From the author of CCA
Back in the mid-1980’s, at the end of each season, I used to prepare my club’s averages using 3 spreadsheets, one for batting, one for bowling and one for catches; very basic and somewhat error-prone. Then, when my professional career moved into an IT Analyst/Programmer role in the late-1980’s I could see how easily a simple relational database system could be used for this labour-intensive task. The vision of Score Book Analyst (the precursor to CCA) had begun. During the next few years I gradually developed the system, purely for my own (club’s) benefit, to make averages more simple to produce at the end of each season and to be able to report cumulatively and selectively on any and every match over multiple seasons.
Then a colleague from the British Computer Society got wind of what I had developed and asked if he could have a copy to evaluate for his Cricket Club. After a short while he came back to me and said he really liked it and that I should make it available to every club. He suggested a few people he already knew who played for other clubs who he thought would be interested and they became my “SBA Beta Testers”. Having incorporated many of their suggestions and ideas for additional functionality, release 1.2E was distributed at the beginning of 1994 to all the clubs that my club played against. The product back then was a “DOS” based application to ensure that it would be usable by as wide an audience as possible. Windows, and the use of personal computers, was not as widespread then as it is today.
Initial uptake was slow and interest varied with the home PC market still evolving. Over the next few years, 4 further releases of SBA were made, each one adding more functionality and options for analysis and statistics. Things like, toss analysis, duck analysis and wicketkeeper analysis are all now included but could not have been contemplated in the old spreadsheet-method days. But PC power for number-crunching was growing fast.
The product has now been in use for many years and is a mature, stable, and well tested system. I’m personally not interested in marketing and selling for profit. What I want to do is enable all clubs to benefit from my hard work (not to mention the many late nights burning the midnight oil) in making the creation of cricket averages and statistics for every club as painless as possible but maintaining speed and accuracy. The notional fee for registration is never going to pay me back for all those hours. But I’m sure all the clubs that have registered have saved themselves hours of tedious effort in exchange for their small investment.
In 2024 SBA underwent a significant overhaul, refresh and upgrade, adding new analysis functions (dot-ball & MVP to name but two), enhanced printing functionality (can print to text, PDF or any installed printer) and modified to operate with all versions of MS Windows. Finally, SBA was rebranded as CLUB CRICKET ANALYTICS (CCA). With the global growth in the use of Play-Cricket, and especially electronic scoring, CCA now has an IMPORT match function that works for all matches scored using Play-Cricket’s PCS Pro scoring software. This vastly speeds up and simplifies match data entry and also minimises typo inaccuracy errors.
Please give CCA a try. If you don’t like it, send in your suggestions to let us know what you didn’t like. Suggestions for improvements and new functionality are always actively encouraged and welcome, as is any feedback (both good and/or bad). All suggestions will be given serious consideration for inclusion into future CCA enhancements.
Thanks for your time …
Martin
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