Cricsheet

How did this start?

Cricsheet was started in 2009. The inspiration for it came from a number of sources including Moneyball by Michael Lewis, a post on Pappus plane where he mentioned that he “would like there to be a cricket equivalent of Retrosheet”, and my discovery of the work Aneesh had put in at Against the Spin where he had generated data files for a number of T20 matches. As I had a question I was curious to answer I set about extracting more matches with extended information. A little while later I decided to create a site to put them, and Cricsheet was born.

I never have answered the question I was initially curious about. I have the data now, but I’m not entirely sure how to apply it to the problem!

The name

The name Cricsheet is a homage to Retrosheet the astoundingly impressive source of baseball event data.

The icons

The favicon, and various other versions of it used for the site, are based on the lovely Cricket Ball Seam by Liji Jinaraj.

He has kindly made it available under a Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-SA 2.0 licence, which our versions of those icons are also available under. Our gratitude to him.

The other icons come from the Noun Project. Specifically I use the “Structure” icon by Nikolay Necheuhin, and the “business contact” icon by Lakshisha.

Who is behind this?

That would be Stephen Rushe. He has written all of the code which extracts and validates the data, as well as developing the website. He also finds it strange to be writing about himself in the third-person.