Cricket Loses A Friend And Loyal Servant

Travis Basevi was a genius and a kind soul

One of cricket’s great modern minds is no longer with us.

In one of cricket’s great cities, Melbourne, ahead of one of cricket’s great contests, India v Pakistan, the inevitable bad news was delivered.

If you’re a cricket fan you are unlikely to have heard of Travis Basevi, but it is improbable that you would not have benefitted from his imagination and skill.

Travis Basevi: Lone Ranger coder, unique individual and loyal friend.

Travis was an integral part of getting Cricinfo’s scorecards database together, a process that was painstaking, elaborate, time-consuming and a labour of love as he did for free as a volunteer.

Later, he singlehandedly built StatsGuru, the engine without which cricket journalists would struggle and fans lost as to settling debates. StatsGuru is something of a miracle and largely unparalleled in any other website or any other sport even for that matter.

Travis was able to pull off this stunning feat of coding not only because he was a genius at his work. And the word genius is not being used lightly here. As a coder, he was in the Shane Warne or Brian Lara league if you want a cricketing parallel.

But, there are other tech geniuses around. Only not many that have a feel for cricket as Travis did. He did not need to be told what to do, he did not need to be given instruction or direction. He could anticipate what a cricket fan might need. He knew what questions someone could possibly ask around numbers and the game of cricket.

While his loss to cricket, through cancer at a far too early age, is immense, and his skills irreplaceable, his presence as a human being is the real dagger blow to the heart.

Travis and I have been friends for over two decades and close for the most part. When I joined Cricinfo as a teenager in 1999, Travis taught me the ropes of ball-by-ball scoring and text commentary on one of his innumerable visits to India, a country he loved dearly.

My early initiation into socialising with Travis was an education. He was fixated by how Indians generally drank spirits rather than beer and of course, I took up the challenge and, shockingly, won.

Not much later, I travelled to England to cover India’s tour in 2002, and Travis was kind enough to allow me to sleep on his couch at his Kilburn home. At the time, he was in the middle of a year-long competition with a friend. The challenge was to see who could drink in more London pubs in a year. The rule was that at least one pint had to be consumed and repeat visits did not count. Travis won, with the tally going past 400 by the end.

We met many times after, and I will not recount every single time. 

In 2009 when I got married, Travis made the trip all the way to Madras, staying at an extremely cheap and not-so-cheerful lodge-style establishment, but he brought me two very expensive bottles of whiskey. That was Travis, generous to a fault but not someone who wanted all the bells and whistles for himself.

Travis Basevi: Gone, but never forgotten.

The final time we met was on June 12, three years ago, when I was in England to cover the World Cup. He looked well, and was the life of the conversation, as always. We sunk a few pints, talked about the old times, some good and some bad, at work and elsewhere. We argued about cricket, as we always did, but with no malice and a pint at the ready.

I will never be able to do that again.

One day and that day has not come yet, someone somewhere might build a better cricket statistical engine than StatsGuru. But I don’t believe I will ever meet a human being who combined razor-sharp wit, pinpoint analysis, and a hearty laugh in a clean, kind soul like the one that drove Travis.

Rest up, for now, my friend. See you on the other side for a pint. This time, I’m buying

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