The next best thing to experiencing something yourself is to hear people talk about their interests, sharing their experiences and stories. And the best stories are those that come from passion - striving to overcome obstacles on your way to succeeding in your chosen field, funny anecdotes, hardships endured. "Release The Geek" is our weekly forum to chat to people who are geeky about something - they could be successful, semi-so, or on their way to achieving a level of it but they've all got one thing in common - passion. Can't replicate it. And we want to share their experiences, their hurdles, their stories with the greater geek populace (or anyone who would care to).
http://www.releasethegeek.net/blog/
Episode 13 - Cricket Statistical Geekery with Andrew Samson
Andrew Samson has earned a reputation as one of the most reliable cricket statisticians in the world, with a remarkable ability to find answers quickly to complex cricket questions, providing interesting and valuable insight to commentary teams around the globe.
Andrew has worked with Cricket South Africa as a statistician for over 20 years, and has worked as the official statistician at four global ICC events as well as scorer/statistician for Test Match Special on several England tours.
In addition, Andrew's a published author, helping to write a tome on the history of Western Province cricket from 1890 to 2011 and, in 2013, his efforts were recognised by the Association of Cricket Statisticians as their Statistician and Historian of the year for 2013.
Andrew kindly sat down with us to chat about a number of topics including:
- His initial foray into cricket statistics at school
- How the role of the commentary scorer and statistician came into being
- And how his passion for cricket stats ended up becoming a career
Plus I manage to make a major mistake regarding the name of a South African city. Profuse apologies given for the terrible, terrible slight.