The bowler who has your number

Club cricket is a small world. The same twelve sides, the same eight grounds, the same first-change seamer who has been running in at you since under-16s. Play a decade and you don't face a hundred bowlers — you face a dozen, over and over, in slightly different weather.

Which is why every cricketer has one. The bowler they can't get away from. Ask about him and you'll get a very confident answer with no evidence behind it: he's had me four or five times, I just can't pick him.

Maybe. Memory is a poor statistician. It keeps every dismissal — the inside edge, the long walk off — and quietly loses the 38 you made off the same bloke in a beaten side two summers ago.

The head-to-head is already there

Every ball you've faced sits in your record, and every one of them has a bowler's name attached. So the match-up isn't something anyone needs to start collecting. It's something that needs reading:

Being right about the hoodoo is the least interesting part of that table. Two other things in it are worth actual work.

Is it him, or is it his type? This is the question the feeling can never answer. If you average in the forties against spin generally and 11 against one left-armer, the problem isn't spin — it's a bowler, and bowlers can be planned for. Your record split by what was actually bowled at you settles it in a glance.

41.3

How does it end? Seven dismissals with a shape — caught behind driving at one that holds up, or lbw pushing across the line — is a plan waiting to be written. Seven dismissals with no shape is bad luck, and you can stop thinking about it. Dismissal patterns carry the mode, the phase of the innings and the score you were on, so the answer is specific enough to take to training.

The same card, the other way round

Bowlers get the reverse of it. Somewhere in your record is the batter who has taken 60 off you across three seasons without ever looking like getting out, and the tail-ender you've dismissed four times in two overs of work. Alongside it sits the rest of the bowling picture: your record against left- and right-handers, which ball of the over gets your wickets, what your wickets actually are once they're sorted by type.

For coaches

The head-to-heads sit on each player's record, which means most of the prep for a semi-final is already written. Your top six have faced their attack before — usually many times, across several seasons — and what happened is on the card rather than in somebody's recollection of last February. It changes the conversation from watch out for the quick to he has you driving at a good one; leave him for four overs and take the other end.

Your PlayHQ scorecard names the bowler who got you on Saturday. Ten Saturdays is a different question, and the answer has been sitting in the record the whole time.