About The Ashes: A Cricket Records Site, England v Australia

What this is

The Ashes is an independent project that collects the records of Ashes Test cricket in one place. You can browse batting, bowling, fielding, partnership, match and team records in the Stats Center, open any match as a full scorecard, or ask Ashes AI a question in your own words.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure is read from a single database of Ashes Tests, starting with the 1882–83 series. Match dates, scorecards and records are shown exactly as stored. Where a value is missing we show a dash instead of guessing, because a gap is more honest than a made-up number.

About Ashes AI

Ashes AI turns your question into a database query, runs it, and explains the result. It reads the same records as the rest of the site, but it can still misunderstand a question. For anything important, check the figures in the Stats Center.

Independent

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Cricket Australia, the England and Wales Cricket Board, or the International Cricket Council. Team names are used only to describe the matches.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake or have an idea? Use the Contact page.

How it’s built

Light, fast and kept simple on purpose.

Frontend

Hugo, HTMX and a little JavaScript

A static site that loads in a blink, with no build tools to install. Pages fill themselves in from the API as you use them.

Backend

Go

A small, fast API built on Go’s standard library. It serves the records, the scorecards and the AI answers.

Database

PostgreSQL

Every match, innings, player and partnership lives in one database. The site can only read it.

Ashes AI

NLP and text-to-SQL

Natural language processing works out what you mean, turns your question into a database query, then explains the result in plain words. Every conversation is logged.

Hosting

Multi-cloud: Azure and AWS

The site and the API run on different clouds, so each part uses the service best suited to it.

Activity

Queued, never blocking

Page activity is handed to a message queue and stored by a background worker, so the site never waits on logging.

Audit and logging

Everything is traceable

Every Ashes AI conversation, error and message is recorded, and a protected admin area lets the team review them. Sign-in takes a password and a one-time code.