Scroll down if you want further information about the Wisden 2021 special supplement.
***
The start of term this week heralds great uncertainty about how much inter-school cricket will actually be played. I wrote at some length about this last week which you can see here. With a large number of schools playing fixtures either not at all until (mostly) after half-term or at best only within a small bubble of local schools, a correspondingly large number of schools willing to play are left with no opposition.
Many schools – unwisely in my view – cancelled fixtures weeks ago. Others waited until about now to decide after seeing what the Covid figures showed. As they actually show a continued decline in hospitalisations and deaths, it would be nice to think that they would be bold and honour arranged fixtures, albeit with inconveniences surrounding travel, changing-rooms etc.
Two scientific observations seem not to have percolated through to the public very widely: a) it is very rare to contract the disease outdoors unless in extremely close contact for several minutes and b) it is even rarer to catch the disease from surfaces which makes the billions spent on sanitising everything every five seconds a vast amount of money spent unnecessarily.
The National Twenty20 competition should be having its biggest round either this Sunday or midweek three days afterwards and that too is hedged about with much uncertainty. Once the first stage – group winners – has been passed, then pressure should ease.
I recently strongly recommended that schools should adopt the ECB’s hugely improved Play-Cricket Pro scoring system (see electronic scoring). The only problem is that it doesn’t yet have the widget that the othes do to send the result almost automatically. They are planning to link it into the play-cricket website so that you are in effect sending the result to both at the same time. But that is not likely to happen this season. So in the meantime you do have to use traditional methods, ie typing a single line with the result. Absolutely nothing else is needed.
For example, for an overs match show the type of match it is, NOT the number of overs actually bowled. Thus
*Forest 189-6 (40 overs), Brentwood 183-9
For a declaration match, put “dec” if the side declared, but nothing if they are all out. Thus
*Forest 189-6 dec, Brentwood 183-9
or
*Forest 189, Brentwood 183-9
You will see that this shows that the first one is a win for Forest but the second in both cases is a draw.
Click on the guidelines below for much fuller, well, guidelines.
Results:
MCC 218-9 (40 overs) (R Noble 6-45), *Stowe 219-6
*Stowe 157, Framlingham 135
Guidelines for sending results
***
Wisden 2021 special supplement
For the briefest of introductions to the schools section you can read the Wisden 2021 Press release. We are delighted to publish simultaneously an extended supplement to the main article in the printed version. We’d strongly urge you to read the printed version first, in order to put the supplement intro perspective. Click on the link to read in full the Wisden Schools Cricketer of the Year – a retrospective
As you will realise there cannot possibly be anything like the normal schools cricket section covering the non-season of 2020, and so there is a very unusual special schools section instead. It is so massive in its extent that Wisden itself is publishing only the main part of it. We are privileged to offer a supplement which includes a vast amount of data which Wisden could not possibly find space for.
Here are the details for ordering Wisden 2021 at a substantial discount:
For schools (including members of staff, pupils and parents) who wish to order the new edition of Wisden annually, the best price available is the less-than-half-price (£25) offer if you take out a subscription. To subscribe, please visit: www.wisdenalmanack.com/subscribe.
For those who prefer not to subscribe, the 2021 edition (hardback or soft cover) can be ordered for £35 (post free) from www.wisdenalmanack.com/2021. The large format edition and Shorter Wisden ebook can also be ordered via this link.
The hardback or soft cover edition can also be ordered for the discounted price of £35 (post free) by phoning 01256 302692 (choose option 1 followed by option 1 again) and quoting the discount code “GLR UK7”. The large format edition can also be ordered for £55 (post free) by quoting “GLR UK7”.