International Cricket - 1992 World Test Championship

Using Owzat Games International Cricket, with the help of Surf's IC Helper, I am going to be running a 1992 World Test Championship featuring the 9 Test nations playing at the time.

This seemed a good point to start because South Africa had just returned, and Zimbabwe were given Test status that year, bringing the number of active Test nations to 9.

It is also a good point in time as far as official cards go, with many one Test wonders carded.

The tournament will be a round robin league, with each team playing the other twice, once home, once away, bringing the total number of games for each team to 16.

Matches will last 5 days, and Points will be awarded as following:

Win: 12 pts

Draw: 4 pts

Tie: 4 pts

First Innings Lead: 4 pts

Bonus Points will be awarded based on a teams performance in it's first 100 Overs of it's First Innings.

Batting:

200 Runs: 1 pt

250 Runs: 2 pts

300 Runs: 3 pts

350 Runs: 4 pts

Bowling:

3,4 Wickets: 1 pt

5,6 Wickets: 2 pts

7,8 Wickets: 3 pts

9,10 Wickets: 4 pts

I created a random draw and fixture list.

Teams will play their Home matches at an appropriate time of year based on that nation's general pattern of scheduling (e.g. England will play their 8 Home fixtures mid season, and most of their Away matches at the beginning and the end of the year).

Linueps will be as per team in 1992, with players playing the correct ratio of Tests (for example, if Ian Botham played 4 of England's 8 Tests in 1992 in real life, he will play 8 of the 16 matches in my replay).

I will be following the sequence of lineup changes for each team during the season to ensure each player players the correct ratio of Tests, though this will mean bowling attacks are sometimes not optimized for certain pitch and weather conditions.

However, most teams have balanced squads and generally pick a balanced XI, so I don't see this as being much of a problem.

I wanted the XI's chosen to be reflective of the XI's chosen at the time, and not a "Best XI" picked from the available players based on stats and opinions.

This should ensure each team's performance over the season is based on it's overall lineups and squads at the time, and that depth becomes important.

The length of the season will result in players playing a lot more Tests than they actually did in real life, but I wanted the chance for player stats to build up over the course of a 16 match County Championship like season, and for each team to have the opportunity to play each opponent home and away.

It will be interesting to see if any bowler can crack the 100 wicket mark for the season, or if any batsman can post over 2000 runs, and of course, very interesting to see which nation wins the Championship.

Draw for the Round 1 is as follows:

West Indies v England

India v Sri Lanka

Australia v Zimbabwe

New Zealand v Pakistan

The Test Mace, awarded to the Number 1 Test Nation in the World.