9 new countries, 91 new matches

Posted: 6th of January, 2014

3 months ago, in October, we said that we would need to give some further thought as to how we will deal with T20 matches that aren’t regarded by the ICC as ‘T20 Internationals’.

Well we’ve reached a conclusion, and implemented it. We’ve just updated the site with 91 new data files, including 53 international T20 matches (not T20s internationals), and added an extra 9 countries to those we have some data for, namely Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Namibia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, and the USA. All 53 of these matches come from the World T20 Qualifier in November 2013. The match_type used for these matches is IT20, meaning “International T20”.

What is the difference between a T20 International and an International T20?

“T20 International” and “International T20” sound like they refer to the same type of match, but there is a subtle difference. A “T20 International” is a match that is recognised by the ICC as being a full international. This means a match between Full Members or those Associates and Affiliates to whom the ICC has “granted” T20 status. An “International T20” is the name we’re using to cover all other international T20 matches, such as those involving a country that hasn’t been granted T20 status.

Confusingly a country can play both types of T20. Ireland did so during the World T20 Qualifiers, playing a “T20 international” against Canada in the group stage while playing “International T20s” in the other group matches.

We don’t think the distinction should exist. If a match is played between any two countries and follows the T20 rules we think it should have the same status as any other similar match. The ICC disagree sadly and we note the difference for accuracy.

What about One-day matches that aren’t ODIs?

We don’t currently have any non-ODI one-day matches on the site. We’ll start adding these when the World Cup Qualifiers start in a weeks time. These will slowly appear on the site with a match_type of ODM.

We will look into adding older data for these types of match too, however finding the data will be the main problem as always. It’s rare that ball-by-ball commentary is provided for these matches, and it’s even more rare for it to be accurate when it is done, sadly. We’re quite good at fixing errors by now (practice will do that) but some sources are so catastrophically bad that we have to just throw our hands up and walk away.