SO there we were playing a sneaky little game of Stick Cricket on the phone after work at the pub, when we noticed something had changed.

The change is a beautiful change. Not beautiful from a gaming point of view, but beautiful in terms of its humanity and consideration.

Wait a minute … You’ve NEVER PLAYED STICK CRICKET??? Well, what you need to know is that Stick Cricket is one of the world’s simplest, most fun online sports games.

It’s not spectacularly whizzbangeriffic from a graphics or gameplay point of view, but its simplicity is its charm.

Fifteen million downloads (and counting) can’t be wrong.

Like we say, though, Stick Cricket just changed.

Here’s how and why.

In the old days, when the stick batsman missed a bouncer, he collapsed in an unconscious bedraggled heap on his stumps and was out bowled.

It was all rather amusing and ironically, the game’s designers were working on a way to make it even more graphic.

Then the Phillip Hughes tragedy happened.

As we all know, the Australian batsman was floored by a bouncer late last year at the SCG and ultimately lost his fight for life.

When that happened, the designers of stick cricket held a snap meeting to try to change the game.

Colin Rowe, creative director of Stick Sports (there are other “Stick” games) takes up the story.

“We felt that the landscape had changed,” Rowe says. “It was there for comedic value, and when we first made Stick Cricket, no one had ever died from a head blow in professional cricket, so we felt justified to add the comedy.

“It’s sobering now and no longer funny, so we had a team meeting the day Phillip Hughes died and put plans to change the game with the very next update.”

Now in stick cricket when a batsman misses a bouncer, it sails harmlessly over his head. You won’t see that change in all formats of the game.

That’s because the team who designed the old desktop version no longer work for the company.

But the change has already come into play on some versions of the mobile game.

“The bouncer has not yet been removed from all Stick Cricket mobile apps,” Rowe confirms. “It’s only from the Stick Cricket Premier League (SPL) version at this stage.

“Some updates, that include the removal of the head blow dismissal among other things, are still pending in other versions of the game. We have four Stick Cricket apps in the market and only SPL has been pushed out so far.”

But the important thing is, the changes are on the way to the platform on which most people play Stick Cricket. Which we think is really thoughtful and great.

Other changes are afoot too, for all you Stick Cricket freaks out there. Colin Rowe can’t give too much away, but he did confirm it involves female cricketers, a whole raft of new cricket shots like the ramp and the switch, more levels of game play, plus players in gorilla suits with bananas for bats.

Well they couldn’t be worse than England.