Keepers of the books: The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians

Over 45 years, cricket’s leading group of statisticians have come to play an important role in administering the game, and cast their eye beyond the numbers

On a wet and windy day in 1971, a couple of hardy souls pitched up at Euston station concourse in their greatcoats. They agreed to make clear their identity by carrying a copy of The Cricketer tucked under their arm. They would come to form the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians.

This was the 1970s, after all, so it did not take long for rival members to be drawn into protracted philosophical debates. Indeed, the ACS barely began at all after the famously irascible Irving Rosenwater, the journalist and BBC TV scorer, warned against the upstart organisation cutting across the statistical bows of the Cricket Society. The ACS came into being by the weight of a solitary vote in 1973.

These pre-internet times were, says David Kendix, the current ACS president, “the Wild West years” of cricket statistics, when stattos presided over scrapbooks of rival records, based on their own definition of what constituted first-class cricket. Even now, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack differs from ESPNcricinfo and Cricket Archive on the number of first-class centuries scored by WG Grace (Wisden say 126; the others 124) and Jack Hobbs (Wisden say 197; the others 199). There is still dispute over the starting point of the County Championship. But, by and large, peaceful co-existence has broken out, partly due to the ACS.

“I joined the ACS in 1984, and there were lots of people rushing around to disprove other people’s theories,” says Kendix. “Certainly there’s grounds for saying a lot of energy might have been better channelled. But I’d like to think that in the last 20 years it has changed a lot.”

The ACS always had experts, and now they are consulted by those running the game right at the top. In 2002, the ICC asked Kendix, an actuary, to advise them on statistics and records, and devise an official team rankings system, which he still does. Kendix regularly took advice from his cohorts at the ACS, and suggested after a while that the ICC formally consult with the ACS on statistical matters.

Test Match Special scorer Andrew Samson, perhaps the most high-profile ACS member, says: “I think we do our best to try to keep the ICC on the straight and narrow when it comes to the status of games.”

^{Steve Harmison took Matthew Hayden’s wicket in the 2005/06 Super Test}

Kendix says the first time the ICC truly engaged the ACS was the 2005/06 Super Series between Australia and the ICC World XI, and whether to confer Test and ODI status on those matches.

“Our committee gave its views,” says Kendix. “Ultimately the commercial views were the ones that prevailed, and it remains a one-off Test match that doesn’t involve a country. But the important point was that the ICC wanted to understand statistical issues and weigh them up against others.”

And retrospective reclassification or declassification of games is not something cricket statisticians are generally keen on. “If we did that, do we then say Warne never reached 708 Test wickets?” asks Kendix. “Murali ended his career with his 800th – ‘no, wait, it never happened’. The retrospective re-categorising of first-class matches must be pretty much avoided in all circumstances. What happens if another set of people came along in a few years and changed it back?”

There are some exceptions, though, notably the highest level of non-white competition in South Africa, and Fiji’s 1947/48 tour of New Zealand (featured on page 138 of the April edition of The Cricketer) were belatedly awarded first-class status.

As for the fuss over the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World, hastily arranged when South Africa’s tour fell through… well, Alan Jones of Glamorgan did famously receive an England cap and blazer, but Kendix says it is a myth that it was ever considered a Test match by the ICC. He suspects that the TCCB marketed the series as Tests to boost the gates. “England probably acted ultra-vires,” says Kendix, “because, in those days, who was going to stop England?”

The 1970 games are first-class, though, and Samson and Jonathan Agnew pranked Geoff Boycott over it on TMS last summer. They ribbed him that his 157 at The Oval in 1970 had lost first-class status, making his famous 100th hundred at Leeds in 1977 his 99th. All a ruse.

^{Test win or not? Garry Sobers, captain of the Rest of the World XI, lifts the Guinness Trophy at The Oval, 1970}

The ACS has a membership in four figures, around 125 overseas. Many are beavering away doing unseen work for the benefit of any cricket lover who uses a database. An ACS member in Australia, Charles Davis, has been tracking down old scoresheets, enabling balls faced to be inserted in around 90 per cent of Test scorecards. Matthew Engel once wrote that Philip Bailey of Cricket Archive (owned by The Cricketer Publishing Ltd) and Wisden had taken “this abstruse branch of science to levels that in other fields win Nobel Prizes”.

In 2006 Kendix and Bailey helped redraft the ICC’s Classification of Official Cricket – which was gathering dust and unfit for purpose until they got their hands on it. It was, in a sense, the fulfilment of the ACS founding fathers’ mission.

“That was very important for the ACS,” says Kendix, “because it had been formed to try to come up with a unified way of determining which matches count in which category.”

While Full Member boards still decide what constitutes first-class cricket, they work to those guidelines. It also meant the creation of two new categories: List A brought the world’s top international and domestic one-day cricket since 1963 under a single category, which Kendix says has “achieved its objective of being a counterpart to first-class cricket”; Twenty20 was the other.

In 1992 the ACS added “and Historians” to its title, and has turned itself into a publishing house to contend with any in cricket. The Overseas First-Class Annual and First-Class Counties Second XI Annual are hardy perennials, and go “beyond Wisden” – in the words of ACS secretary Andrew Hignell – in that OFCA lists full cards of every first-class game round the world, and Second XI has details on players not yet in Wisden or Playfair.

But the real proof of the ACS’ scope comes in their Lives in Cricket series – 30-odd biographies of cricketers, some as high profile as Maurice Leyland and MJK Smith. A new imprint – Cricket Witness – looks at how cricket intertwines with social issues. The acclaimed writer Eric Midwinter has published Class Peace in this stable, and the ACS sponsored a Masters student at Royal Holloway who is researching a history of women’s cricket between the wars.

“We had a look at the landscape of cricket literature and realised there was a gap we could fill,” says Hignell. “This was at a time when commercial publishers were not so interested. We caught the mood of the moment.”

For more information on the ACS and how to join, visit www.acscricket.com