Home Ground

Your home stadium is your club's spiritual home and the location at which all of your home matches are played. There are two main areas of responsibility when managing your home ground - pitch preparation and stadium expansion.

Preparing the Pitch

As the manager of your club, you are able to control the type of pitch that you play your home matches on. Selecting the correct pitch is an important tactical decision that should be reached after carefully weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of both your team and those of the opposition.

Your groundspeople have five pitches available, one for each league competition your club competes in and one specially set aside for Matt Krevs Memorial Cup matches. The different pitch types and their general characteristics are described below:

Pitch Types

Pitch TypeDescription
StickyHeavily favours all bowlers.
UnevenFavours seam bowlers, particularly fast and fast-medium bowlers.
GreenFavours seam bowlers, particularly medium pace bowlers. Slightly disadvantages spin bowlers.
HardFavours batters, although fast and fast medium bowlers sometimes enjoy the additional bounce available.
FlatFavours batters.
EvenNo advantage or disadvantage to batters or bowlers.
SlowSlightly favours medium pace and spin bowlers, with batters finding it harder than normal to score quickly.
DryFavours spin bowlers. Slightly disadvantages seam bowlers.
CrumblingHeavily favours spin bowlers. Slightly favours seam bowlers.

It takes time for your groundspeople to change the condition of a pitch. For example, to go from a flat pitch to a slow pitch might take about 2 days, from flat to green about 4 days, etc. Make sure you allow enough time for your groundsperson to make the change you want before the match is to be played.


Ground Expansion

You can order stadium upgrades to increase (or sometimes decrease) the size of your stadium. Stadium expansion is quite costly, so you should probably only consider expanding your stadium once you start selling out a few matches in a row. It takes 7 days from the time you order construction to start for the work to be completed.

Whenever you make a ground expansion, there is a fixed cost of $10,000 involved, and each seat that is added or removed costs $20. For example, expanding your stadium from 5,000 to 8,000 will cost you $10,000 + (3,000 x $20 per seat) = $70,000.

Demolition of seats costs the same amount as expansion. In the example above, reducing your stadium from 8,000 seats to 5,000 would also cost $70,000.

Weather

The weather conditions on match day can also have a significant effect on the result.

A 7 day weather forecast for each country can be found by clicking on Country -> Weather Forecast. The forecasters try to do a good job, but the further into the future they look, the less accurate their forecast is likely to be.

The weather in the game does not follow real life conditions. For example, England will have the same chance of having a sunny day as Australia, and it is just as likely for New Zealand to have a hot day as it is in India.

The daily weather forecasts occur approximately two and a half hours before matches start in a country. However, the weather forecast that is made 26.5 hours prior to a match will not change at the next update, so managers will always know what the weather will be at least a day in advance.

Weather can also have a minor impact on crowd attendance and the amount of fatigue players experience in a match. The possible weather types are displayed below:

Weather Types

3
Weather TypeDescription
HotHard work for all players who tire faster than normal. Seam bowlers also don't perform quite as well as normal, although spinners don't mind the heat too much.
HumidHard work for all players who tire faster than normal. Seam bowlers tend to enjoy humid conditions, but spinners can find it difficult to grip the ball.
SunnyEveryone likes a sunny day :). No particular advantage is provided for batters or bowlers.
CloudySlightly favours seam bowlers.
WindySlightly favours spin bowlers, who usually enjoy bowling into a nice breeze.
OvercastFavours seam bowlers.

Gate Takings

Attendance is affected by

  • your supporters mood and number of club supporters
  • your opponent's supporters mood and number of club supporters
  • the type of match being played. For example, youth matches attract a smaller crowd
  • the division level of the match. The higher the division, the higher the crowd that is likely to attend
  • weather conditions on the day

Gate Taking are affected by

  • the number of people attending the match (described above)
  • Ticket prices. The higher the division level of the match, the higher the ticket prices that are charged.
  • Whether the match is being played at your home ground or elsewhere. The home team receives 2/3 of the total gate takings, with the remaining 1/3 being allocated to the away team (except Matt Krev's Memorial Cup matches where revenue is split 50/50).
Gate Takings
DIVSENIOR One DaySENIOR Twenty20YOUTH One DayYOUTH Twenty20
One$13.00$10.50$5.25$2.65
Two$12.16$9.82$4.91$2.48
Three$11.36$9.18$4.59$2.32
Four$10.63$8.85$4.29$2.17
Five$9.94$8.02$4.01$2.03