4. Career Statistics
In 2005 Paul Wlodarczyk begun to collate the 1st XI stats for the prior 20 years for a few players who had played for the club for most of those 2 decades. Approximately 10 years ago I decided to build upon that original work to collate historical statistics for all XIs and for as many players as possible who have represented the club.
Not an easy task, and a project that I have dipped in and out of over the past 10 years, but was struggling to get anywhere near completion until I was blessed with 2 lockdowns this year!
While I might have preferred to have spent my time this year doing many things other than collating cricket stats, I do now have the satisfaction of having completed this onerous task.
Before we get into the details, I’d like to thank all those who have helped supply the scorebooks, stats summaries by season and captains annual reports that have been crucial to the collation of all this information. I specifically call out Paul Wlodarczyk who kept excellent summaries of the 1st XI statistics from the late 1980s until 2008. I also express thanks to those scorers who, over the years have kept such neat and tidy scorebooks – you know who you are! You also know who you are if you’re responsible for some of the less legible scoresheets I’ve had to deal with!!
In this age of digitisation, it is almost incomprehensible that all this information is not readily accessible at the click of a mouse button, but alas 35 years ago stats summaries were mostly handwritten or at best produced on a typewriter, and certainly not stored electronically. It was not until 2016 that all match stats were recorded on the league website.
Therefore, and unfortunately, while I have been able to track down most of the records for the last 35 years, there are inevitably some gaps in the information:
- 2nd XI info for 1991 is completely missing
- 2nd XI info for 1992 covers top few batters and bowlers only
- 2nd XI info for 1994 is for half the season only
- 2nd XI Sat 1996 is completely missing
- 2nd XI Sun 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007 is available for top few batters and bowlers only
- 2nd XI Sat and Sun 2010 is mostly missing
- 2nd XI Sat 2011 is missing
- 1st XI Sun 2010-2017 is missing a couple of matches each season
- While a typical scorebook entry for a match contains all the relevant batsman scores and bowling figures, catches and stumpings are often not listed
Having listed all these gaps, I must emphasize that they only represent approximately 5% of all matches over the past 35 years and therefore we should celebrate that we have 95% of the records. If anyone has any scorebooks or season summaries that could close these gaps squirrelled away somewhere, then please do get them to me.
A final note on what is missing is that these records go back to 1985. There are players featured such as Chris Wenman and Peter Brocklehurst amongst others who begun their Chenies careers in the 1960s. Therefore, their true playing records are significantly more expansive than the official record. We won’t use the phrase all the time, but all references to playing records within the collated data should be viewed in the context “since records began”.
What we have is what we’ve got, and therefore the collated records we do have form the official record of playing achievement at the club over the past 35 years.
Attached is a downloadable Excel file in which all the statistics reside. There are 7 tabs as follows:
- 1st XI Sat League
- 1st XI Sun & Friendlies
- 2nd XI Sat League
- 2nd XI Sun & Friendlies
- 3rd XI Sat League
- 3rd XI Sun & Friendlies
- Total
Each tab contains filters in the top row which allow you to sort and filter the data.
Also attached is an example of an individual report. By way of an example, and in honour of the fact that he started this whole project, the example report is for Paul Wlodarczyk. An individual report contains 2 files; a one page summary of total career stats, and a year by year summary.
If anyone wishes to see their own individual report then please send me an email at dave@homebrown.co.uk