Cricket Club President Demo

Cricket Club President Demo

One season, and the winter after it

This is the demo. You get a full season as president of a Division 8 club: nine rounds, the finals, and the whole offseason that follows, up to the moment season 2 would begin.

It is the middle of winter

Nobody has picked up a bat since March.

The Annual General Meeting is upstairs at the bowling club, twenty-two people in a room set for sixty, and the Treasurer is a long way into the accounts before it becomes clear the president is not coming back. Nominations are called for. Nobody moves.

Then somebody says your name. Somebody else seconds it before you have worked out who.

Carried. You have a club at the bottom of Division 8, three sides to field by the start of the season, and a committee who will spend the next six months finding out what you are like.

Every week

Three sides take the field on your first weekend — 1st Grade, 2nd Grade and the U19s — and all three want the best players.

You call the selection meeting, hear the captains out, take the Chairman of Selectors' recommendation or overrule it, and have the sides settled before the Friday. The league alternates one-dayers and two-dayers. The mid-week T20 is a knockout cup for all eighty clubs.

Field placings, declarations and coaching are not on you.

Then Saturday morning happens

Somebody texts at 7:43: "can't make it today mate, bit of a situation." No further detail. Somebody tweaked his back getting out of the car. Somebody has food poisoning, and he was fine at the pub last night. Run short enough and you field a ring-in. His file reads: "Watching from the car park. Seemed keen. We were desperate."

Any match can be watched ball by ball, or skipped for the result and read about on Sunday.

The room

A captain who counts the times you overruled him starts voicing his opinion. A Chairman of Selectors with a bias: he might take the club man ahead of the better player, or blood a junior who is not ready.

Agreeing with one of them is refusing another. Both remember.

The vote

At the end of the season the club votes on whether you stay: the players, the committee, the staff and the volunteers.

Before the vote you get to your feet and make up to two promises: "bring the registration fee down", "put another tier into the ground", "get everyone training twice a week". You can promise nothing at all.

Everyone on the committee judges you on something different: the Treasurer on the bank balance, the Facilities Officer on what you built this season. Below fifty per cent and the run ends.

Where the demo stops

At the start of season 2, with the promises made, the trialists signed, the captains named and the fixtures drawn.

Your career carries. The demo saves to the same place the full game reads, so the club you build here is the club you keep: same committee, same squad, same promises falling due.