Cricket clubs lose all sorts of equipment. Pads, bails, stumps and bats all are at the mercy of a season's erosion of the club's resources. Their replacement becomes an agenda to be debated at length and their loss is rarely mourned.

But lose the book and you lose the DNA of the team.

The book carries the memory of your performance -- heroic or woeful. It is an indisputable reality. Many things you do at work, or socially, become merely myths disputed by everyone but you.

Achievement is diminished, and heroism belittled by those dark forces that oppose you. Convincing the masses that you are capable of the deeds you describe becomes a war of words. You fill with fury as the crowd dismisses your claims of glory.

But the cricket scorebook stands alone as a testament to your achievements.

The book notes every run you scrambled, every four you swiped and every catch you took -- for it is an impassionate, purely objective testament to the truth.

Every wicket is there and, if the scorer has sense, it will note the time you bowled with a broken wrist.

No matter what people's impressions of you that day -- for memories are formed, then reformed, and reformed and reformed into whatever suits each of us best -- the book speaks the facts.

You did score 52 not out on a pudding in Acton. We did, as a result, win the match against a team we hadn't beaten for nine years. No, no one scored more than you on that day.

That it was the jammiest innings ever seen can be, for once, relegated into reverie, thanks to the stats book. "Let the facts speak for themselves."

It focuses our minds on what really happened. And cricket, like few other things in life, has the ability to describe the facts of a day, indisputably, for generations to come. And it must not be lost.

Dominic Pilgrim: club scorer and webmaster © 2002