Cricket Leinster are currently digitising our archives back to the start of the league in 1919. Scores and averages were meticulously kept, but I’d love to hear an opinion on a problem we have with many of the earlier matches.
Once thing that was not recorded was the winning margin. So we know who won each match, but it is not always possible to work out who batted first. And this is further complicated by it being fairly common for the side batting second to continue batting when they passed the total of the side batting first.
So a typical score could be Dublin University (200-6) beat Royal Hibernian Military School (85 ao). We had assumed that Dublin University won by 115 runs, but in fact it turns out that batted second, and batted on after passing the RHMS total.
Has anyone experienced something similar before? And is there any convention for recording such results?
Not sure if its convention but our competition has had various rule changes over the year for the number of overs faced per team and stopping when you pass the opp score. The way I’ve done the result like your example is in “runs“ if you continue past the opp score - as both teams were able to face the same amount of overs but one team didn’t do it. So for example if you had a match that was 75 overs each, and if the first team made 150 all out in 50 overs and the team batting 2nd passed this score and continued to their allotted 75 overs and made 6/200 the result in my view would be a win by 50 runs and not 6 wkts.
I just keep it simple and say x beat y by 23 runs.
I spent a fair bit of time last off season going back over all our match results and checking each one and amending them accordingly, as the result descriptions in our database were fairly inconsistent with what i described above.
I am now happy with the way our results are now reported in our database, which includes our association changing the way matches finishes every couple of seasons eg
- match finishes once the opp score is passed,
- match finishes once a min over is achieved,
- match finishes when a max over is reached...