Plenty of clubs field a side in more than one competition in the same season, and most stats systems add the lot together. Here is why that happens, and how BetterCricket now pulls them apart.
A club recently asked us an interesting question. In a season, one of their teams plays in three separate competitions: a cup, a midweek competition and a divisional competition. On their stats page all records were added together. Could we break it down by competition?
We could not, at the time. We can now.
Most club cricket looks fairly simple from the outside. You play in an association, the association runs grades, and a season is the grades you competed in. Filter by season and grade and you have your stats.
A lot of clubs aren't organised that simply. One team plays across three different associations at the same time: its senior men's grades in one, its women's programme in another, an inclusive competition in a third. Another fields a single side in three competitions run by the one association. In both cases the previous BetterCricket season filter couldn't help, because all records were aggregated within the same season, and the grade filter only provides the right view if you already know which grades belong to which competition.
So the numbers were simply getting added together. A batting average across a cup, a midweek competition and a divisional competition is still a true number, but it doesn't tell the full story. It may not be a sufficiently accurate or detailed stat for a selector or captain looking to make a decision about a selection for a particular game, and it certainly doesn't give you the complete stats breakdown for that player across different competitions.
The obvious fix is to group on the competition itself, and that information isn't often available. A fixture generally tells us about the season, the grade, the match and the scorecard details, but the fixture usually doesn't automatically tell us which competition a grade is associated with. The competition or competitions that a grade participates in is usually well understood within the club, but it's just generally not recorded.
What a fixture does tell us, on every single grade, is the association that runs it. BetterCricket can work with that.
The association information alone gets most clubs to the right answer automatically. A club playing in three associations in one season now has its grades sorted in BetterCricket into three groups automatically, named after the associations.
If all three of a club's competitions are run by the same association, BetterCricket will initially put them in one bucket. A competition in BetterCricket is a named group of your own grades. In BetterCricket we seed it from the association. If you run several competitions under one association you need to split the competitions yourself in BetterCricket under the Manage Grades function: rename the initial group, add the other groups, then drag each grade into the right group.
Once a club admin has done this you're all set.
There is a Competition filter, sitting alongside the Grade Type and Match Type filters already on the dashboard, Leaderboard, Records, Players, Games and every player profile. Pick a Competition, plus batting, bowling, fielding to see your stats by competition.
Then there is a breakdown, because a filter tells you how you performed in one competition, not how records across competitions compare. Your club gets a Competitions page under Stats: your record in each competition, and under each one every grade that was played in it, which is where a side that turned out in two competitions in one summer finally reads as two separate stats. Every player profile has a Competitions tab providing the same breakdown for a player's batting, bowling and fielding.
If a club only plays in one competition, the viewer won't see these competition filters.
A competition stat has to come from scorecards, because the scorecard is where the grade is recorded. Clubs that import decades of history into BetterCricket from a spreadsheet or scorecards often have season totals with no grade details. In these cases those matches genuinely cannot be filed by competition.
We report them separately, with a count, rather than putting them in a competition they might not belong to. It means a per-competition breakdown will sometimes not add up to a career total, but the report will indicate this instead of leaving you to work it out.
Once you've set up your competition groups, all new match information will keep your stats updated correctly. The Manage Grades function will tell you how many seasons sit outside your competitions and provide an admin function to help match any historical records. The admin process runs in the background to help you clean your historical data.
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BetterCricket groups your grades into the competitions they were played in, automatically where we can and by hand where only the club knows. Search for your club at betterat.cricket/trial to get started. Learn more
Yes. BetterCricket has a Competition filter on the dashboard, Leaderboard, Records, Players, Games and every player profile, plus a breakdown that lists a club's record in each competition and a player's batting, bowling and fielding across all of them side by side.
That is the case this was built for. Each competition a side plays in is a different grade, so each reads separately once the grades are grouped. A player who turned out in a cup and a midweek competition in one summer gets a row for each.
A fixture tells us about the season, grade, match and scorecard information, but it doesn't tell us about the competition. It does name the association that runs each grade, so BetterCricket groups on that automatically and lets a club split it further where one association runs several competitions.
No. Grouping only changes how figures can be filtered and compared. Creating, renaming or deleting a competition never touches a game, a run or a wicket, and unfiltered totals stay exactly as they were.
Two different things can leave records outside a competition. An older season that has grades but was synced before you set your competitions up can be grouped: Manage Grades tells you how many such seasons there are and offers to fetch what it needs, running in the background with a progress bar and no rebuild of your data. History imported with no grade recorded against it at all cannot be filed under any competition, so it is reported separately with a count rather than being put in one it might not belong to. Either way those matches still count in every unfiltered figure on the site.