A Call to Arms

Updating club, competition and player records. 

As anyone interested in this article will know, Cricket Leinster has a great collection of records from 1919 through to the present day thanks to the dedicated work of Derek Scott over a lifetime in cricket. 

Many of these records are included in the centenary history of Cricket Leinster ‘100 Not Out’ [copies of which are still available from Cricket Leinster]. A few weeks ago a second important step in making the records more readily accessible was taken with the launch of the ‘Archive’ section on the CL website. 

There are four parts in the Archive at present [it will grow over time] providing details on: 

Competitions Details of all Open Competitions since 1919 [1500 records]

Players The complete Senior Player Records as originally complied by Derek Scott. There are over 5,500 individual player records [from all Senior Clubs except Leinster and YMCA which are still being compiled]. There are also more than 22,000  annual records. All available for browsing online.

Representative All players [265] from the period of the ‘Guinness Cup’ from the early 1960s to 2004. 

Honour Boards Tables - those included in the Career Tables for batting, bowling, fielding in Leinster Senior Cricket. 

But there is still plenty of work remaining and we are hoping, in this period of enforced inactivity on the cricket field, that we can find some local club historians and other volunteers who will come together and continue the work of digitising club records. 

In the first instance we are looking to fill out the bare bones records for [a] winning teams and [b] senior players on the Honour Boards. What we need in both cases is a digital photo of the team / individual and in the case of the player a short biography. These can then be attached to the particular record in the online archive. 

A sample document has been created which will give you an idea of what we are looking for i.e. a photo and some background text.

There is plenty of other tasks for willing volunteers. The modern averages on Sportstatz only go back to 2011. There are, however, scorecards for earlier years. If anyone was interested in helping to enter the details into the electronic scorecards [as you would do for matches during the season] then we could extend the full averages on the website back beyond 2011. 

So if there is any club out there who has someone who is willing to take on the role of club historical / record keeper / archivist [you can choose your own job title] please let me know at cricketleinster@gmail.com. There is still a wealth of information from the Derek Scott archives that is waiting to be brought online.

Also if there are any volunteers that would be willing to take on some data entry tasks - let me know at the same e/mail address.