Welcome to the Owzthat Cricket Blog

Replaying historical cricket matches one ball at a time using the retro classic Owzthat cricket game

Sure, I’ll admit all this is a bit random. You know, deciding in the shower to start revisiting cricket matches from years gone by and rewriting history using two metal dice, a pencil and some kind of cricket scorebook. Oh, any my imagination and alleged creative flair. Scrap that, make that creative license.

Let’s start from the beginning.

My name is Christopher and I’ve been a cricket fan for as long as I can remember. There’s no amazing “I was born during Botham’s Ashes” type thing happening here - born in October of 1978 as it goes, probably the least cricket-linked time of a year you can manage as the summer is already a distant memory and the winter tour squad possibly not even selected yet.

I, like few I went to school with, loved nothing more than doing whatever I was doing at home during the school holidays with the Test cricket on the TV. At the start, I certainly watched a whole lot more than I played (football was the sport I played and I didn’t really get into that until I was nine) unless you count bowling to my sister in the back garden and then forcing her to do the same to me.

I remember being super-excited to learn that Graham Gooch had scored 333 against India in the summer of 1990 - I would have been 12 then. I have vague memories of cricket before then, but that is probably the first actual event I recall with clarity and then the 1991 World Cup which followed only a few months later.

My early cricket heroes were probably Gooch, Mark Ramprakash, the West Indians who were incredible and then, quite definitely, Mike Atherton and Jack Russell - being a goalkeeper I wanted to keep wicket and wanting to be the captain I wanted to be Atherton, hence my role models being somewhat obvious.

Eventually, I was able to join a team playing U15s and despite being incredibly average with both bat and ball (I was decent behind the stumps, apparently) have enjoyed a very village level of participation ever since.

Quite how any of this leads us up to starting this blog, I am still not too sure but hey.

Just last night, I was watching All Creatures Great and Small with the wife (the modern one, not the old one - the TV show, not the wife) and there was a scene where Tristain Farnon was playing “dice cricket” with Mrs Hall the housekeeper. “I’ve got that game” I told the missus, who seemed quite unimpressed.

Weirdly, about two months earlier, I had seen a vintage Owzthat cricket game for sale on Vinted and had snaffled it up for no reason other than I thought it might be fun at some point. And had promptly forgotten about it.

Seeing it on TV gave me this idea the next morning - having written about various computer games whilst playing them over the years (and when I say various I mean Championship Manager and Football Manager exclusively), I wondered what it would be like to take things back even earlier and do the same with this game from the 1930s.

But what is Owzthat?

Let boardgamegeek.com explain;

Owzthat is a simulation of the game of cricket using dice.

The game consists of two unique dice; one of them labelled with numbers, the other with words. The idea is that the player who is "in" rolls the numbered die, scoring the number of runs as shown on the die. This continues until he rolls the side of the die with the word "Owzthat!" (a corruption of "How's that", an appeal in cricket). Then, the other die is rolled. The faces on this die show different ways of being out, such as caught, bowled, etc. On this die are also two ways of being not out i.e. the appeal is turned down. If the player is not out, he continues to roll the first die. If he is out, he continues his innings with his next batsman, as in a real game of cricket.

Simple, right?

So my idea is this. We (and when I say we, I mean me until this builds up a wonderfully engaged ‘community’ who eventually make requests of matches to be replayed) choose matches from history to replay using Owzthat.

I replay the game, I write about it - what form that will take is still undecided and how quickly we can get through the games also feels a bit up in the air (as much as I’d love to commit from the get-go to redoing a whole Ashes series ball-by-ball, let’s give it a few weeks to bed in first, eh?).

Thinking out loud, I’d love to set the scene of the match a bit - go back in time to when the game was being played. Learn and explain what the world was like back then. Try and get into the heads of the selectors who felt that *this* was the team to pick - and if I am focusing on England matches, which could well happen quite naturally, there will be a lot of unpicking to do around selection, I can assure you. It will give a wonderful opportunity to segway off into bits and pieces about the characters involved. Hell, who knows - the actual replaying of the match might even become nothing more than a mere sideshow. There’s no rigid bowling plan in place here, we’ll just see what comes out and adjust the field accordingly.

To do this, I need to decide on what historical material will help me (a) decide the matches and (b) understand the context etc of each match. Fortunately, since relocating back to England this Autumn, I seem to have built up a bit of a sporting book library where at least 40% is cricket nostalgia. So, I should have enough support there to get going.

We have the game, see below. We understand the rules, as explained above.

The one thing that is missing is a scorebook which has been ordered off Amazon and should be here just after Christmas, one would hope - I did toy with the idea of using an electronic scoreboard but not knowing whether I could save them as I went and come back to them when needed, I decided old school was the best school.

Oh, and some pencils.

Oh, and an actual retro scoreboard desk tidy for some authenticity.

I also picked up a spare, newer version of the game as well given that the one I have is an original and I’d hate it to get damaged. Risk-averse as ever, Atherton taught me well.

Once everything arrives, we’ll be in business - I can assure you of that.

I wonder what the first match will be…

Subscribe, purely so you don’t miss the first ball.

*all images courtesy of the boardgamegeek.com