PLAY-CRICKET
INTEGRATION.

The process is currently scattered across half a dozen ECB help docs, a couple of Reddit threads and one or two club secretaries' notebooks. This is the plain-English version. We've written it for the volunteer secretary or marketing lead who needs fixtures, results and scorecards moving without having to become a developer first.

What is Play-Cricket, and who actually uses it?

Play-Cricket is the system the ECB runs to manage fixtures, results, scorecards and team sheets for recreational cricket. If your club is ECB-affiliated, you almost certainly have a Play-Cricket site (usually at your-club.play-cricket.com), and your league probably mandates that fixtures and results are submitted there each week.

Who uses it day-to-day:

• Club secretaries updating fixture lists at the start of each season
• Captains and scorers entering team sheets and live scorecards on Saturdays
• League admins publishing the divisional fixture grid
• Players and parents checking next weekend's match details

What the Play-Cricket API actually lets you do (and what it doesn't)

What the Play-Cricket API lets a club do (read-only):

• Pull a list of fixtures for one or more of the club's teams, by season
• Pull match results including totals, individual batting and bowling figures, and team sheets
• Pull scorecards for matches that have been completed
• Pull club and team metadata (team names, age groups, division)

What the Play-Cricket API does not let you do:

• It does not let you write back to Play-Cricket. No posting fixtures, no editing results, no submitting team sheets.
• It does not give you access to any club other than the one the key was issued for. One key = one club.
• It does not expose personal contact data.

The accurate framing is Play-Cricket integration: connecting your club's authorised data flows on your terms.

How do you request your club's Play-Cricket API key from ECB?

1. Confirm who in your club has admin rights. Only a Play-Cricket site administrator should request the key.
2. Email ECB Play-Cricket Support from a club admin email address. Include club name, Play-Cricket site URL, your name and role, and a one-line description of what you want to use the key for.
3. Wait. In our experience, turnaround is typically a few working days, and longer in March and April when many clubs are doing the same thing.
4. Store the key carefully. Treat it like a password. Don't paste it into a public Slack, don't commit it to GitHub.
5. Know how to revoke it. If your club ever changes vendor or the secretary changes, ask ECB Play-Cricket Support to rotate the key.

How do you export fixtures from Play-Cricket without an API key?

1. Log in to Play-Cricket as a site admin.
2. Navigate to Fixtures. Pick the team and season.
3. Switch to the Print view.
4. Select all and copy. Paste into Google Sheets or Excel.
5. Tidy the columns. Standardise dates to YYYY-MM-DD.

This is fine for an annual season-launch task. It falls apart the moment the league reshuffles a fixture and you want every channel to update on its own. For a fuller walk-through, see how to export Play-Cricket fixtures to CSV.

How do you connect Play-Cricket to Google Calendar using your API key?

Method A. Manual one-off CSV/ICS import. Works once per season. It does not update when the league reschedules.

Method B. Live iCal feed via your club's API key. Your club provides its ECB-issued API key to a tool that calls the Play-Cricket API on a schedule, transforms the fixtures into an iCal feed, and serves it at a URL your members subscribe to. When a fixture is rescheduled in Play-Cricket, the iCal feed picks it up on the next poll and every subscriber's calendar updates by itself.

For the full method-by-method comparison, see Play-Cricket to Google Calendar, step-by-step sync.

How do you post fixtures to social media using your club's API key, compliantly?

The compliant flow:

1. Your club requests its API key from ECB Play-Cricket Support.
2. Your club provides that key to a tool that polls Play-Cricket for fixtures and results using your key, and pushes to Meta Business Suite (Instagram and Facebook) and/or X.
3. The tool generates a graphic per fixture (or per result) using a template you've approved.
4. You either auto-publish on a schedule, or queue posts for review before they go live.

What the tool must do to be compliant:

• Use your club's own key, never a shared "platform key" claimed across multiple clubs
• Store the key encrypted at rest and in transit
• Never expose the key in client-side code or in logs
• Let you rotate or revoke the key without re-onboarding the whole club
• Never share data between clubs. Your data stays your data.

Boundary Social connects to Play-Cricket using your club's own ECB-issued API key. We don't share keys between clubs. We don't scrape. We store the key encrypted, and we make rotation a one-click operation.

Play-Cricket vs Pitchero: which one does your club actually need?

Where Boundary Social fits, and the "your key only" promise

1. We only operate on the API key your club provides us, issued by ECB directly to your club.
2. We never share keys between clubs. Your key sits in your encrypted vault, used only for your data.
3. We never scrape Play-Cricket. If we can't get the data via your authorised key, we don't get it.
4. We make rotation a one-click operation.
5. We store keys encrypted at rest, transmitted over TLS, and never exposed in client-side code or in logs.

Related deep-dives:

• How to export Play-Cricket fixtures to CSV (2 methods)
• Play-Cricket to Google Calendar, step-by-step
• Match-day graphics, the practical UK guide
• Cricket club social media, the complete UK guide

If Boundary Social is the tool that earns your trust, request a free sample. We'll show you the key-handling flow end to end. No demo deck. Just the actual screen your secretary will use.