Why does the same cricket ground appear under different names in ball-by-ball data?

Because the older source files spelled the same ground several ways. Cricsheet has since standardised venue names across its whole archive, and the TigZig cricket database picked up the new names on 4 November 2026, on 5,145 older matches. Distinct venue names fell from 609 to 382 (the 609 is from the release note, and 382 is the count in the live match_info file). Nothing else in the match details changed.

What you now get. Every major ground has one name across all formats. Eden Gardens is "Eden Gardens, Kolkata" on all 152 matches, the Gabba is "Brisbane Cricket Ground" (62 matches), and the Oval is "The Oval" (97). Grounds that share a name are told apart by the city: "County Ground, Bristol" and "County Ground, Northampton", "National Stadium, Karachi" and "National Stadium, Hamilton".

A few grounds still have two names, and each split follows a real rename. Older matches keep the name the ground had at the time. If you want one ground across its whole history, include both names in the filter. In the live file on 6 November 2026:

• Chinnaswamy: "M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore" (58 matches, 2001 to 2014) and "M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru" (91 matches, 2015 to 2026).
• Delhi: "Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi" (103 matches up to May 2019) and "Arun Jaitley Stadium" (45 matches from November 2019).
• Port Elizabeth is now "Gqeberha" and Chittagong is now "Chattogram", each with older matches under the earlier name.

A query that covers a renamed ground:

SELECT venue, COUNT(*) AS matches, MIN(start_date) AS first_match, MAX(start_date) AS last_match
FROM match_info
WHERE venue IN ('M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore', 'M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru')
GROUP BY venue

If your own saved queries or tables use the old spellings, they will miss matches now, so rerun them against the current names. The names are Cricsheet's, as published. The validation page lists every changed match with its old and new name: validation.tigzig.com.

The data comes from Cricsheet under the Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0 (ODC-BY). TigZig is not affiliated with or endorsed by Cricsheet. Release note: https://www.tigzig.com/post/cricket-venue-names-standardised-nov2026. Related: is there a free cricket database I can query with SQL? and why a cricket stat query can return the wrong numbers.