150th Post : Milestones and Cliffhangers

As I have mentioned several times in the last few weeks, the blog re-read that I've been doing has been a lead-up to another milestone on the blog. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the 150th post! It is also the final post for 2015 (I'm banking on no games next week, otherwise I'm going to break my commitment of blogs every week for the rest of the year).
It's been two years since the blog reached 100 posts. Today, to round out 2015, we reach 150!

The 1st Post (23 January 2010)
The 50th Post (19 February 2012) - There was no fanfare for this one, but that was indeed the fiftieth.
The 100th Post (15 November 2013)
The 150th Post (15 December 2015)

If you go through and count the posts currently on the blog, you will find that the "100th Post" isn't the 100th... that's because there are a couple of other posts that have been published then un-published over the life of the blog. I think I published them, even though I hadn't finished them, and then took them off again later. The unfinished drafts are still sitting around behind the scenes, I will re-implement them at some point.

There has been a fairly consistent 2 year period for each 50 posts - very consistent given that it goes through very quiet phases, and occasionally goes crazy with week-long series of posts!

Two other milestones...!
The dodgy stats that the blog make available to me also indicate that the blog passed 10,000 page views sometime during the last week! But because they are dodgy stats, it's not worth any further mention.

More significantly, we recently played our 300th match and I didn't notice. But it's ok - it was that game a few weeks ago where Brad was away and we fielded terribly and lost comfortably. No need to remember that.

Close matches
I commented 2 weeks ago - after we won a last-ball thriller - that it felt like a long time since we'd had a close game. Here is a graph showing whether I was correct or not (click on to see a larger version)

The graph shows the margins of victory for all Popped Collars matches - positive numbers indicate that we won the game, negatives are games we lost. It has indeed been a while since we had a really close game (within single figures). Before our recent 2-run win, you have to go back to mid-June to find a match against the Thrill Killers which came down to having Gareth needing 5 from the final ball to tie.

Here's another view of the margins which doesn't show who won, so you can see the straight margins more easily:

Have a look at that period of time where there were 7 games with margins of 200+ in the space of 43 games... that's about one in six games! And there were 18 other games during that period where the margin was over 100. And they were a mixture of wins and losses.... they were the good ol' days at Weston.

Over all time, we have played 37 games with a margin of less than 10 runs. Out of 303 total matches, that means more than 1-in-10 should be that close. So to have gone 23 matches without one is indeed a "long time".

We have had a longer streak than that before though - 27 matches throughout the second half of 2012. Our first game of 2013 broke the streak when Brad bowled 1/3 in the final over against the Gold Diggers to win the match by 4. And then the very next week, Rian and Gareth made a valiant effort at chasing down 58 in the final skin, but missed out by 5.



And now, after discussing matches that were "cliffhangers", I'm going to leave you with one of my own.

A special announcement
The next post on this site will be sometime in January 2016 (no promises on the exact date), and I currently intend for that next post to be the final one ever!!

Shocking news indeed!!!!

But never fear; that announcement probably doesn't mean exactly what you think it does.

Of course everyone is going to ask me "well, what does it mean then?" ...but I'm going to leave you to work that out for yourself. Or you can just wait until next year when all will be revealed.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
from PoppedStats HQ.