Travis Basevi

Travis Basevi (17 March 1975 – 20 October 2022) was an Australian web developer, cricket data analyst, statistician, historian and ESPN Cricinfo correspondent. He was well known for his innovation regarding StatsGuru which became one of the most sought-after cricket data analysis tools as many critics and ardent cricket fans have widely used it for data gathering. He also played a pivotal and instrumental role in compilation of ESPN Cricinfo's database of scorecards and known for his reputation of building an effective content management system which is still in use. He also published articles in Cricinfo website as an authorized contributor.^[1]

Personal life[edit | edit source]

Basevi was born in March 1975 in Geelong, Australia. He moved to London in 2000 and initially lived in Kilburn. He continued to live in North London with his wife, Jane, and their son, Victor. He was a QPR season ticket holder for many seasons.

Career[edit | edit source]

He first identified and navigated into nascent Cricinfo through Internet Relay Chat as a teenager during the 1990s while still pursuing his studies at Sydney. He thereafter decided to pursue an interest into data gathering and research by initially working as a volunteer to publish and build scorecards for Cricinfo. Basevi was not a programmer when he initially collaborated with Vishal Misra to build the Test and ODI scorecard database in 1995 in an archive version, crosschecking the scorecards with reliable sources such as Wisden to produce their first scorecard format.^[2]

He moved to limelight and prominence with his creation of StatsGuru in 1998, which was built largely from some scripts in order to go through the scorecards and create live stats.^[3] He also turned out to be one of the early pioneers of Cricinfo's ball-by-ball-commentary including the iconic 1999 Cricket World Cup where he memorably described the clash of yellow and green kits for the World Cup final between Australia and Pakistan at Lord's as the "ripe bananas v the unripe bananas", and later co-authored the site's long-running stats column, "The List".^[4]

Following the global popularity and influence of Cricinfo, he began travelling across various nations for a series of assignments including the inaugural edition of the Men's ICC Champions Trophy (formerly known as ICC KnockOut Trophy) in 1998 which was held in Bangladesh. Having left Cricinfo for the first time in 2001 he returned to cricket when hired by Wisden in spring 2002 as part of their new Wisden.com venture. During this time he developed and launched a rival to Statsguru - The Wisden Wizard. As luck would have it, on the eve of the 2003 Cricket World Cup, Wisden acquired Cricinfo and he was back working on his old site and code base.

Next up he built from scratch the Cricinfo Content Management System which went live in April 2005 and is still in use now.^[5] Once Cricinfo was acquired by ESPN in 2007, Travis built StatsGuru for rugby union as part of the ESPNscrum.com website relaunch in September 2008 (it proved a vital statistical resource for journalists and broadcasters until it was taken down in 2020) and was a key member of the team that built and launched ESPNF1.com in December 2009 and ESPN.co.uk in January 2010. Across all four sites his code lives on to this day.

Having parted ways with ESPN and Cricinfo (for the second time) in 2016 he then began his stint as a Chief Technology Officer at CricViz and he further cemented his reputation as a cricket statistician by building the database and tools which underpin the statistical analysis of the company.^[5]

Death[edit | edit source]

He died at the age of 47, two years after being diagnosed with cancer.^[5]

References[edit | edit source]