Not as Simple as one, two, three!

THAILAND TAKES ITS PLACE AT INAUGURAL COURSE FOR SCORERS

Thailand were among 17 countries represented at the first ever Asian Cricket Council Scorer Educators Course that was held in Kathmandu in Nepal from 3rd to 5th September 2012 and the three days proved a tough test for some of the leading scorers in Asia.

This new ACC course was being staged so that uniformly high standards could be achieved across all the countries in Asia. All tournaments would be scored in the same way with a high level of accuracy and all matches would eventually be scored using the same computer software.

The turn-out for the course staged by the Cricket Association of Nepal in tandem with the ACC was an impressive one with Thailand joined by representatives from Bahrain, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and UAE: truly an A to Z of Asian cricket outside of the Test playing nations. Korea were also invited as they will be hosting the next Asian Games at which cricket will play its part.

The course began with an opening ceremony with a welcome to Nepal from the CAN and from the Sports Ministry on behalf of the Nepal government. ACC Chief Executive Ashraful Haq and Development Manager Bandula Warnapura both stressed the importance of the course and how it would be the responsibility of all present to train new scorers and raise standards in each country.

ACC Resource Persons Bomi Jamula from India and Peter Manuel from Sri Lanka were responsible for running the course, alongside Sunil Landge who is an experienced scorer for the BCCI who has also developed his own software for scoring cricket matches.

As is fitting for a cricket course, the three days were divided into sessions for lunch and tea and often play had to be extended into the extra half hour at the end of the day, as so much material was covered in the course.

All techniques of scoring were expained in great detail – box scoring where immaculate scoresheets are filled in with coloured pens; linear scoring where a complex grid of lines and columns is continually updated to uncover the complete record of a match at any stage; and finally computer scoring where an Excel spreadsheet was filled in by the scorer and all the arithmetic calculated automatically.

As well as learning about the intricacies of scoring itself, the participants were helped through many of the more complex Laws of Cricket, and many of the complicated calculations that scorers have to cope with at higher levels of cricket were also described.

A very enjoyable dinner was staged at the end of the second day so that scorers from so many different countries had a perfect opportunity to socialise together and to compare notes on their experiences both at the course and back at home in their own countries.

But this was the lull before the storm as the last day was filled with revision of all that had been learnt and then a series of exams and practical tests put the scorers through their paces. The final torture for all the students was to watch a video made up of all the most unlikely things that can ever happen at a cricket match and have to try to score the match both on paper and on computer.

There was quite a variety of final totals when the video was finally turned off but that just made everybody all the more determined to go back home and to put into practice every detail that had learned on the course.

A hard but enjoyable three days work was completed by the presentation of certificates, team photos, and pen drives with all the course notes and software on them; finally there was a rousing farewell from Bandula in which he congratulated all the scorers for their hard work but urged them that they must go home and immediately start work on training others. The course was attended by Rattanaporn Padunglerd and Richard Lockwood from Cricket Association Of Thailand.

By- Richard Lockwood