The pitch is empty.
For now.

Gabbattoir is a cricket prediction game where only the strongest survive. Every day of a test series you predict runs, wickets and innings against your friends, and the arcane Gabbattoir scoring system quietly decides who was wise and who was merely hopeful.

Right now there's no live series and nothing to predict — so we've turned the lights off, put the scoreboard to sleep, and gone to sit quietly in the dark. It's cheaper this way, and frankly it suits the mood.

When the next test looms, we wake up. The predictions reopen, the trophies come out of the cabinet, and everyone signs up once more to suffer the indescribable pain of nearly winning it.