AFL Connections

Clubs and guernsey numbers, in that order. The sides a player turned out for is the base — club identity does more work in this rotation than in any other — and a quartet who all wore the same number is the group that hides longest. This is the only board outside the American leagues that uses the number at all. Around those sit the club a man debuted with, the season he first appeared, the games he racked up and the medals he won.

The league’s own, the Brownlow foremost, by name and by year. An award group here is four men who each took the same medal home, which spans the competition’s history rather than a single era of it.

Games played, at the thresholds the sport itself celebrates — three hundred games being the one that defines a career. Longevity is the milestone this code respects most, and the board follows that.

They appear: surnames that are also animals or objects, unconnected to any club or era. They are the groups that catch out the fan who knows the football best, because football knowledge is precisely no help.

No. The first-season groups reach back across the decades of the competition, so a board can set a current player beside someone who debuted generations earlier at the same club.

Ten more: college basketball, cricket, college football, MLB, the WNBA, the NFL, the NBA, golf, soccer and the NHL. More AFL games: AFL Wordle, AFL Grid, Build an AFL Player and AFL Career Simulator. AFL Trivia Quiz asks three questions a day. Guess the AFL Team asks for the club of one era’s players. The AFL Ball Knowledge Dive asks for one right name, and the less obvious it is, the more it scores.