About Pavilion
That is roughly what a child who loves this game gets. Pavilion exists because of the other six days.
Where it started
Pavilion was not designed in an office. It was tested in North Yorkshire, at Beckwithshaw Cricket Club, during a season Harry spent playing for the club as their overseas player.
An early version went into junior training. Ben Holderness, an ECB Level 3 coach, and Oliver Wynn, who runs the club's junior section, put it in front of the children — and the room went off. They were fizzing. Passing the phone round, calling their scores across the nets, arguing about them, wanting one more innings.
That is the whole origin of this. Not a market opportunity and not a business plan — a room full of children who did not want to give the phone back.
There is so much more to this game. It needs to be spread far and wide, for all to play, all to see, to engage and have fun.
Everything built since has been an attempt to get that room to scale.
The gap
The other thing a junior session makes obvious is how little cricket those children actually get. A child who has found this game and fallen for it faces a strange problem: there is almost none of it available to them. Nets for an hour if the club runs them. A game at the weekend, where they might bat for six balls and field for two hours. Then it rains, and that is the week gone.
And that is the lucky child — the one with a club, a lift to the ground, a bag, and a parent who can give up a Saturday.
Plenty of children never get that far. No club nearby, or no way to get to it, or a family for whom kit and subs and weekends are not a small thing. They are interested in cricket and there is simply no door.
Both children want the identical thing, and it is not a coaching programme or a pathway. They want more balls to face.
So: a cricket ground that is open at seven in the morning, in a bedroom, on a phone, for nothing.
What it had to be
Cricket games mostly get made for adults who already love cricket — licences, teams, sliders, menus. There was nothing built for a nine-year-old with a phone and twenty minutes.
So Pavilion is built on a small number of stubborn decisions:
One moment, done properly. The ball comes down and you decide when to swing. That is the best thing in cricket and it is the whole game. No fielding placements, no toss, no sliders.
Nothing to read. No manual, no tutorial you can fail. A child should be facing a ball inside a minute of arriving, and understand what happened without anybody explaining it.
You are never quite out of it. Lose a wicket and one good six brings a fallen batter back. A child who is having a bad innings is still playing, which is more than can be said for a Saturday.
Nothing you can buy makes you better. Every score on every board was made by somebody timing the ball. That is not a marketing position, it is the only way a record means anything.
It works on the phone that is actually in the house. Designed and tested on a phone first, not squeezed down from a desktop game.
The reason for the boards
Every other thing about cricket can be argued over. This one cannot: it is the game of the scorebook, the averages, the name painted on a board in a room you walk past on the way to the changing rooms. A club knows who made a hundred in 1974. That is not nostalgia, it is the point of the sport.
Video games almost never do this. A high score sits at the top of a list until somebody better arrives, then it is gone, and at the end of the season the list wipes. Games rank you. Cricket keeps a register.
So Pavilion keeps a register. Make a hundred and your name goes on the wall with the year beside it, numbered, and it is never reordered by anybody else's innings and never reset. A ladder is a fixed number of places, so every child who climbs pushes another down. A wall always takes one more name.
And everybody gets a debut number on their first innings — free, sequential, permanent. You are the Nth person ever to bat at Pavilion, and nobody can take that off you, including me.
The name
The pavilion is the building at the edge of the ground. It is where the boards hang, where the names are, where you go when you are out and where you sit when you are waiting. It is the part of a cricket club that has nothing to do with playing and everything to do with belonging to the place.
A child playing on a phone in a country with no cricket club within an hour's drive should still get one of those.
Who made it
Pavilion is built and run by Harry Wenham. Every line of it — the fixtures, the boards, the overs, the club — one person, over months, because cricket deserved a version of itself a nine-year-old could love on a phone.
With thanks to Beckwithshaw Cricket Club, and to Ben Holderness and Oliver Wynn, for handing it to the only critics whose opinion counted.
Worth saying plainly rather than hiding behind a plural. It means the game is opinionated, it means it will have rough edges, and it means bugs get answered by the person who wrote them.
It does not tell you where Pavilion goes next, or what it might become, or what it might one day be able to do for children who cannot get to a club. Those are real intentions and they are not achievements, and a website is not the place to bank credit for things that have not happened.
What is on this site is what exists and can be checked by playing it. When something else is true, it will be added here — and not before.
Face six balls. It takes about a minute.
