Saturday 22 October 2011

Excel Test Match Cricket Player

Any regular readers that I ever had, and who might still be with me, will have noticed that I've been much more quiet on this blog in recent months than before.  There are many reasons for this, one of which I will explain to you now.
For the last few months I have been working on a Test Match Cricket Player in Excel, and you can download it here

It uses macro's, random numbers, probability and my own knowledge of the game of cricket and will play a whole test match automatically (with a certain amount of prompting by way of pressing start buttons etc!)

When you download it, you will first get the setup page:

From here you choose your home and away teams from the list of the current top eight Test teams (sorry Zimbabwe and Bangladesh).  You then click on the 'Select' button, and you are taken to the Match screen:


As you can see, the match has reached lunch on day 1.  This is really where everything takes place.  There is ball by ball commentary in the top yellow window, the scoreboard, the temporary scorecard which updates for each wicket that falls, and the bowling figures which update ball by ball.  There are the details of the toss, the weather and the pitch, and various other statistics as well.
To start an innings you click the 'Start Inns' button, and if an innings is already in progress but the macro has stopped for Lunch or Tea etc then you click on the 'Cont Inns' button. When a match is complete and you want to play another, click on the 'New Match' button and it will take you back to the Setup page.
For extra statistics you need to click on the Scorecard screen and you will get this:



The scorecard will update after each innings completes.  The summary section below the scorecard will update as the match progresses with details of wickets fallen, various team, individual and partnership milestones, as well as details of the toss and the result.  All of this information can be printed off at the end of a match or saved as it's own file (if you so wish!)

This player is simply created for fun and my own amusement, to get through those days when there is no Test Match Special to listen to.  However it has taken several months of learning about macro's, trial, error and experimentation to get it to this stage to be shared with the world.  Please enjoy if you would like to.

And yes...I probably am a bit crazy.

Sunday 9 October 2011

Twittering

I have succumbed to Twitter...not sure if this is a good thing or not yet, but I will make up my mind as I go...For the moment I think it will just contain some interesting collections of words which together may create interesting pictures...I hope!