“What is human life but a game of cricket?” – Brian Lara International Cricket 2005

**Brian Lara International Cricket 2005** (Swordfish/Codemasters, PlayStation 2, 2005)

Talk about picking your moment. The back of the box of Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 quotes the Official PlayStation 2 Magazine calling it “the best cricket game on PS2”. It was a claim which put it ahead of EA Sports’s Cricket 2002, Cricket 2004 and Cricket 2005, and… that’s it. It’s not a sport which was inspiring a lot of games. But while EA had settled into their usual regular update routine to no great effect, Brain Lara was a much-loved name which hadn’t graced a cricket game since 1999, and Codemasters brought it back just in time for the biggest moment in English cricket for even longer.

Playing the 2005 game, it’s clear that in the ten years since the first Brian Lara Cricket, not that much changed in terms of gameplay. Batting is kept very simple, largely a matter of timing with a bit of shot selection. Bowling once again uses a golf-style swingometer, plus a bit of aftertouch. There is a brilliant decision to split the difference between manual and automatic fielding and turn catches and throws into timing games with their own swingometers, something which makes for a lot of initial painful fumbled catches but pays off in eventual involvement. All topped off with some functional up-to-date graphics and an authentic selection of rambling old men on commentary. Even as someone who resorted to referencing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s satirical interpretation of cricket in my explanation of the first game, it was again very easy to pick up and get into.

And even as that non-cricket-fan, I still remember the exceptional summer of 2005, a high point and a crossroads for the sport here. Every two years, England’s men’s cricket team play a series of matches against Australia for the Ashes. a tradition which began after a satirical obituary of English cricket on losing to Australia in 1882 (it has been around for seven years longer even than Nintendo). Since the hosts alternate, the Ashes are only in England every four years. And in 2005, England hadn’t won the series for nineteen years. Until then.

I remember a regular sense of disbelief from the media and friends more into cricket as the 2005 Ashes progressed, not just that England might actually finally win but that it was so regularly producing such intense drama. England didn’t just win the series, but won a comeback victory with individual matches dragging out to some of the closest finales ever. I still didn’t get into watching it, but many clearly did. On the last day of the final match in the series, Channel 4 ended with its biggest audience over the course of a day ever, beating a previous high set thanks to the final of the third series of Big Brother in 2002.

Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 was released on the same day the Ashes started. You can’t play the series on it, since it doesn’t have the licences. It does have the Cricket World Cup, and a bizarre setup where matches within that have real player names but those outside of it don’t. But the only Ashes action it includes is in historic scenarios where you can play snippets of matches including the 1882 one (in black and white, but complete with modern advertising boards and graphic overlays). It’s obvious, though, that interest in the event drove the success of the game anyway. After one week at the top of the charts after the first test, it picked up again after England’s incredibly narrow victory in the second match, and stayed there for three weeks.

The usual dearth of big summer games releases probably helped it on its way, but four weeks at the top is not something a cricket game has managed since. And the reasons lie as much in cricket as in video games. Channel 4’s record viewing figures came with a bittersweet edge. Right afterwards, international cricket on UK television moved to Sky and its subscription model. Potential wider audiences were sacrificed for an influx of cash, with roughly the same attendant debates as those in more recent times when online video game stores spend big on securing exclusivity.

Cricket’s time in the cultural sun was pretty much gone again as soon as it arrived. It would take England winning the World Cup in 2019 via the equivalent of a penalty shootout for cricket to capture the imagination again. Video game cricket wasn’t solely reliant on the English market — Codemasters’s game was released as Ricky Ponting Cricket in Australia and New Zealand — but it would be a tough job to ride out any falls in popularity here. Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 and its success wound up as a monument to a very specific moment.