What is the ACS?
Who is the oldest man to hit a Test match century? What is the most expensive bowling analysis in first-class cricket? Does a match start with the toss, the call of ‘Play’ or the first delivery?
If you are intrigued by such conundrums, or if you’re interested in the origins and history of the game, you’ll find a group of like minds in the ACS. Founded in 1973, we are an international body represented in over 20 countries, and our members include most of the world’s leading cricket statisticians and several of its most accomplished historians and biographers.
Our principal purpose is ‘to promote and encourage research into the statistical and historical aspects of cricket throughout the world at all levels and to publish the findings’. Members of the ACS have significantly contributed to a wider understanding of the game and have led the way in uncovering many biographical details of first-class cricketers.
We have around 800 members all over the world. Membership is open to everyone – all you need to join us is to share our interest in the statistics and history of the game. The ACS aims to appeal to people with an interest in every form of the game. Read why TMS statistician Andy Zaltzman thinks you should join in An invitation to join the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (PDF).
Although in the past, much of its work has focused on men’s first-class cricket, more recently it has published material on women’s cricket and taken the lead, for example, on developing statistics for the new Hundred competition.
To encourage research work on a broad range of topics which are likely to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, the ACS will:
- continue to invite contributions to its activities from all its members;
- actively encourage new projects related to forms of cricket which have received less attention in the past (including recreational cricket, women’s cricket, disabled cricket etc);
- seek to take the lead in the collection of statistics for these and other under-researched aspects of the game;
- selectively offer financial support to worthwhile projects which are aligned with the ACS’s objectives; and
- make regular use of different social media platforms to engage with a more diverse audience.
Members receive our quarterly journal, The Cricket Statistician, and an annual voucher, currently worth £8, towards the cost of our printed publications. They are entitled to a 33% discount on subscriptions to the Cricket Archive website and to the CSW cricket database. Members can also join our email forum to share information, ask questions and chat about topical cricketing issues. Details about the email forum and discounts are available in the Members Area; any member who does not have the password for this page should contact webmaster@acscricket.com.
We publish a range of titles which are available in the ACS Online Shop.
The website includes several valuable research tools open to all visitors:
- The digitised version of Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game, the magazine which ran from 1882 to 1914.
- The ACS Online Cricket Records Section, which is updated on a daily basis and covers first-class cricket, Test cricket, List A, Twenty20 and women’s international cricket, with some minor cricket records too.
- The archive of The Cricket Statistician up to 2022 in digitised form; copies of more recent issues are still on sale in the shop.
- Our Research Section which contains further resources, including the first two parts of a massive A to Z of Kent Cricketers, compiled by Derek Carlaw and covering all Kent players who appeared between 1806 and 1999, plus County Cricket: Sundry Extras, biographical details compiled by David Jeater on over a thousand county cricketers with achievements in areas of public life away from cricket.
- Our Collaborative Research Projects – if you’d like to get involved in our research, there’s a list in the Research Section of collaborative projects we have set up since March 2020 on topics such as women’s cricket, league cricket, national competitions, county committees, scorebooks, cricketers who died in war, and more; do get in touch if you’d like to join in (contact details on the Collaborative Research Projects page).
- Our answers to a number of Frequently Asked Questions about the statistics and history of cricket
- Ask the ACS, a collection of statistical questions and answers on specialised one-off matters.
You can also follow the Association via Twitter, at @ACScricket; on Instagram, at acscricket; on Facebook, at Association of Cricket Statisticians & Historians; on YouTube, at ACScricket; on Mastodon, at @ACScricket@mstdn.social; on Bluesky at @ACScricket.bsky.social; and on Substack at acscricket.substack.com (more details here).
You can watch a video interview with founder Robert Brooke on the ACS YouTube channel, and read more about the formation and earlier years of the ACS, and about the individuals whose hugely-valued efforts set us on our current path, in Twenty-One Years of the ACS, by our late President, Richard Streeton.
If you are looking for an answer to any question about cricket, seeking clarification about a particular record or feat, or searching for information on a team or a particular player, please send an email to secretary@acscricket.com and the Secretary will point you in the right direction.
AGM 2026
The 53rd AGM of the ACS will held via Zoom on Saturday 21 March 2026; members will be sent details nearer the time.
The Minutes of the 2025 AGM, plus a recording (lasting 53 minutes), are available in the password-protected Members Area.
Latest publications
Our November publications are now available in the shop, and two of them commemorate distinguished ACS members who died in 2025.
The latest issue of our quarterly journal The Cricket Statistician pays tribute to Robert Brooke, who co-founded the Association in 1973, and also features Simon Wilde on the legacy of Gilbert Jessop’s famously fast (but how fast?) Test hundred, and David Frith’s reflections on his career as a cricket magazine editor.
We are proud to present Christianity at the Crease: Cricket and the Church, the final book by Eric Midwinter. It examines the long entanglement of cricket and the church, which sometimes frowned upon the sport, and sometimes found it a useful tool. As well as 17th-century Puritanism and Victorian Anglicanism, the book examines the later decline in formal Christian belief, alongside the commercialisation of professional cricket.
In The Hills of Rookwood: An Exceptional Sporting Family, Andrew Hignell tells the story of Sir Edward Stock Hill, a prominent 19th-century businessman, and his family, during a pivotal period in cricket’s evolution in South Wales, either side of the First World War. Hill’s sons and grandsons played county and representative cricket, while his daughters were pioneers in the women’s game.
Still selling well is Mick Pope’s popular biography of Northamptonshire opener Fred Bakewell, who scored 14,570 first-class runs between 1928 and 1936, and won six Test caps for England. RC Robertson-Glasgow thought Bakewell ‘could have batted with Bradman on not uneven terms’. But his career was ended by a road accident straight after scoring 241 not out at Chesterfield, and his life descended into chaos, with a messy divorce, money troubles and charges of theft.
Loose Ends, the final volume in our ‘Hard to Get’ series, collating first-class scorecards not readily available in printed form, has a dual function. It ties up loose ends by including a further 210 scorecards outside the scope of the previous books, and serves as a guide to the publications in which first-class scores may be found: not only ACS publications such as the ‘Green’ series, but national annuals, compilations, and of course Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
The 40th edition of our Second Eleven Annual 2025 provides details of performances in the 2024 Second Eleven Championship (won by Nottinghamshire) and Twenty20 competition (won by Somerset), along with a Who’s Who of cricketers who played in those tournaments, and updated Second Eleven records. It also includes details of the South Asian Cricket Academy.
In Brick by Brick, Max Bonnell explores the Australian tour of 1964. A touring team derided as the weakest Australian side to visit England won the Ashes in a damp and occasionally controversial series, while 13 years of Conservative government were ended by an election presented as a choice between a revitalised country and the class-ridden shackles of the past. Cricket stood at a similar crossroads, having abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals, and introduced one-day professional cricket.
Other recent publications include The Dream That Died: Gwilym Rowland and Welsh Cricket, Andrew Hignell’s account of Gwilym Evans Rowland, a businessman who tried to raise cricket’s profile in Wales by creating a team which played home internationals against Scotland and Ireland and appeared at Lord’s. But after his business went into liquidation, he ended penniless, and his body was found in a ditch in 1938.
The 16th edition of the Overseas First-Class Annual covers all first-class cricket worldwide in 2023/24, and includes 559 full scorecards, plus brief narratives and league tables of each country’s first-class tournaments.
All books published in the last year which remain in stock appear under Latest Publications. Many earlier publications are available in the online shop, including extra copies of the ACS Journal, The Cricket Statistician.
If you need to get in touch with ACS Sales, their contact details are here.
ACS members online meetings in October
We ran an online event for our members worldwide on 4 October. The schedule included:
- Mick Pope on his book Fred Bakewell: ‘Among the Bright Colours’
- Raf Nicholson, Guardian cricket writer and historian, on the state of women’s cricket and her research on its history
- Andrew Hignell on his book The Dream That Died: Gwilym Rowland and Welsh Cricket
- Andrew Radd on Northamptonshire CCC
- David Griffin on Derbyshire CCC and Photography
- John Bryant, ACS Chair, bringing members up to date.
A further online members event, an interview with Australian statistician and ACS committee member Ric Finlay, was held on 27 October.
Recordings of both sessions are available in the password-protected Members Area.
Robert Brooke, Eric Midwinter and Brian Croudy
The ACS has lost three distinguished members in the past few months.
Robert Brooke, who died in May, was the co-founder and former chair of the ACS; his obituary includes a video interview, quotes from his famously forthright book reviews, and members’ tributes. The November edition of The Cricket Statistician focuses on his life and work.
Eric Midwinter, the distinguished historian who served as ACS president, died in August. He wrote more than 50 books, including several ACS titles: we have just published his final work, Christianity at the Crease. His obituary appears on this site, as well as an appreciation to mark his being awarded the Brooke-Lambert Trophy in 2019.
Former committee member Brian Croudy, who used to organise regular London meetings, died in September. As well as his obituary, you can read the citation for Brian when he was named Statistician of the Year for 1999.
Andrew Radd presented with Brooke-Lambert Trophy
Cricket writer and broadcaster Andrew Radd finally got his hands on the ACS Brooke-Lambert Trophy at Northampton in June.
Andrew was declared the winner of the annual award at the ACS AGM in March, which was held online, but there was an official presentation ceremony, attended by ACS and Northamptonshire CCC representatives, during the county’s Championship match against Middlesex.
Hampshire Cricket in the Eighteenth Century
Dave Allen, director of Hampshire Cricket Heritage and an ACS member, has recently published Hampshire Cricket in the Eighteenth Century, a companion volume to Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth Century, Tim J McCann’s comprehensive chronological collection of references to cricket in that period, which earned him the Statistician of the Year award in 2004.
Tim had already done much of the work on the Hampshire project before he died in 2022. After receiving a digital copy from Tim’s wife Alison, Dave has been able to complete it, and it is now available from the Hampshire Cricket Heritage website.
He hopes to incorporate comments and amendments from other ACS members into a revised edition; in the meantime, he has provided a PDF bulletin on the amendments accepted to date.
Peter Wynne-Thomas research
on cricketers available online
The late Peter Wynne-Thomas, our long-serving honorary secretary, collected huge amounts of information on first-class cricketers while researching the Who’s Who of Cricketers which he compiled with Philip Bailey and Philip Thorn (first edition 1984), and continued to add occasional notes, newspaper cuttings, photographs, etc after the book was published.
All of this material was kept in a four-drawer filing cabinet at the Trent Bridge Library, and we are grateful to Nottinghamshire CCC for allowing us to digitise it. You can now view 6,890 pages of Peter’s research in our online folders.
Members’ Marketplace
The ACS has launched a Members’ Marketplace to facilitate members selling cricket-related printed material (books, magazines, scorebooks, scorecards, etc) to each other. The marketplace will operate on a similar basis to small ads, so any transaction will be between the buyer and the seller; the ACS will not act as an agent, will take no fee, and will not guarantee the description or condition of any items. Instructions for using the marketplace are on the webpage.
We have now added an Items Wanted page where members may request items they are looking for, so do look if you think you might be able to help.
ACS Statistics Logistics sub-group
The ACS has created a Statistics Logistics sub-group drawn from the ACS committee, members of the Association, and members of the scoring and umpiring community, to discuss and advise on the recording or calculation of cricket statistics.
The group’s answers to a batch of questions, and explanations of how they reached their decisions, are available in a PDF document here.
The group has also discussed how to treat statistics for the ECB’s 100-ball competition, after consultation with ACS members, ECB officials, Wisden and Cricket Archive. Their advice on how to handle statistics for The Hundred is available in pdf form here.
Diversity and Equality Statement
The ACS Diversity and Equality Statement sets out the Association’s objective of seeking to appeal to people with an interest in every form of the game.
It recognises that, although in the past much of its work has focused on men’s first-class cricket, more recently it has published material on women’s cricket and taken the lead, for example, on developing statistics for the new Hundred competition.
The statement sets out ways in which the ACS will seek to encourage research work on a broad range of topics, designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. These include continuing to invite contributions to its activities from all members, actively encouraging new projects related to forms of cricket that have received less attention in the past, and seeking to lead on the collection of statistics for under-researched aspects of the game.
More ACS news
A summary of recent website updates
Join the ACS
If you are not yet a member of the Association, we very much hope that you will consider joining. Click on Join the ACS and follow the links and instructions there.
There is an option of digital membership, for those who prefer to receive the quarterly mailing in electronic form.
Once you have joined, you will have access to the Members Area and can subscribe to the Members’ Email Forum. Members can obtain the password for the Members Area by sending an email to webmaster@acscricket.com.