Audit Trails for Ball-by-Ball Data: Can an Immutable Ledger Make Cricket Scorecards Trustworthy?

At the Mirpur Sher-e-Bangla press box last season I was reconciling the score of a domestic T20 match. Three scoring apps were open on my phone, a pad and pen beside them. Same match, same over — and a four-delivery gap in the dot-ball count. On one app a delivery sat in the fourteenth over; on another it sat in the fifteenth. One source credited a wicket to the bowler; another logged it as a run-out and left the bowler's column empty. The episode grew teeth forty-eight hours later, when two cricket pages posted two different strike rates for the same batter from that match. Neither was invented; both were pulled from a source. Whatever number went out on television is the number everyone quoted. Nobody opened the raw ball-by-ball log, and nobody has the means to. The cricket data economy is a supply chain. A scorer in the ground writes ball by ball; that entry travels to a live-feed vendor's server, then to a broadcaster, an app, a fantasy platform, a betting market, a newsroom. If a delivery is mis-typed at the first link, it stops being an error by the last link. It becomes the truth, because everyone downstream copies the same origin. A T20 innings carries roughly 120 legal deliveries, about 240 across a match. Each delivery needs at least six fields filled: runner, batter, bowler, outcome, field placement, timestamp. That is more than fifteen hundred small decisions in one match, taken around ten at night, with tired eyes, often by one person alone. In Bangladesh the chain is thinner still. The BPL, the Dhaka Premier League, the National Cricket League, the women's domestic circuit — the match count is not small, but independent verification is close to zero. When a card is wrong, no correction is visible, because domestic scores travel so lightly through mainstream coverage that nobody turns back to look. I began with 44 matches, a Rangpur notebook, and a suspicion of easy numbers. That was a football season, hand-coded across four columns: event, location, minute, context. The column structure belonged to football; the method belonged to data, not to a sport. Returning to cricket, I found the same frame works — and that the risk here is higher. The first paid byline taught me that a model is only as honest as its assumptions, not an inch more. The xG model I built in 2026 by hand-logging roughly 1,200 shot coordinates from all 64 World Cup matches was never valuable for its numbers; it was valuable for admitting what it assumed. Cricket works the same way. A clean-looking dot-ball rate or phase-wise scoring rate is only as solid as the raw entry underneath it. Hand-coding does not mean fast guesses; it means writing a time and a context beside every event. Last domestic season I picked one team's powerplay and tracked which bowler was operating from which angle, where fielders drifted, what changed on the ball after a dot. The feed carries none of that shadow. The feed carries runs and wickets. What emerged: that team's powerplay dot-ball rate is higher than the feed suggests, because a handful of mis-timed entries pull the number down. What also emerged: after the sixth over, the rate of field-placement changes jumps sharply — something no broadcast graphic shows and no newspaper score carries. My suspicion of strike rates is old. A death-over strike rate of 175 across twelve innings and forty balls is a handsome number, but the sample is small, the opposition quality uneven, and nobody separates the deliveries that were attempted sixes off the last ball. Easy numbers are easy because they ask nothing of context. This is where the immutable ledger proposal enters. The idea is simple: every delivery is a record, and chaining each record to the hash of the previous one means that anyone who later changes a number breaks the chain. What fantasy, broadcast and betting markets need is not faith but verifiability. The real benefit of a ledger in cricket is not secrecy or crypto enthusiasm; it is an audit trail. A single delivery has four versions — the scorer's pad, the vendor's feed, the broadcast graphic, the app score. If they diverge, a ledger can prove which one changed and when. Today there is no such proof. The limit is equally clear, and it is the part most often buried. A ledger makes a record immutable, not true. If a scorer writes a bye where a leg-bye belongs, the chain preserves that error forever, now with a reassuring blue tick. Where the input is weak, immutability behaves like punishment. Trust and accuracy are correlated, not causal. A “verified on-chain” label can become marketing copy unless it discloses who coded the match, how corrections are made, and who can see the correction history. A board-controlled permissioned chain is a database with extra steps, where the board decides who writes and who reads. The meaningful reform is procedural, not technological. Two independent coders per match, their entries kept separate, public corrections whenever they disagree, and raw delivery logs opened to everyone — with or without a blockchain, that is what builds trust. Empty stadiums taught me that attendance is a variable, not atmosphere. In 2026, after the COVID restart, I hand-coded all 83 Bundesliga matches played behind closed doors and found the home win rate had fallen from 43.3 per cent to 33.3 per cent. The number was not for erudition; it was for proof, and nobody had bothered to count it. The same logic holds in cricket. Dew arrival time, field-setting patterns, the day's temperature — these are variables, not “conditions.” Television delivers them as commentary, never as data. A league that publishes raw logs of such variables will be the one that actually teaches something new. For Bangladesh the practical point is blunt. Domestic cricket has fewer spectators, fewer cameras, fewer hands — which means fewer eyes. Where eyes are few, errors live longer. An open audit log would be cheap even for a small league, because the obstacle is not cost. It is will. One thing is worth watching next season: which domestic league publishes raw ball-by-ball logs first, whether that is the BPL or the Dhaka Premier League. If someone does, the next question is who signs the ledger and who holds the power to correct it. Cricket's trust problem is not a media problem; it is the game's problem with its own arithmetic.