| A common sight, post match in cricket clubs... |
Towards the end
of your cricket season you might finally notice someone who has followed the
team around all year. This person will go to home and away games and yet you
have never spoken to them. Who is this person who never speaks but carries a
variety of multicoloured pens around with them? And then it suddenly dawns on
you, it’s your scorer.
Scorers come in
all shapes, sizes, ages and genders. They range from the downright attractive
female to the socially inept single man. They are a breed who prefer to spend
their summers under cover, so the spring sees them having to disturb the local
vagrant who has inhabited their score box as their winter abode.
Scorers are stat-obsessed.
99.99% of them also suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. You mess with
their scorebook and this meek, mild-mannered individual who doesn’t say
anything all year will suddenly combust. Neatness and order are the hallmarks
of their work and they will go into huge bouts of depression should the coloured
pen they’ve used for the opening bowler suddenly run out in his fourth over. Some
have even been known to shout out to the skipper to take someone off rather
than have to use two colours for the same bowler. They also go mental if it
starts to rain and there’s no cover for them. To see their book, so lovingly
cared for, suddenly resemble an abstract finger painting that your 5-year-old
would bring back from primary school fills them with angst. Then the skipper goes
and leaves their book behind in the opposition clubhouse, leading to more
despondency.
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| Why scorers need up to date tetanus jabs |
The more
technologically advanced of this genus now carry laptops with them and go about
their weekly task online. The advent of apps such as Total Cricket Scorer and websites
like Play Cricket, mean that you can follow the fortunes of your club from
miles away. Many scoreboards are now electronic and the score can show on the
board from the safety of the pavilion, with batsmen’s scores, overs and even
runs required being sorted by a small contraption. The days of having to hook metal
numbers on to a board and cutting yourself on the rusty nail that they dangle on
are long gone. The scorers of yesteryear always had to have up-to-date tetanus
jabs.
Long gone, too,
are the rollers that required extreme precision to get the number just right so
the players could actually decipher the score. These would hang half way
between the numbers and gave a vigorous workout to all and sundry. You had to
be fit to be a good scorer back in the day. Some clubs still have the
drawstring ones that you have to pull down manually. Many a clubbie who has to
go into the box with the opposition scorer (due to your club not providing one),
will pull the string too hard leading to it coming off in his hand.
The other
contraption is the scoreboard that you have to turn the dials clockwise or anti-clockwise
to move the score. Often a standalone device, you still see this used when the
electronic scoreboard technology breaks down or if the host club have failed to
put 50p in the meter. These archaic boards have flummoxed many a club cricketer
over the years and watching your lads trying to work out how to operate one of
these is similar to watching a dyslexic read War and Peace. It’s normally at this point that the 12-year-old
opposition scorer steps in and sorts it out with a simple flick of the wrist.
The scorebox can
be a strange and unpleasant place. You wouldn’t venture into one for any reason
other than to score a game of cricket. Aside from being a great habitat for
tramps, they are littered with spiders, woodlice, earwigs and plagues of
insects that you’ve only read about in the Old Testament. There are holes in
the roof and in the floor, and a viewing hole at the front which is often
strategically placed to funnel bitter northerly winds in April. Others involve
climbing great heights too, often up precarious ladders and require crampons
and the like to get you safely back down.
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| The home of spiders, earwigs, woodlice and the winter abode of the local vagrant |
For those who
operate at ground level, the players don’t help them. Apart from losing a pen,
nothing winds the scorer up more than a group of players standing in front of
them so that they can’t see the action. This usually means that they miss a run
or a call of wide and get shouted at by the umpire for the lack of
acknowledgement on his signal. Scorers don’t like getting shouted at by umpires
and it’s usually by a player distracting them or standing in their line of
vision that’s the cause. The cry of ‘Scorers’ light’ will be heard if they are
polite, or ‘You don’t make a very good window, you know?’ Then you have the
batsman desperate to look at his runs in the book after a decent knock who
again will stand directly in front of the sight line of the scorer. Many
scorers give a more than passable impression of Bez out of the Happy Mondays as
they weave from side to side trying to get a glimpse of the action with players
in front of their beloved score box.
There are now
courses that these people can go on. The ECB’s Association of Cricket Officials
run not only courses for umpires but for scorers too.
It’s a tough job
being a scorer. I believe that a tenner is the going rate these days, which is
a vast improvement on the £1.50, a lemonade and a packet of crisps that I
started on as a 12-year-old in club cricket. There can be serious pressure at
times and woe betide them if they start to get the overs wrong in a tight finish.
I knew of one child in the past who just gave up and went home half way through
a game. It was only after 10 minutes when the board hadn’t moved and the umpire
was repeatedly shouting, ‘Telegraph’ from the middle that the players had
realised what had happened.
The scorer’s
life has become easier though. They don’t have to work out averages any more as
this is all done online, should someone have had the inclination to upload the
scorecard onto a cricket website. It has been known that when this is left to
some players, those that get a duck or go for no wickets for 50 runs off of six
overs can ‘forget’ to upload that scorecard. At the other extreme, the player
who scores big runs or takes a five-wicket haul will upload this within 10 minutes
of the game finishing.
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| "Bowler's name?" |
Sometimes a
scorer has to work alone due to the opposition not turning up with one. In this
instance they will send a lower-order player into the scorebox when they are
batting, but when they are fielding the solitary scorer has to manage
everything alone. It can also lead to some hilarious mistakes. The cry of the
question ‘bowler’s name?’ will be heard at this point and trying to hear the mumble
of a player in the wind from 70 yards away can often lead to the name being
entered incorrectly into the book. I have had a team mate called Flatt entered
into the book as Pratt in one of these instances and I dread to think what
Nottinghamshire’s Ben Duckett was deciphered into during junior cricket.
The scorer is
last to leave the field after a game, as they have to work out the bowling
figures. They are also the last to tea as well. Look after your scorer, they
save you a hell of a lot of hassle and should be treasured.
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