Few sporting moments can stir the juices of the back page headline writers as effectively as yet another England cricketing disaster, especially when defeat of the hands of Sri Lanka occurs only a few months before the Ozzies turn up to defend the Ashes. National pride demands a spritited performance and nothing short of victory will drag the names of the 11 unfotunate white-clad sportsman out of the ninth circle of hell to which every sports journo in Wapping bahinshed them after the winter tour.

Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket is the latest of a small group of games which have attempted to simulated the sport, and comes which have attempted to simulate the sport, and comes closer than anything yet released to the real thing.

God games of this sort are difficult produce because cricket doesn't lend itself as readily as football to a fast exciting computer game, but GGWCC combines simulation accuracy with slick gameplay and brings it off very nicely.

Just about every rule and aspect of cricket is implemented, from LBW's to run-outs, and the superb graphics catch the eye as soon as play commences. Crammed onto one disk as it is, GGWCC loads quickly, play quickly, and disk access is minimal, so nothing gets in the way of the simulation.

In play, the game can be as complex or simple as one likes, and there should be enough options to keep even the cricket fanatics happy. Play can be over anything from one to five days and the number of overs can be set from 20 to unlimited.

A selection of world teams is on offer, complete with realistic and current player lists, but the novice need only have the computer select the best 11 to proceed to the action. The more finicky among us can chop and change team selection by dipping into the full squad, and the even more dedicated will find the option to edit teams, team names, and even players' individual characteristics to suit any taste.

It would, for instance, be perfectly possible for a nostalgic player to change the England and Australia line up to repeat the infamous "body-line" tour of the 30s complete with Don Bradman and company.

In playing, bowling, batting, and fielding are all taken care of in simple but effective fashion. Bowling is a matter of placing the intended landing point for the ball then clicking the joystick button, at which point one of two things will happen depending on the type of bowler being used.

If playing a fast bowler, the player will see a speed bar in the corner of the screen which can be controlled by waggling the joystick back and forth to increase speed.

Spin bowlers vary in that they bring up a selection for leg or off spin, then the player waggles the joystick to increase the amount of spin. For added realism, a natural leg spin bowler will be able to spin the ball faster in that direction. Batting can be tricky - my first innings score of ten all out should be ample testament to that - but with practice and good timing the eight types of shot on offer give the player enough flexibility to deal with all sorts of bowlers.

There is little in the way of the delicate touch, but the choice of where in the crease to stand, when to hit the button, and which shot to play makes batting a challenging enough affair without fancy extras.

Once you manage to pull a decent shot out of the bag, joystick waggling is again needed to make the batsmen run at anything more than a relaxed canter, so play can become quite physical as one player waggles furiously to deliver a fast ball and the other does likewise to squeeze a single out of a short cut to the midfield.

Fielding is less controllable, but one feature I liked was the ability so set a different field placement for each bowler, then save them to disk for later use. It is possible to arrange the fielders for one fast bowler then copy it to all the other fast bowlers, so quick tactics changes are possible before and during play.

When an opposing batsmen hits the ball, the display changes to a more distant view showing about a quarter of the field, and the fielder under control is highlighted by an arrow. Players have little or no control over what happens, and my input seemed to be limited to just pressing the button to throw the ball.

Overall, despite using the same graphics for European, Caribbean, and Asian players, the lack of a tour or World Cup option, and a few reservations about some cricket fans' willingness to indulge in joystick waggling, GGWCC is easily the best cricket game available on the Amiga, and one of the most well polished and neatly implemented sports games I've ever had the pleasure to play.

Cricket is an odd game. You really have to know the ins and outs to appreciate it. It helps if you know the difference between a googly and a Chinaman, leg spin and outswing, and when a mid-on becomes a silly one.

No other game has so many peculiar terms or niceties, and none has such a fantatical following of statisticians who spend days analysing matches, poring over batting averages, Graham Gooch World Class Cricket offers you the option to edit and create teams and amend batting and bowling averages.

Bodyline the Windies
For example you could create two All Time Great teams, enter the relevant batting and bowling averages, and let the Amiga get on with playing the game to see how the legendary figures from different eras would fare against each other.

The prospect of Viv Richards facing Harold Larwood or WG Grace taking strike against Malcolm Marshall at this most aggressive, is enough to bring most cricket junkies out in cold sweat.

The game is reasonably effective in two player mode or versus the computer, capturing the pace (some say tedium) of cricket, with rbeaks between overs and stoppages for loading time when you change bowlers. The shortest game, 20 overs and one innings each, last about an hour.

So how does it work? Select the two player option and pick your team from the menu. You can either edit your team from the menu. You can either edit your team from a selection of about 20 players or get the program to pick a Best XI. David Gower makes it into the Best XI which is a tad surprising considering he was controversially dropped form the recent England tour of India.

Next, toss a coin to decide who bats and bowls. You control the batsman with thei eight joystick diagonals. To run, click and waggle the joystick furiously to increase speed. This takes some getting used to because too much waggling results in you taking an unwanted extra run and getting run-out for your troubles.

To bowl. You position a white square where you want the ball to pitch, and click to begin your run up. Bowlers come in the fast, swing and spin varieties,and increase the pace, swing or spin by waggling the joystick. You can change the field positions at any time.

The white square is an authentic device as many bowlers practise by putting newspaper sheets on the wicket where they want the ball to bounce, and then attempt to pitch it there.

Where's the streaker?
The game does have a few niggling idiosyncrasies. Occasionally a fielder just yards from the wicket hurls the ball to the boundary. Also, if you pick the England Best XI, Gooch, Gower, Hick and Smith play for both sids. However, this can be easily solved by editing the teams.

None of the teams have any black players, which is an inexcusable oversight. Also if you're playing against the computer and you bowl certain balls, the batsman doesn't play a shot, or plays and misses. Although it's not in the spirit of the game, it's tempting to do this when England are defending a lead of 19.

But the two areas where Graham Gooch really falls down are the sound effects that consist of the thwack of willow on leather, applause for a boundary, and stifled appeals, coupled with a complete lack of humour.

This is particularly irritating because cricket culture is built on a sense of absurd humour. Tens of thousands of radio listeners look forward to rain stopping play so they can listen to the commentary team discussing the virtues of Mrs Jenkins' chocolate cake.

It's also the only game in which a commentator can pronounce "The Batsman's Holding, the bowler's Willey". Unfortunately there are no concessions to this sort of thing. If there were, it would be much more appealing.

My problem is that I'm just too trusting. When I was at school I was forever being caught out by the most transparent of ruses. For instance, there I was, minding my own business, when the music teacher, Froggy Davies by name, said, "Norris, you like music, don't you?"
"Yes, sir," I replied.
"Good, help me move this piano."

Now the more cynical sort of chap is never tripped up like this more than once or twice. But not trusting old Tim, oh no. I never, it seems, managed to work out that nothing is ever quite as it appears, and that no-one - not even someone as pleasant and apparently ingenuous as Linda - is ever without their own secret hidden agenda.

Take, for instance, my experience of earlier this month. It was a hectic day and I thought I'd better get away from my desk for a bit of a break. I decided that a visit to my old chums on AP would do the trick, so I wandered into their office for a bit of a chat. Linda looked up from her daisy-covered desk and said in her lovely Hackney accent, "Ere, Tim - you went to public school, didn't you?"
"Yes," I foolishly replied.
"Oh good, you'd probably like to review Graham Gooch World Class Cricket for us, then." Caught again. If only I were a little more suspicious of people.

On the face of it, it's difficult to capture the magic of England's summer sport in a computer game. What, after all is cricket? What do you think of when someone says 'cricket'? Beer tents, chaps in white trousers playing a bizarre game in the middle of a huge circle, beer tents, old chaps in blazers and gaudy ties who used to wear white trousers but are now, because of their fondness for beer tents, too fat and lazy to play the game and prefer, instead, to pontificate at length about how much better 'the game' used to be. Oh, and don't forget the beer tent.

Magic aside, though, the mechanics of the game are fairly straightforward. A bloke chucks a ball, a bloke hits the ball with a stick, a bloke catches the ball. It's all down to timing, co-ordination, skill and luck - just the things you need for a good game. But for some reason it seems to have been really difficult to get all these things together in a decent cricket sim. Until now.

My first game was England (me) against India (the machine). You can choose any of the international teams and each has a squad made up of current players (there's also a team of cricket legends). There are statistics for all the players and they do affect their performance in the game. There's also the facility to create your own players.

So, I had the machine pick my best 11 players (rather than picking my own team, which was the other option) and off we went. England won the toss (quite neat graphics) and elected to bat. At the end of the first over England were one for five (quite realistic, really).

Your batsman has eight strokes in his playing armoury controlled by moving the joystick at the appropriate moment. Judging the stroke to play and the moment to play it is, as in the real game, the key to batting success.

By the end of the fifth over England were all out for nine runs and there wasn't even the hope of rain stopping play.
Maybe we'd have more luck fielding. You can set your field (with a pop-down menu) and then select the point at which the ball will pitch. Now choose your spin direction - for the spinners - and waggle your joystick to control either pace or spin.

By the time play was halted by switching off the machine and going home, India were 156 for one and I couldn't bear the fake steel drum music anymore. As I practised, I did, of course, improve. And, as I improved I found that I was really beginning to enjoy myself. As a two-player game it's great fun (as these things always are) but if you're on your own you'd have to stick at it for a while to get anything from it. If you do, though, you'll find it quite entertaining.

Considering the English invented cricket, it's a little disturbing that we now find ourselves in the position of possessing one of the worst test teams on the planet. Now's your chance to avenge their numerous defeats, not by shooting the MCC, but by battering the world's teams into submission with your joystick skills.

Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket lets you battle some of the most formidable sides in test cricket. Matches can be played over a number of innings, although I found any more than one fifty-overs-a-side innings to be utterly brain-numbing.

The world's top teams such as Pakistan and Australia are included, along with the actual player names. There's also a World XI which is made up from the best players from each team.

That apart, all the usual teams present a more than adequate challenge. Each team is made up from a squad of 20 and it's up to you to choose your final 11. The players all have individual ratings for bowling and batting, so it's best to go by these when selecting the final squad rather than opting for your favourites.

The batters have a wide variety of strokes in their arsenal. Depending on the kind of delivery, you can get them to execute sweeps, on-drives, off-drives, hooks and plenty more. If you choose a stroke which is impossible to play on the current ball, the chances are your batter will just stand there looking bashful.

Bowling is a matter of being able to waggle the joystick extremely fast. This is used to determine the speed of fast bowlers or spin of swing balls. Fortunately your arm gets a decent rest between overs, so you can put the Ralgex away.

Your fielders are computer controlled, which is a little frustrating as they adhere utterly to procedure and never take risks.

For instance, no matter how close they are to bowler's-end stumps, they'll always throw to the wicket keeper, which means its possible to exploit this and grab a couple of easy runs.

The batting and bowling orders are initially decided by the computer, which automatically selects the best players in your side and places them first. It pays to keep an eye on its selection as it doesn't take tactics into account and will readily give you four fast bowlers followed by all your spin bowlers.

Without a doubt the game's most outstanding feature is its graphics. The animation is superb and the players are a decent size. The sound effects are sparse, but add to the atmosphere.

At the end of the day there are just some things this game can't simulate, such as the fear generated by a lump of leather-wrapped wood hurtling towards your head at 100mph.

If you can handle that, and are prepared to give up the customary visit to the ale house at the end of a match, you should find plenty of fun here.

The very thought of cricket sends the mind spinning into images of summer. Pictures of lying in sun-bleached fields with nostrils filled with pollen and a head filled with the hazy, lazy sound of leather on willow are summoned. Unfortunately the reality of village cricket is much more different. This form of cricket has long since lost any hint of being the gentle, noble sport it once was.

Instead what you get for your apres Sunday pub entertainment is 22 overweight farm hands filled to the brim with whatever ale has been quaffed in the nearest hostelry. Filled with as much Dutch courage as is possible within the allotted time, it seems the romantic image of the sporting gent is lost. What remains is one bloke chucking a piece of solid leather at another bloke with a large blunt piece of wood in his hands.

The sole intention of the chap with the plank in his grip is to hit the speeding leather at ten chaps who stand around in various stupid locations waiting to block the lump of speeding cow skin with their fleshy areas. That's the amateurs, the professional is obviously a different animal altogether. But what neiter seemed capable of pulling off was a decent computer simulation of the noble sport.

Both Robin Smith and Beefy Botham have bowled veritable no-balls in this particular department, coming up with pretty tame licences which have disappeared quicker than the English middle order.

PLAYABLE
The only man who seems to have pulled it off is the Nigel Mansell of the cricket world, Graham Gooch. The Essex and ex-England captain (with just a tad of help from Audiogenic) produced a very playable, fairly realistic cricket simulation.

Well, the moustachioed one is back with an improved version of the game called Second Innings. Getting to grips with Second Innings is fairly simple and the system it employs for control relatively straightforward.
Initially the first thing to ste up are the match parameters. You have the choice of just about every World class team you could care to mention - even England. But, with SI you can also choose from every country side in the country plus a "moments from history" option.

This option allow you to re-live great matches from the past - for example, Ian Botham smashing the Aussies to pieces in the third test back in 1981. Within all the teams are a full squad so you can choose the individual players you care to, along with their particular skills.

Duration, amount of overs to be bowled and a number of other configuration options can all be altered so that any type of match can be simulated.

Playwise, Graham Gooch's Second Innings is pretty simple to pick up. The batting aspect of play is fairly instinctive with the shot selected through a movement of the joystick. All of the shots that you are allowed to play have a natural relationship with movements of the joystick. For example, an upward right movement of the joystick will hook the ball - providing the timing is right, that is.

Bowling is a slightly more complicated procedure to follow. First the bowler must position a square where the ball is to pitch, this will differ depending on the type of bowler used. In Graham Gooch you have the choice of fast, swing and spin bowling.

After the selection of where the ball is to bounce has been determined, sideways joystick gesticulating determines the amount of speed, spin or swing that is applied to the ball.

Graham Gooch Second Innings also features full fielding controls, giving you opportunity to alter your field placings. In fact, you can practically replicate everything feasible within the parameters of cricket - except for an England collapse.

One of the main differences between Gooch and his older brother is that the computer batsmen are vastly improved - they've obviously been in the nets between releases.

TOUGHER
This makes for a much tougher game against the computer, though I have to confess I personally didn't really enjoy playing the Amiga that much. By far the best option is to get hold of one of your friends, grab a second joystick and do battle against each other.

Though most of the changes to Second Innings are extra statistics and updated team lists, the playability, while not altered cosmetically, has also been tweaked.

Second Innings is without a doubt the most playable, graphically pleasing and realistic cricket sim to ever bowl the Amiga over.
I doubt that a non-cricket type person could ever fall in love with Graham Gooch (could any human being, ever Mrs Gooch?). But, if you have a basic knowledge and a slight interest in the sport, then it's a highly enjoyable change from the normal platformers and shoot-'em-ups.

When Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket arrived in the office it was met with the odd suspicious glance. Cricket and Amigas tend to make uneasy bedfellows, the intricacies of the game being difficult to portray successfully.

But Audiogenic did a magnificent job combining great graphics and sound with convincing and realistic gameplay. It was by no means perfect, but good enough for me and a mate to play through the half of the FA Cup Final.

You could not bowl a googly, but spin, swing and fast balls were all weapons in the armoury for budding Wasims, Warnes or, erm, Pringles. Unfortunately, you have to spank the monkey out of your joystick to get the ball go at Wasim speed.

And now Audiogenic have released Graham Gooch's Second Innings, an add-on to the original game with a whole host of extra features. The computer batsmen are improved, all 18 county squads are included and there are five historic matches to watch including 'Botham's Test' from 1981.

You must have the original game to use Second Innings, and the total cost for both is a fulsome £48. The game has been improved and it is a worthy addition to a good cricket sim but I would have liked to have seen the price nearer a tenner.

The thing that really strikes me about cricket titles is that they're attempting to simulate a game which is quite slow and tedious to watch. While I was always fond of playing cricket back in school, since then I've found test matches only marginally more exciting than snooker in the telly-watching stakes.

Every time it's on I find myself vocally urging the bowler to hurry up, especially the allegedly 'fast' bowlers who spend aeons sauntering back from the pitch before getting a good run up for the bowl.

Playing Amiga cricket, though, is potentially much more interesting. Even the poorer cricket simulations which have appeared on the PD scene over the years have been superior to their non-interactive TV counterpart, simply because you have some control over what goes on.

A year ago, Audiogenic released Graham Gooch World Class Cricket, a game which was widely acclaimed for combining a decent game engine along with believable graphics and sound effects. Always a winning combination, I find.

Now, the same company has released a special Test Match edition of the game, to coincide with, er, the Test Match between England and South Africa (which is probably over by the time you read this, incidentally).

The improvements are few, but the game presumably warrants an update anyway simply because this is a new cricket season, bringing in new names, faces and, of course, the South African test side, so long out of world cricket.

Gooch Cricket has a comprehensive database of world cricket, pulling in all sorts of data which doesn't just include player's names, but also their abilities and strengths - so you quickly find out which batsmen are the strongest, and where to place the fielders for the best results.

For this bit you really need a working knowledge of cricket, but the computer does help you along which means that even beginners soon pick up the basic rules (silly mid-offs, bowling maiden overs, that sort of thing).

The Test Match edition, as well as being more difficult than the original, also includes a long list of actual matches which are saved half-way through so you can continue from where they left off - a bit like "What happened next?" from A Question of Sport, except you get complete control.

Some of the most popular test matches (apparently) are saved, including the recent West Indies vs England in Antigua (where Brian Lara scored his record-breaking 375 runs), and the perhaps less well-known England vs Australia in 1902. Yes, well...

Thankfully, even though Audiogenic has built a good simulation, the actual in-game graphics are great. Huge sprites form the bowler, batsmen and in-fielders, so the game looks like a coin-op rather than a computer sim, which should satisfy the less cricket-knowledgable among you.

Gooch Cricket really is cricket for the masses, because it has something to satisfy everybody, and only some pretty lengthy disk loading to work against it. As a one-player game the Amiga puts up quite a good fight (depending on the quality of the teams being played), but, like most sports games, it's best played with two people.

And hey, even the presentation's good, so while setting up the many options in-between matches isn't exactly a joy, it's not as frustrating as many games of this kind. I can't pretend that Gooch Cricket will convert non-believers to cricket, but even if you only have a small interest in the game, Gooch will have something for you.

Pace, aggression, stamina, dexterity, sharpness and judgement are all required of anyone wanting to play that most dangerous and exciting of white trouser-clad games - cricket. Since the inception of Graham Gooch Cricket on the Amiga market, the cricket simulation sector was wrapped up. Nothing else could compete against it in terms of feel, play mechanics, statistical accuracy and fun.

You could play limited over matches, Test matches, against a friend, against the computer or, for stat heads, you could even have the computer play against itself.

The players that made up each team were up to date with their performances in the real world too. Batting averages, bowling averages and fielding averages were all taken care of and it meant that, rather than feel that you were playing an arbitrary computer game, you felt involved with current cricketing events.

Further improving on most of the cricket sims that had gone before it, Graham Gooch Cricket offered a first person perspective view of the wicket - the part of the field where most of the action takes place, apparently.

Fielders could be positioned according to preferences and idiosyncrasies of the type of bowlers used and the ability of the batsman at defending the wicket. These positions could be swapped around if fine tuning was required. All in all it contributed to the feeling that Graham Gooch Cricket was a sim rather than just a game. You could edit all the names of the players too.

And, just like real cricket, the batsman's job came down to positioning, reactions, timing and instinct. And just in case you were wondering, eight different types of shot could be played depending on the type of ball being fired in by the bowler.

The embarrassing part of all this of course was the inclusion of the wiggle waggle factor, both for increasing the amount of spin or pace of the bowler and the speed that the fielders ran between the wickets. Not only did it decrease the lifespan of your joystick drastically, it also lead to an undeserved reputation if people weren't aware of what you were doing.

In the googles
Anyway, that was Graham Gooch Cricket which we awarded 78% in AF47. Not Battle For The Ashes. So why have we spent the whole of this review referring to it?

Well, Battle For The Ashes is Graham Gooch Cricket with its wings clipped - because in Battle you can only set you back a tenner and it can be upgraded with a 94/95 data disk.

So, there's no longer any excuse not to involve yourself in the heady world of willow and leather spanking. Bowl yourself a googly today.