As I mentioned in this post a good use of your compulsory CV - 19 lock down is to read https://redballdata.blog/   It's a bit geeky, which I like, and Mr RedBallData has some interesting ideas on how to predict and select, cricket and cricketers, an area which I find fascinating, although I don't have the maths to do anything other than cheer on from the sidelines. Something that really appealed to me was his list of the best bowlers of the last 50 years.  The approach used to compile the list was, rather than  look at average, to order the bowlers by their impact on the averages of the batsmen they played against (you can get a bowler's career broken down this way on cricinfos stats guru.).  So, for instance,  let's say we have a bowler who has only ever bowled to two batsmen, A&B.  A has a career average of 50 but our bowler gets him out for 25; B has a career average of 10, our guy though has a bowling average of 15 against him.  ...

Durham is the baby of the 18 first class counties , admitted to the County Championship in 1992.  Before Durham came Glamorgan who gained first class status in 1921.  Northamptonshire (1905) were the only other county to join the championship in the twentieth century, all of the other counties were playing in the county championship prior to 1900. English domestic cricket is a remarkably stable affair with no county having become insolvent or gone into administration.  Remarkably this stability has been achieved against a background of a hundred years plus of financial crisis.  Pictures of crowds flocking to Lord's in the aftermath of World War Two are misleading.  As I found out whilst researching my book A War To The Knife small crowds, unbalanced budgets and reliance on distributions from Test cricket have long been a fact of life for many counties. The 1933 spring edition of The Cricketer commented: “It is satisfactory to find that in spite of adve...

My Book, "A War to the Knife" is finished and available from https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/sport-hobbies/a-war-to-the-knife/   A WAR TO THE KNIFE tells the story of two test match series: England vs West Indies in 1933 and West Indies vs England in 1935.  The England team was one of the best to ever play the game, including Herbert Sutcliffe, Wally Hammond and Harold Larwood and captained by Douglas Jardine they had just crushed Don Bradman’s Australia in the infamous bodyline series. The West Indian side, made up from the populations of Britain’s scattered possessions in the Caribbean and divided by race as well as island loyalties, seemingly had little chance against Jardine’s juggernaut.  But cricket in the West Indies was more than just a game, it allowed the island’s multi - racial populations to compete as equals and the cricket that emerged was exciting and new, suffused with athletic excellence, passion and the desire for dignity and financial sec...

I was in Barbados in 2015 to watch  England vs West Indies .  A couple of people from Barbados told me about a game played against Jamaica where the greats of West Indian fast bowling came up against each other, on a lightening fast pitch, in front of a capacity ++ crowd.  I did a bit of searching and think the most likely candidate was the Shell Shield game in  1986 . Jamaica had a fearsome pace trio of Holding, Walsh and Patterson (Michael Holding first change); Barbados responded with Marshall and Garner.  Barbados won, with their 224 all out in the first innings being the top score in the game.  The first change bowler for Barbados in the game was RO Estwick who I had never heard off but who had a first class bowling average of just over 21 and was one of the South African Cricketers of the Year in 1988.  An indication of the strength of West Indian bowling in the 1980s. The same furious five bowlers were to play in another Shell Shiel...

I am currently writing a book about English and West Indian cricket in the 1930s.  As a part of that I collated some statistics from Cricketarchive on test matches played by England from December 1932 to March 1935.  You can click on the link below to see the spreadsheet and if you download you should get the "proper" excel version. Amateur vs Professional December 1932 - March 1935 Overall it was a successful period for the England side: winning 10 games, drawing 7 and losing 5, but it is noticeable that the record for the first 13 tests when Douglas Jardine was captain (he actually missed the final game of the 1933 West Indies series but was captain again for tour of India) the record is won 8, drawn 4 and lost 1.  It always surprises me how much difference a good "leader" makes to performance, or am I just ascribing a human face to noisy statistics? England selected 41 different players over the 22 matches, evidence of selectoral inconsistency and ...

Cricket history is one of my interests.  I'm currently writing a book on the England vs West Indies test series of 1933 and the return series in the West Indies in 1935. Doing this I spent some time going through the MCC archives where I came across correspondence on negotiations between the West Indies Board of Control and their three star players: Learie Constantine, George Headley and Manny Martindale over contracts for the 1939 tour of England. I thought it was interesting stuff but didn't fit in with the book, so instead it became an article that got published in the Nightwatchman cricket quarterly.  Now I have a blog it is reproduced below. Six hundred pounds, plus expenses Test cricket between the two World Wars seems very far away. Norman Gordon of South Africa died in 2014 and there is no - one left alive who played international cricket before World War II.  All we are left with is flickering fragments of Test matches on film.  Yet during the...