On Sunday at Lord’s, women’s cricket statistician Marion Collin was honoured with a special presentation by ECB Director of Women’s Cricket, Clare Connor.

Clare Connor with Marion Collin at Lord’s

Marion has chosen this summer to end a 44-year career devoted to the collation of statistics in women’s cricket. The day that England won a World Cup was not a bad one to go out on, as it happens.

Her involvement in cricket began at school, and she went on to play for the Redoubtables Women’s Cricket Club in Surrey. Fellow club member Margaret Dickens, then official keeper of the England Women statistics, passed over the baton to Marion in 1973.

In 1995 she took early retirement from her job as local government finance officer to begin collating statistics for the International Women’s Cricket Council (then the international governing body of women’s cricket) full-time.

When the ICC took over in 2005, she retained her position as Honorary Women’s Cricket Statistician.

It has not been an easy job, involving many hours of communications with those in countries all around the world to ensure a complete record now exists of all international women’s cricket since the first Test match was played in December 1934.

Marion has also overseen the transition from pen and paper to computer scoring: it took four years of work to ensure that all the paper scorecards which she had collected were slowly and painstakingly made available online.

Since we at CRICKETher have been covering women’s cricket, Marion has been a constant presence in the press box, always ready with the latest stat to enhance our writing. We’d like to say congratulations, and thank her for her long service to our sport.