From a fading list of phone numbers to the digital stats that matter

These days, it’s called MyCricket, and if you’ve played for a cricket club in Australia in the last two decades, you’ll be nodding in recognition.

Grassroots cricket guys David and Peter Macaulay of Interact Sport Picture: Aaron Francis

I’m 21. My old club mates Dave and Pete Macaulay are 29 and 30 respectively. My friend Andrew Walton is 212.

These days, it’s called MyCricket, and if you’ve played for a cricket club in Australia in the last two decades, you’ll be nodding in recognition — it is the taken-for-granted maid-of-all-work in club management across the country, also adapted for use in rugby, netball and swimming in Australia and the UK.

Twenty years ago it was nothing very much at all — just an idea kicked around from time to time on the balcony at the cricket club we played for, and I still do, the Yarras.

But last week, the aforementioned founders of what became Interact Sport sold out to Sportradar, a big sports data provider with an integrity speciality and a growing interest in cricket.

The sale gave me pause, because I was, as it were, present at the creation. I was then the Yarras’ chairman of selectors, working in the fashion of such officials at sporting clubs since time immemorial.

Availabilities were ascertained anecdotally: so-and-so could play this week not next and only if he didn’t pull a night shift at 7-Eleven, he would let you know if he remembered; what’s-his-name had a mate who last played 20 years ago but reckoned he’d like a game assuming we didn’t object to his prosthetic leg.

I had a fading photostatted list of phone numbers through which I worked steadily over the course of the week, the last few of which were guys who had once played back in the day, who hadn’t changed their numbers, and who would laugh sympathetically at the sound of my plaintive voice because they knew if they were in the picture we were desperate.

On finishing a game, the process was a slight advance on clay tablets.

The captain would scribble out a summary score, and dictate it onto the association answering machine.

Collated by the match secretary, these results were then faxed to a newspaper, where one assumes they were manually keyed in also.

The association updated the ladder twice a season. You did not see “stats” at the Yarras until presentation night, and then only because Pete and Dave, who were handy at this stuff, had created a spreadsheet they called Stat Man.

This harked back to a season where our opening bowler had spat the dummy because we mistakenly turned a seven-for into a three-for and cost him the bowling trophy — we never saw him again. If you’re out there, sorry.

The initial spur for what started out as Results Vault was Dave building our club a website — one of Australia’s very first.

One day on the balcony of our clubrooms at Como Park in March 2000, Pete (1sts captain), Dave (2nds captain) and Andrew (coach) wondered aloud: wouldn’t it be great if the website had all our old scores and stats?

Crazy talk, right? But that old phone list enabled us to track down a bunch of past captains, who amazingly had not yet discarded their old scorebooks (with the exception of the 1987-88 A-grade book, which in Yarras folklore is like the lost plays of Aeschylus).

The task of entering these on ResultsVault was divvied up — imagine, if you will, the task of decrypting handwritings, scribbles and crossings-out decades old.

But a week before the 2001-02 season, the career data on players was spilled into the new system in alphabetical order.

So tiny a club were we that there was no player whose surname started with A: the event became known as Bill Bennett Day, for the first name on the list; I owe my eminence solely to my surname starting with H.

It occurred to Pete, Dave and Andrew that what was useful to us might interest others. There were, after all, more than 100 cricket associations in Victoria doing their chores in manual ways little changed in a century. They did a mail-out survey. They started knocking on doors, especially gregarious Andrew, a natural salesman.

In hindsight, this was pretty gutsy. Modems still dialled up. Cricket Australia did not even own their website. The state associations, with the praiseworthy exception of Western Australia, then thought that they could roll out their own management systems, and duly squandered millions.

To Melbourne premier clubs, by contrast, the trio at first offered ResultsVault for free, running it on two old desktop computers in Pete’s flat in Richmond, then from the back room of an indoor cricket centre they leased.

But it succeeded, which is a case study worthy of Harvard Business Review, given that the guys had an advertising/marketing budget of nil, and social media was undreamed-of.

The simplest explanation is that the service was designed by cricketers for cricketers, flexibly and incrementally, with the added benefit of instant feedback from users, including themselves, including me.

The idea of an email availability mail-out, for example, came from our third XI captain at a selection meeting.

This was a breakthrough because, it turned out, people were starting to answer email more reliably than the phone — although I held onto that tattered list of numbers for a few more years, just in case.

By 2007, what was now Interact led a market that they had essentially created, and for which CA belatedly realised they needed a partner. The tender documents went in the day before Pete got married; in his wedding photos he looks like a man who has not slept for a week, which he reckons he hadn’t.

It paid off. Interact became a supplier to CA, MyCricket was rolled out in 2008-09, and the work of club secretaries, statisticians, selectors and historians was slashed — while still, make no mistake, remaining damn heavy, but not needlessly so.

When Andrew decided to concentrate on his coaching, he was succeeded as CEO by Sam Taylor, who had gone from selling Powerades and Pythons at the indoor cricket centre to handling major clients via manning the MyCricket helpdesk. Sam is 599 on MyCricket, having played 382 games for Richmond.

This counts; it always has. Pete observed last week that cricket hallows figures: “People are very protective of their MyCricket stats, because there’s no other game that has that historical legacy where scores are concerned.”

And I can say this because they’re too self-effacing, but Pete, Dave, Waldo and Sam, unassuming grassroots cricket guys, have made a more meaningful contribution to cricket than 99 per cent of professional administrators.

They’re not moving on yet, by the way. There’s a transition period involved; their business is now far more diverse; Interact is now heavily involved in FrogBox, a video app that allows sporting clubs to live-stream games.

It’s Interact’s growing suite of other data products, meanwhile, that have engaged the interest of Sportradar, including what their local director Dave Edwards described to me as “a potentially game-changing data collection tool for cricket, which we think has the potential to revolutionise how the story of cricket is communicated to fans”. Hmmm. Nice.

Edwards, by the way, is one of the original members of the Grade Cricketer, and 103507, a veritable newbie, on MyCricket. He also has a Yarras connection, having, like virtually everyone I know, once been roped in for a game at Como Park.

Me? I’m still hanging on, reinforced by there being somewhere I am 21 forever.