The county scorers are maintaining a diplomatic silence over the appointment of nine new analysts employed by Opta, the sports data specialists, who will circulate details of county matches to the media this coming season.
Scorers have previously supplied the information through the Press Association, and received a fee to supplement their arrangements with their county employers. So the deal that has been agreed with Opta by the England and Wales Cricket Board will hit them financially, although it is the logistical problems of the new arrangements that have caused the most concern.
“There just won’t be room at a lot of the grounds for the guys from Opta to sit with us,” said one scorer, after a pre-season meeting with Opta in Derby last week. “That means they’re going to be sitting somewhere else on their own, and scoring a match on your own is difficult verging on impossible. I can see there being a lot of teething troubles, put it that way.”
However the ECB point out that Opta will be able to provide a much more detailed and varied range of statistics than the scorers. The company, which was founded in 1996, now have nine offices worldwide, and their data on other sports is already widely used by newspapers and broadcasters in Britain and abroad, most obviously on Premier League football but also rugby union and rugby league.
Whatever the merits, or otherwise, of this deal between the ECB and Opta I just hope that the Umpires and Scorers remain responsible for the score.
I have been reliably informed that the ICC insist on an electronic scoreboard. How long before they are displaying the truly interesting fact that a batsman has hit the 132nd boundary of his career or that for the 48th time since Whitsun a bowler has had an LBW appeal turned down. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.)
Then again having enjoyed a lot of cricket at Liverpool last year I’d welcome a return to a proper scoreboard.
Three points on the ECB-Opta contract.
(1) It is a commercial deal. Scorers were not consulted but presented with a fait accompli. Consequently, there were a number of operational and logistical issues that were not considered.
(2) Opta were given the opportunity to ‘bolt on’ the role of analyst to that of those scorers willing and able to operate the system. They declined that option and chose instead to employ their own analysts. As a result, although scorers will work with the Opta people, there will be two versions of events – the one kept by the official scorers and the one transmitted to the outside world by Opta. With a bit of luck they should coincide, but duplicating the data increases the possibility of error and risks reducing the quality of service to the game.
(3) Top of the ‘market sectors’ served by Opta (according to their own website) -is betting and gaming. This may be seen as sitting uneasily alongside the ECB’s anti-corruption code and its prohibition on the disclosure of inside information which could be used for betting. Betting of course is not synonomous with corruption, but it’s perhaps sufficiently close to be a matter of concern.