Test Match Cricket Game: Playing Four Innings in a Browser Tab
Most cricket games you can play in a browser give you twenty overs, a slog, and a number at the end. That is a fine way to spend ten minutes. It is not cricket's best format, and it is not the one most people who love the game would pick if somebody offered them a choice.
Howzat Live now plays a Test match. Four innings, two a side, up to sixty overs each, whites and a red ball. You declare. You are offered the follow-on. The lead you build in the first innings is carried into the third and it decides the target in the fourth. And because nobody finishes a Test in one sitting, it saves as you go and comes back exactly where you left it.
This is a guide to what is actually in there, and to the handful of things that separate a real Test from a long limited-overs game with the overs turned up.
The difference is the arithmetic, not the length
You can take any twenty-over game, change the number to sixty, and you have a longer twenty-over game. What makes a Test a Test is that the four innings are tied together by a running total, and every decision you make is about that total rather than about this over.
Here is the worked example, because it is the thing people get wrong. Say you bat first and make 100. The opposition make 85. You lead by 15 — so when you walk out for your second innings, you are not starting from nothing, you are starting 15 ahead, and every run you add is 16, 17, 18. Close on 200 and the target for their fourth innings is 216: your two innings added together, minus their one, plus one.
Howzat Live keeps that number on screen the whole time, under the score, in the words you would actually use:
- LEAD BY 75 while you are extending it
- TRAIL BY 40 · AUSTRALIA AHEAD while you are still behind
- NEED 216 TO WIN · 10 WICKETS IN HAND in the last innings
It never pollutes the innings score itself — 60/4 is 60/4 — but the state of the match is never more than a glance away.
The results come out the way Test results come out: by an innings, by runs, by wickets, or a draw when the last innings runs out of overs with the chase incomplete. If your two innings together never pass their one, you have won by an innings and there is no fourth innings to play.
Declaring
You can close your innings whenever you have had enough of batting. Press D, confirm, and that is your lot — the scorecard marks it with a d, the way it should be (243/6d).
It is available in the first three innings and never in the fourth, because you cannot declare a chase closed. It is also the decision the whole format turns on. Bat too long and you have not left yourself the overs to bowl them out. Bat too little and you have handed them a target they can chase.
The follow-on
Lead by two hundred at the end of the second innings and you are asked whether they should bat again straight away. That is Law 14 for a match of five days or more, and it is a genuine choice rather than a free win: enforce it, and your bowlers go out again with no rest, and a side that bats well the second time can still get past you and set you a target of their own.
If you enforce it and they are still behind when their second innings closes, the match is over there and then and you have won by an innings.
DRS, with ball-tracking
Three unsuccessful reviews an innings, which is what a Test side gets under the current ICC playing conditions.
When you are given out LBW you get the offer, with a clock on it. Make the T and the review plays out on screen: the batter signals, the umpire draws the television screen, and the panel shows the three things a review actually decides —
- Pitching. Pitched outside leg and you are not out, however plumb the rest
- Impact. In line, or umpire's call within half a ball of the line, or
- Wickets. Hitting, clipping, or missing. Clipping is umpire's call.
of it looked. There is no umpire's call on pitching.
outside off — and outside off is not out.
Umpire's call means the on-field decision stands and the review is not spent. That is the part people get wrong most often, and it is the whole point of umpire's call. An overturned decision does not cost you a review either. Only a review that is simply wrong does.
Captaincy, not just batting
A Test gives you time to make decisions, so there are decisions to make.
Who bowls. At the top of each over you pick the man, not the type — any of your eleven except the keeper, with your recognised attack listed first and the part-timers after them. Picking a man sets his arm and whether he is pace or spin, because those are facts about him rather than choices you make afresh every over.
Who is in next. When a wicket falls you are asked who walks out, instead of the order being followed blindly. Send in the nightwatchman, promote a left-hander, hold your best player back — the rest of the order closes up behind whoever you choose.
Where they stand. A Test starts with an attacking field: two slips and men round the bat, not the white-ball ring. Press C and drag all nine wherever you want them.
The pitch depends on where you are playing
Pick your venue before the toss. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka grip, turn and keep low; the ball comes on more slowly and a spinner gets more than three times the sideways movement he would get anywhere else. Everywhere else plays true.
This is applied to the ball, not to the outcome — the delivery physically behaves differently rather than the result being fudged afterwards. It is also the reason it is worth telling the game which of your players are spinners: on a turning track they are brought on first.
Save it, and come back on Thursday
Five days' worth of cricket does not fit into a lunch break, so the format would be pointless without this.
The save button is on screen for the whole innings, whether you are batting or bowling, and there is a key for it (F). Press it and a card comes up in the middle of the screen saying exactly what has been kept —
✓ MATCH SAVED — Innings 2, 143/4 after 51.3 overs
Close the tab. Come back whenever. RESUME on the front screen brings the match back with the four innings totals, whose innings it is, who is at the crease and on what score, the fall of wickets, both squads, the venue, the kits and the reviews you have left. It also saves itself quietly at the top of every delivery, so a closed laptop costs you nothing.
A scorecard, and someone to give the award to
Every innings is kept, in full: runs, balls and strike rate for every batter with how he was out; overs, maidens, runs and wickets for every bowler with his economy; catches credited to the man who took them; and the fall of wickets.
Press S at any point and it opens — including the innings you are in the middle of. Batting second and wondering what they actually made, and who did the damage? It is all there, innings by innings, for the whole match.
At the end, a man of the match, weighed across the whole game and both sides: runs, wickets and catches together, with something extra for a hundred, a fifty and a five-for. It can go to a losing player, and it should.
And the light goes
Cloud rolls over during a day match. The ground goes flat and grey, the sun loses its edge, and when the light has properly gone the floodlights come on. A shower passes through. Play never stops for it.
None of it touches the ball or the scoreboard — it is light and it is rain — but a Test that looks the same on the fourth afternoon as it did on the first morning does not feel like a Test.
Bring your own eleven
The other half of this: the men out there can be your men.
Build your own XI, name all eleven, and set each one's batting hand, bowling arm, whether he is pace or spin, and which of them keeps wicket. All four of those change what happens on the field — a left-hander stands the other side of the stumps, a leg-spinner turns it the other way, and the man in the gloves is taken out of the bowling attack, so putting the gloves on your No.7 hands somebody else the fifth bowler's overs.
Then pick your kit from ten international sides. If both teams choose the same one, the second is moved to another colour, because eleven men in green playing eleven men in green is not a cricket match.
After that the names follow the cricket around. The scoreboard uses them. So does the panel asking who is in next, and the row of bowlers you pick from at the top of an over. The scorecard writes them out the way a scorecard does — c †Rashid b Waqar, lbw b Abdul, Abdul 19-9-41-5 — and one of them gets the award at the end.
Where to find it
Test cricket, the venue and your own teams are on the setup screen when you play the computer, at three difficulty levels. Those matches count toward your Scale at half weight. Live 1v1 against another person is the limited-overs game: five, ten or twenty overs a side, one of you batting, one of you bowling, both watching the same ball at the same moment.
It is free, it runs in an ordinary browser on a laptop or a phone, and there is nothing to download.