27 Nov 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 proceeedings, 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.

18 Nov 2011

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 innnings 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