HowzStat : General Information

General Information About HowzStat

HowzStat lives on the UNIX filesystem that resides in the School of Earth Sciences, in the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. I have essentially digitised all scorecards of every Test, a process which took 2 years of me spending a few hours a week when I got bored with work or study. At first the cards were manually digitized, with each player "owning" a unique file that contained his biographical data and match analyses. A suite of FORTRAN programs (yes, FORTRAN! I am a scientist after all) and C-Shell scripts then process the data and return the various averages and totals that you see displayed. The advantage of this approach is its flexibilty, both in terms of adding more statistical features, as well as expanding the database to incorporate limited-overs matches, or first class matches. It is also simple to keep adding new matches, thus keeping the database up-to-date.

Thanks to the availability of consistently formatted scorecards from CricInfo (see below), I was able to automate the digitisation process. Thus I was able to process 70% of all the Test matches in the past 6 months, as well as add a lot more detail. Furthermore, it only took 1 month to create the one-day international archive.

Due to this automatic generation I am confident (within reasonable limits) of the accuracy and precision of the statistics contained in this site. I have exhaustively checked my Test totals against official figures found in Wisden. I am basically aiming for a standard which allows the professional cricket statistician or serious enthusiast to utilize this data, secure in the knowledge that he/she won't be hampered by bugs or errors. I have also closely checked the biographical data. If you believe that you have found an error or oversight (for example, first class teams can be hard to keep up with), then don't hesitate to mail and let me know.

Finally, a big thank you to Andrew Watkins, (colleague and fellow biking loony) for providing the name of this site. After discovering that "KwikStat" was the name of some bit of software originating from Texas, I was a bit stuck for a good name. "The Heavy Roller" was rejected as being a little enigmatic, while "Just Short of a Good Length" did not perhaps show the site's maintainer in the best possible light. Luckily Andrew, that font of all groan-inducing puns, came to the rescue.

References


M. Engel (ed.)		Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.
			131st-133rd ed., John Wisden and Co. Ltd., 1994-1996

W.H. Frindall		The Wisden Book of Test Cricket Vol. II 1977-1994
			4th edition, Headline, 779 pp., 1995

C. Martin-Jenkins	The Complete Who's Who of Test Cricketers
			Rigby, 487 pp., 1983

CricInfo

This a link to CricInfo's Australian mirror. CricInfo is a free-of-charge database that aims to provide complete coverage of international and first class cricket, whether it be in the form of scorecards, match reports, player profiles, statistics .. you name it, and chances are CricInfo will have a mention of it somewhere. CricInfo is easily the most extensive cricket resource on the Internet, and acts as a focal point for other cricket-related sites on the Net and WWW. The database is run by a team of 30 or so voluntary managers (of which I am one).

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Cricket's CRICKET A site about West Indies cricket, with up-to-date news and articles by Tony Cozier

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