages (including these What’s New entries) should adapt better to different screen sizes (especially on wide screens) but I have also corrected a problem with the layout of the old-school scorecards pages and as a first taste of the sort of improvements I am looking to make in the future have changed the way that the personal pages index works so that it should use a multi-column format on wider screens but drop to a single column on narrow panes like a mobile phone screen in portrait mode.

Obviously with such a fundamental change I would welcome any comments, critical or otherwise, and also ideas as to areas for further improvement, especially if you are using a phone or tablet to view the site because I tend to use the PC for both content creation and testing.

NOTE that the next update never actually made it onto the public web site, due to other changes not being complete and in a state to be uploaded, but I have left it here for archival purposes since it documents the cup winners.