Sideline Sid Sports correspondent & historian www.sunlive.co.nz

Born in the shadows of WW2, Sideline Sid has been on the sideline of some amazing changes (some good - some bad) over the last seven and something decades.

Sid can cast his mind back to the mid 1950's, when households didn't have the luxuries of washing machines, refrigerators and any of the household goods we take for granted today. Many families didn't own a car, with nightly entertainment listening to 'Life with Dexter' on the valve radio, and television some years in the future.

As the world has progressed in leaps and bounds with new technology, cricket has also made a quantum leap in the way that cricket is scored and results relayed to cricket fans.

The start of cricket in the South Pacific colony in the 1840's, saw team scores kept with notches of a knife on a stick. Some time afterward the scores were kept in written form, which allowed individual batting and bowling figures to be recorded.

Score books evolved, which required calculations to be done manually, before the advent of early electronic calculators made additions a little easier.

In times gone by, cricket tragic's would take their own score books to test matches and score the game for their own satisfaction, acknowledging the umpire signals in tandem with the official scorers.

The rapid introduction of technology such as computers, smart phones, tablets and the advent of apps, has turned the scoring of cricket games at every level on its head.

Around a decade or so ago, the advent of tablets saw the bright sparks in the cricket community taking their hand held devices to matches, to record ball by ball action utilizing the first basic cricket apps. At the end of the match, details would be transferred manually to match records and used to send to the media by email.

In tandem with the use of tablets to score matches, came more sophisticated cricket apps and the universal use of Wifi. Today games from Saturday morning junior cricket to international matches are scored live, on such as Crichq, with cricket followers anywhere in the world able to follow the live updates.

Live scoring has massively changed the way that this grey-haired cricket reporter follows the Western Bay of Plenty club action on a Saturday afternoon. When he started out nearly two decades ago, he would go around the traps notebook in hand scribbling first innings scores, to be followed up by mid-evening phone calls to get the final details.

Today all it takes is a mid-evening look at the Bay of Plenty Cricket website, to get the completed results which are used as the ammunition for the weekly media cricket reviews.

The website results make writing the cricket wraps a breeze - with each players' runs, balls faced, minutes at the crease, strike rate and average's along with the same detailed information for the bowlers.

Preparing a weekly preview is just as easy, with the BOPCA Crichq information detailing points tables and each individual players season batting, bowling and fielding statistics.

One of the intriguing things for this writer is where technology in cricket scoring will go in the future?