What we've been up to
Digitisation and more...
The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) is pleased to share with you some of its latest initiatives. We’ve been working tirelessly on a variety of projects we think you’ll find interesting.
Cricket literature, old and new
Most recently we have turned our attention to reviving out-of-print cricket literature through digitisation and cataloguing. Among our most important efforts in this area is an expanding archive of Lillywhite’s Annuals and Guides, which you can access here, and a full run of Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game, available here. Along similar lines, our sister website Cricket History, administered by the incomparable Peter Griffiths, has a fully indexed and searchable bibliography of cricket literature, which now contains more than 13,000 entries, and is growing all the time. Access it here.
Then there is our own catalogue of original ACS publications, which you can purchase direct from our website. Our latest include—
Les Jackson and Cliff Gladwin: Masters of their Craft, John Shawcroft’s account of the fast-bowling Derbyshire pair who formed the most dangerous new-ball attack in England in the 1950s;
Town v Gown; City v Village: A History of Cricket in Cambridge, in which Tony Watts examines the extraordinarily rich culture and tradition of cricket in Cambridge;
issue 208 of The Cricket Statistician, our flagship journal, edited by Jonathan Northall, free to all ACS members, but also available for purchase on our website;
Simon Sweetman’s You Can’t Hurry Us: A History of Cricket in Suffolk, which covers cricket in that county from the Eighteenth Century to the present;
Ernest Parker: Not a Love Story, by Max Bonnell and Andrew Sproul, who tell the story of the finest cricketer produced by Western Australia before the Second World War;
The ACS International Cricket Year Book 2024, furnishing detailed information on everything you could hope to know about every current player worldwide;
The Cricket Professionals of Oxford, in which Michael Stimpson brings to life such obscure figures as Peter Bancalari, the underarm bowler of the 1820s, the fiery roundarmer David Burrin of the 1850s, and the equally fiery “Brusher” Rogers at the end of the Victorian era;
our Second Eleven Annual, covering all Second Eleven County Championship and T20 cricket in 2023;
Stephen Musk’s account, in Outside the Tent, of how Twentieth-Century Australian cricketers rebelled against their Board of Control by taking part in unofficial international tours or taking up careers in England; and
Best of Enemies, John Shawcroft’s account of the keen rivalry between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, whose contests in the 1930s, when both vied for the County Championship, often eclipsed even the Roses matches.
A few extra copies of Mr. Wooller’s Legacy: A history of cricket at Colwyn Bay and in Denbighshire, which sold out last year, are now available. Also in stock—but hurry!—is First-Class Matches: Pakistan 2004/05 to 2006/07, the eleventh volume in our “Hard to Get” series.
Some of our older publications are available as ebooks via Google Play, including the “Cricket Witness” series and our ever-popular “Lives in Cricket” biographies.
Don’t forget that ACS members receive the journal at no cost, together with a voucher worth £8 towards one of these publications.
“Major Feats in Minor Cricket”
This project, always expanding, aims to improve our knowledge of outstanding performances at lower levels of the game: teams bowled out for 0, batters sharing last-wicket stands of 200, wicketkeepers making seven stumpings in an innings, and so on, and so on. Deploying a wide variety of sources, including local newspapers and club records, we have tracked down and published the details of several hundred such performances. But there is so much more to be done, in all parts of the cricketing world. You can read more about this project, see the results of our research, and even contribute to it, on the ACS website. Contributors from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and New Zealand are especially sought after.
Records
The records section of our website is updated daily, and has a fair claim to being the most thorough resource of its kind anywhere on the web. Be it the ongoing Test series or the less celebrated T20 World Cup Qualifiers, you’ll find all the latest, along with all the history, right here.
Get involved!
We invite you to join our efforts. Your support helps us sustain and expand these projects, and ensures the preservation of cricket’s rich history for generations to come. So if you’d like to assist in the compilation of the bibliography or the digitisation of old literature, or have research to contribute to “Major Feats in Minor Cricket,” please write to secretary@acscricket.com. Alternatively, leave a comment below, or reply to the email in which you received this newsletter. We are active on all major social media, too.
We are also seeking the assistance of an IT specialist to help us renovate our website. A volunteer with experience in web development, design and maintenance would be invaluable in helping us create a more dynamic and user-friendly platform for our members and visitors.
But by far the best way to get involved is to become an ACS member. Membership is open to everyone—those who wish to engage in active research or statistical compilation, those who are interested in reading and studying the results of fellow members’ work—and indeed both!
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, thank you for being part of the ACS community.