MORE ABOUT THE GAME

LEAGUE & TEAM FORMATS

There are twelve teams in each game of Cricket Stats, all fighting for the title. The games runs all through the English season, using stats from the county championship and the test series.

Your squad is up to twenty current county and international players and your results are determined solely by their performances in first class games in real-life. Each turn you can change your lineup by selecting from players in your squad, and you can change your squad by making new signings, releasing players you don't want, or by transfers.

Teams and leagues normally carry over from season to season. If you're not going to win the league this season, then you've got a head start on your opponents for future seasons - you have the freedom to start rebuilding while they're still committed to the players who are performing right now. Rebuilding is mainly with young players coming through, new players arriving from overseas from abroad - and often simply from changes in form.

SCORING

Your players' scores for the week are taken from their real-life performances, with all the games in a given round being used. It's important you select the right players. There's no point having someone who runs up a big score or collects a hatful of wickets if you haven't selected him!

Each week you play one other team in your league and your aim is simply to outscore that opponent that week. You outscore an opponent by scoring more runs, and/or bowling overs at a low run rate, and/or taking lots of wickets. The scoring system looks a bit complicated at first sight, but it does just come down to scoring runs, bowling lots of economical overs and/or taking wickets.

BATTING

Each player scores runs according to his average for the week, or his average in the season so far, or a mixture of the two (you choose, individually for each batter. The score ach batter makes can be increased or decreased according to how the opposition bowls.

BOWLING

Each bowler bowls up to twenty overs (less if he didn't bowl as many as twenty) with the same run rate and strike rate as in real life. If that didn't make up 120 overs the they bowl another ten according to their stats (run rate and strike rate) in the season so far. If that isn't enough, then your batters to have make up the extra overs (they take no wickets and give away runs at an alarming rate).

FINAL SCORES

There are some adjustments to the scores according to how many overs were bowled by different sorts of bowlers (pace, seam, offspin, legspin, left-arm, right-arm etc). Extra runs are added if you didn't manage enough variety.

The runs total is also reduced (in proportion) if the bowlers took a lot of wickets (if you take twenty wickets* then that reduces the score by half, for example). The final scores in each innings are the average of the runs scores by the batting side and the runs conceded by the bowling side.

* Taking twenty wickets in 120 overs would be an exceptional performance: that's a one wicket every 6 overs across the whole of your bowling lineup.

TIPSTERS & SECONDS

There are two secondary competitions in Cricket Stats. Each week during the season you try to predict the results of all the real-life games. At the end of the season each team gets extra income according to how well they've done in this competition. It's to help keep people interested even when their team is doing badly, and it provides and extra chance of improving the team for next season.

In the second half of the season there's the "Seconds" competition. This has nothing to do with 2nd XI cricket, but rewards the team that improved the most in the second half of the season. If you start the season with a team of broken down old donkeys then the Seconds competition is probably your target, to give you the momentum to build a winning team for the season after.

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