Bill Frindall

William Howard Frindall , MBE , (born March 3, 1939 in Epsom , Surrey , † January 29, 2009 in Swindon , Wiltshire ) was an English cricket statistician and scorer .

Life

Frindall was born in Epsom , Surrey . After school he studied architecture. From 1958 to 1965 he served in the Royal Air Force as an accounting officer and officer in the secretarial service. He was married three times and had two sons and two daughters.

In 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University for his services in statistics . Frindall died in January 2009 of legionnaires , which he contracted during a charity event in Dubai .

Cricket

Frindall was an avid cricketer who never got beyond amateur status. In June 1966 he took over the post of scorer on Test Match Special , the live radio broadcast of the BBC , in which the matches of the England cricket team are broadcast. He held this office until his death, although he took a break from the English national team's international tours of several months in recent years. From 1966 to 2008 he was used as a scorer in 377 test matches , including all 246 that took place in England during this period.

The nickname of Frindall under which he was known to listeners of Test Match Special in the world, was "the Bearded Wonder" (dt .: the bearded wonder). He was able to keep perfect scorecards and at the same time to determine completely obscure statistics and data within a very short time, which he then repeatedly introduced into the ongoing radio report. His scorecards and statistics enjoyed such a good reputation that they were repeatedly preferred to the official information in the event of discrepancies.

Frindall published his autobiography in 2006. He has also published various books on cricket statistics. In the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack he was responsible for the statistics section for a long time. Since 2006 he has been the patron of the German Cricket Association .