Palmcricket Manual

Time Spent at the Crease

Palmcricket uses the handhelds' real-time clock to store, to the nearest minute, the start and end of a batter's innings when the player is selected and dismissed, respectively. For not-out batters, the end time is taken as that of the last ball bowled in the innings. The hand-held clock's date and time should of course be set correctly before the match commences, for such timing to be effective. Also, for greater accuracy, batters should be selected only when they start walking onto the field of play.

In addition, the time for each event is recorded in the ball-by-ball database. The program automatically determines significant breaks in play (whether these were recorded by the scorer or not) when the time between successive balls bowled exceeds 3 minutes. Time spent by batters at the crease is calculated as the number of minutes that have elapsed between the recorded start and end times. During the batter's innings, breaks in play are allowed for by deducting all delays longer than 3 minutes and replacing each of these with a nominal 40 seconds of play.

Typical calculations of the time spent at the crease are illustrated in the following batting examples from the 2nd Test, Australia vs South Africa, played at Melbourne on 26 December 2001. The start of the first day, scheduled for 11:00, was delayed for 79 minutes due to rain. Play resumed at 12:20, with a break for lunch at 13:03, a few minutes after the normal scheduled time. After lunch, there were two more interruptions for rain (101 minutes and 35 minutes), and a drinks break of 3 minutes. The usual tea-break fell away and the play ended at 18:00.

Day 2 started half an hour earlier at 10:30 and there were no further delays caused by rain. Drinks were taken at 11:49, 14:44 and 17:15, and lunch started at 13:00. South Africa were bowled out at 15:38, two minutes before tea. The change of innings thus overlapped into the tea-break (refer to the example under innings timing for more complete details). Play resumed at 15:59 and continued until 18:23, when bad light stopped play, with Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden still at the crease.

The 219 minutes deductions for breaks during Herschelle Gibbs' innings consisted of a rain delay of 79 minutes, 39 minutes for lunch and another rain delay lasting 101 minutes. (Herschelle incidentally lost his wicket in the 2 minutes of play between the second and third stoppage for rain). Neil McKenzie started his innings at 17:18 and continued batting into day 2. His 1035 minutes of deductions for breaks comprised 989 minutes overnight, lunch of 39 minutes, two drinks breaks of 3 and 2 minutes duration and an unexplained 2 minute delay, just before the last drinks break. (The latter delay was caused by the scorer's lapse in concentration). The last session on day 2 had only one stoppage of 3 minutes for a drinks break, as illustrated on Matthew Hayden's batting summary.

[Note: Refer also to batting summaries, section for guidelines relating to the display of batting details shown above. The example score sheet is supplied with the Palmcricket Viewer download and can be viewed and printed on a Windows desktop. The file can also be installed on the handheld by copying it to the installation directory, and then invoking the Palm Hotsynch procedure. From there, it can be copied into the current match within Palmcricket by restoring it from the archive, in order to explore the example in more detail.]