Pick one of the twelve Test nations and run it for as long as you like. You name the squads, award the central contracts, appoint a captain in each format and decide who gets the training time — then take the side through tours, world tournaments and a Test championship, season after season, while the players you started with grow old, retire, and hand over to a generation you have to judge for yourself. Every ball is played out Every match is played one ball at a time, and what happens comes out of the two players involved, the pitch under them, the weather overhead and how old the ball is. Win the toss and choose. Tell a batter to attack, or to shut up shop. Change your bowler, move the field, enforce the follow-on, declare, take the new ball. If you would rather not play it out, hand the fixture over and read the scorecard. It is the same simulation either way. A Test runs five days, so you are not expected to sit through one in a single go. Leave at tea on the third afternoon and it picks up on the very same ball when you come back. There is no 3D or 2D match view. A match is a live scorecard, ball-by-ball commentary, a field diagram and run-rate charts — everything went into the simulation underneath instead. A season that looks like a real one Seasons run October to September, with six touring windows Tours with Test, one-day and T20 legs, played home and away The first year of a new career is built from the real fixture list — the tours and grounds actually on A fifty-over World Cup and a twenty-team World T20, each on its own cycle A regional cup, and tri-series that show up some years and not others World rankings across all three formats, on the same points system the ICC uses A Test championship scoring every Test on the calendar — so a series in February you thought was dead decides who makes the final Picking the side is the job Name a squad before each series and carry it into the next one. Then pick your eleven with the whole card in front of you — matches, average, strike rate, wickets, current form and fitness — and choose whether to judge a player on his career or on this season alone. The side you sent out last time is remembered, so you are adjusting an eleven rather than building one from scratch every match. Get it wrong in the first Test and you pick the second one a bowler short. Contracts, captains and coaching At the start of every season you award central contracts: a list of twenty to thirty players, locked in once you confirm it. You name a captain in each of the three formats, and he has to be one of the men you contracted. The captaincy record is kept the way the record books keep it — matches, won, lost, by format, carrying on from whoever held the job before you. Then you spread twelve training slots across that list, two at most on any one man, each working on batting or bowling. Players improve as the season is played rather than in one lump at the end, and you can move the work around whenever you like. Everyone has a ceiling, so nobody improves for ever — which is what makes it a real decision: develop the 21-year-old who has years of room left, or prop up the 34-year-old for two more seasons. There will never be enough slots to go round, and that is the point. A database with real depth Close to 5,000 players. Every one of them carries a real career record in all six formats — Test, one-day and T20 international, plus the first-class, List A and T20 careers those sit inside — along with a real date of birth, batting hand and bowling style. Domestic cricket runs in the background whether you are watching or not, so an uncapped player quietly builds a case: hundreds, five-fors, a best bowling figure you can go and look up. Put him on the watchlist and pick your moment. Records that already have history in them Your nation's record boards start out full. Highest and lowest team totals, most runs, most wickets, most catches — the real all-time marks are already there, and what your career produces is measured against them and takes the board when it beats one. Some of them you will not get near, which is rather the point. Careers end. Yours doesn't. Players get better and then worse as they age, and unevenly — a fast bowler loses his pace everywhere at once, while a batsman's eye holds on for years after his legs have gone. Eventually they retire. Each nation brings its own youngsters through, and they arrive a clear step below the men they are replacing. Working out which of them is worth a cap is most of the job. Change the database, and share the change There is a database editor built into the main menu. Search the whole database, pick a player, and change his name, date of birth, batting hand, bowling style, role, batting position or what he has retired from. Your edits are written to a small text file rather than into the game's own data, so an update never wipes them — and because it is just a file, you can hand it to someone else and they get your edits too. Files other people have made sit underneath yours, so your own changes always win. Worth knowing before you buy Single-player only, and fully offline. Careers are files on your own machine and nothing is uploaded anywhere. You manage a nation, not a club. Domestic cricket is simulated so you can scout on it, but you do not pick those sides. Rain does not yet interrupt a limited-overs match — there is no Duckworth-Lewis-Stern calculation. No injuries yet.
