About

The Women's Provincial Cricket Database is an independent archive of South African women's domestic cricket. The aim is to make the history of the provincial game easier to access through statistics, records and historical information. It contains data from 1,835 matches, at 171 venues, involving 1,723 players.

For completeness, the data starts at the 2005/06 season. It is the furthest back I can go before seasons have missing or incomplete scorecards. Without all the scorecards from a season, it's not possible to have accurate records, specifically sections like most runs in a season or most wickets in a season.

The part affected the most by this is player career statistics, as they are only 100% accurate for players who made their debut during or after the 2005/06 season. Anyone who made their debut before that will logically have missing performances.

In the most basic sense (who scored runs, who took wickets), all the matches have scorecards. But in terms of what is in the scorecards, it's a bit different. When looking at aspects like balls faced, dismissal method, or extras bowled, the scorecards are 99.47% complete. This mostly involves smaller unions playing a match at a recreational venue or school. These matches were excluded when calculating records like strike-rate and extras bowled.

The data does not contain all domestic women's List A and T20 competitions played in SA during this period. Over the years CSA have organised regional competitions, usually containing 4 teams. Not all these competitions have scorecards available, and it was decided to narrow the scope to only provincial cricket.

The competitions excluded from the data:

• CSA Women's Regional Super 4 T20 Competition 2012/13
• CSA Women's Regional Super 4 One-Day Competition 2012/13
• CSA Women's Regional Super 4 T20 Competition 2013/14
• CSA Women's Regional Super 4 One-Day Competition 2013/14
• CSA Women's Super League 2019/20
• CSA Women's T20 Super League 2019/20
• CSA Women's T20 Super League 2020/21
• CSA Women's T20 Super League 2022/23

Another competition competition played in recent seasons is the Global Cricket Tournament. While this competition does involve provincial teams, it's a mid-season mini-competition organised by the Titans Cricket Union and not CSA. Given the small number of teams, and the fact it's not a CSA competition, it is also excluded.

The 21 seasons contained in the dataset has a number of different competition structures and formats. This includes seasons where there are no divisions but instead geographic pools, usually two or three of them. To still be able to filter out performances against smaller unions, I set up a proxy division system for the seasons without clear divisions. Proxy Division 1 is the top 6 teams as listed on the end-of-season standings, with the rest of the teams in Division 2. Seasons using proxy divisions instead of actual ones:

• 2005/06
• 2006/07
• 2007/08
• 2009/10
• 2010/11
• 2011/12
• 2012/13
• 2013/14

The 2020/21 season had the teams playing in 4 bio-bubble groups, with no points standings, therefore it has no division split.

Of the 1,723 players, 632 of them only have initials and no first name. Unfortunately this is somewhat a reflection of the record-keeping of the era. Here's a look at the raw data: 1,776 unique players were found in the data, around 780 of them with only initials and surname. Of those I identified 53 duplicate players; these instances had their records merged, in order to be more accurate. For the rest, I spent over 50 hours trying to find first names for players: internet searches, news articles, CSA's site on archive.org, obscure team lists from the old Cricinfo site, and social media posts by provincial unions. About 150 players were identified this way.

All players with at least 500 career runs or 40 career wickets have been positively identified. Along with this, I also have first names for every single player in the two most recent seasons.

The provincial union map had to be built from scratch, since no version was available online or in any of CSA's documentation.

To build the map, I used a different method depending on the union:

• Free State (Knights), Limpopo (Lillies), Mpumalanga (Rhinos), Northern Cape (Heat), North West (Dragons): their existing geo-administrative provincial border.
• KwaZulu-Natal Inland (Tuskers) & Coastal (Dolphins): Inland's own website lists its district municipalities; the remaining KZN district municipalities were allocated to Coastal.
• Easterns (Storm), Northerns (Titans), Western Province: these unions consist of only one local municipality or metro (the one their home ground is located in).
• Gauteng (Lions): whichever local municipalities aren't already part of Northerns or Easterns.
• Boland, South Western Districts (Badgers), Eastern Province (Warriors), Eastern Cape (Iinyathi), Kei: based on where local clubs and schools played their cricket; municipalities were allocated to whichever union's competitions those clubs and schools took part in.

With a combination of provincial, district municipality and local municipality borders, I was able to compile a map. Of South Africa's 212 local municipalities, 210 are placed in a provincial union with proven information. Of the remaining two, one was basically an enclave surrounded by a single provincial union and was placed in that one. The other had no local clubs or schools playing cricket, and was allocated with a best guess.

The venues map is based on the coordinates of the venues, grouped together by their city/town. To resolve the clustering of cities/towns close to each other, a further grouping option was added. The venue most used by a team in the past five years is also indicated in white, along with the logo added next to the venue in the list below the map.

The idea for the site came from a lack of easily accessible information on South African women's domestic cricket. The aim is to provide a central resource for statistics, records and historical information, while also giving recognition to the players who have contributed to the domestic game.

If you have any questions, comments or contributions, you can find me on Bluesky: @wernerboucher.bsky.social.