It’s the final over of the game, and Muttiah Muralitharan has just arrived at the crease. For a man who retired from the sport in 2011, he’s looking spry and, despite being known as a spin bowler — never mind the fact he’s pushing sixty — any hopes of victory now lie with the Sri Lankan.

‘You have 20 overs to chase India’s total of 490. You must win to progress to the next opponent,’ the game had said moments earlier. Now, the closing ‘Good Luck!’ feels less like encouragement and more like heckling from an overzealous fan. “We’re beyond record-setting territory today, folks!” you can imagine the commentator saying with a decidedly British twang. “Our stats guy just handed me the numbers — the previous highest score in a T20 was 344!”

Good luck, indeed.

The next delivery is a short ball. It hurtles towards the spinner’s head and, to everyone’s surprise, he sends it sailing over square leg for six. Hope stirs — in the crowd and in my fingers — that this might just be doable. It’s still an absurd ask. Ludicrous, even. But then, this is Stick Cricket.

Oh, Stick Cricket. You sensational affront to all things sports simulation, you. It’s been eons since I last thought about this game, but off the back of a summer spent reacquainting myself with the sport and, in turn, the sport’s many videogames, I set off in search of this childhood favourite. I’d fully expected to spend hours here, digging through old cricket fan forums or The Wayback Machine only to find it had died a slow, painful death when Adobe shuttered Flash, but to my surprise it was, in fact, still around. Hell, it even released on mobile in 2011.

The font! The crowd! The cricket-by-way-of-newspaper-comic-strip art style! It’s all still here. It’s also still a shockingly simple affair. You have two buttons and one goal — hit the ball. As for bowling? You can't. That’s because Stick Cricket has always been a batter’s game. It’s about swivelling gracefully onto the back foot for a hook shot. It’s about cheekily ramping the ball over the wicketkeeper’s head. And it’s about the purity of a well-timed cover drive, the heft of well-whittled willow meeting leather with a ‘Thwack!’. Fuck, what a sound. God, what a game.

“I figured that making a game with Flash would keep this interesting for me.” says Colin Rowe in a lovely little retrospective I stumbled on during my search. “Cricket is my favourite sport, and I had played a few free cricket games but thought that they were a bit slow, and didn’t really have a fun factor. I set myself the challenge of firstly improving my skills for the workplace, and secondly, making a better cricket game than any I had played.”

Twenty-three years after Colin “...uploaded it [Stick Cricket] to a blank webpage, so that his friends and colleagues could play it.”, I’d say he succeeded. Stick Sports Ltd is now a successful mobile game developer, and Stick Cricket — as well as the Stick genre — has grown since I last used the arrow keys of a fast-yellowing Dell keyboard to smash a boundary in ‘03. There’s Stick Football. Stick Tennis. Stick… everything. There’s also Stick Cricket Super League and Stick Cricket Clash, both mobile sequels, of sorts, that introduce modern features like career modes, a flashy — if generic — 3D art-style and, of course, in-app purchases.

Stick Cricket’s transition from the web sees it suffer much the same — you can buy bats that make the timing more forgiving, or Power Overs that let you see where the ball will land — but the game beneath it all remains Stick Sports at its best. Maybe that’s because it lives in the early ‘00s part of my brain — crammed in next to the dial tone of a 56K modem, torrenting Backstreet Boys music videos, and playing 3D Pinball: Space Cadet on Windows ME (which, in a nostalgic one-two punch, is also available for Android if you’re willing to jump through some hoops) — or maybe it’s because it, more than most cricket games since, understands there's more to the sport than back-of-the-box features like Century Stick (Cricket 05) or QuickSwitch Bowling (Cricket 07).

That’s not to say there isn't a place for sports sims, but somewhere along the way we seem to have wrung the humanity out of digital sports like a used sweat towel. Yes, cricket is serious stuff — when The Ashes left the MCC Museum in London to tour Australia in ‘06, it did so handcuffed to a museum curator — but it’s also incredibly silly. Few cricket games — hell, few sports games outside of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 and Rocket League — remember that like Stick Cricket.

It’s in the way the umpire channels the best of Billy Bowden, flicking his leg skyward when signalling a six, it’s in the way ball meets head, then body meets wickets, if you miss a bouncer, concussion protocols be damned — you might be dead, but you are definitely out — and it’s needing 19 runs from 5 balls if you want to proceed to the next opponent. More than that, it’s believing it might just be doable. This, right here, is sport at its best. This, right here, is Stick Cricket.