From Andrew Miller, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo. @miller_cricket

Geology professor and stalwart of Canada cricket was key influence in website’s early years

David Liverman, one of CricInfo’s pioneers in the early years of the internet, and a tireless administrator and advocate of cricket in his adopted homeland of Canada, has died in Newfoundland at the age of 66.

Liverman was known as “@WGG” to CricInfo colleagues and users on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the system that predated the website’s mainstream existence and, until the onset of formalised instant messaging, remained the primary means of communication between its admins thereafter.

As an eminent geologist with an expertise in natural hazards such as avalanches, Liverman studied at Edinburgh University before moving to Canada in 1978, and was appointed Adjunct Professor of Geography at Memorial University in Newfoundland in 1993, the same year that CricInfo (with a capital “I” in those days) officially came into being.

“I really missed cricket,” Liverman recalled in The CricInfo Story, a reunion podcast recorded in 2020. “I used to go to the university library to get the cricket scores six weeks late. That’s how I’d find out about what was going on. So when my work took me to Newfoundland, and the internet became available, I thought, well, what the hell can I do with the Internet? Let’s find out about cricket. And very quickly I discovered CricInfo.”

Read the full story here.