Cricket Connections

Teams and eras carry it, the same as everywhere else in the family — who a player turned out for and when. What this rotation owns is the vocabulary none of the others have: when bowling style appears it is a whole group, four off-spinners or four quicks, and so is a player’s role in the side. Around those sit the competitions entered, the honours won, the runs or wickets accumulated, and surnames often enough to be worth watching for.

It uses cricket’s vocabulary to describe the players, never as the tiles themselves. Every name on the board is a cricketer; what binds four of them may be a term the game owns — off-spin, a keeping role, a format — but you are always grouping people, not words. That is what makes the bowling-style group the family’s most sport-specific category and the one that separates the follower of the game from the follower of the scoreboard.

They are, because the record keeps them separate. A milestone group states the format it belongs to — a one-day run total is a different achievement from the same number in the longer game — so a group never quietly adds two formats together.

Domestic ones as well as international, including the long-established county game. A competition group asks where a player plied their trade rather than who they represented, which is a genuinely different question in this sport.

The named international awards, each as a set of four recipients. As everywhere else in the family the membership is a matter of record rather than an opinion about who was the finer player.

Ten more: the AFL, golf, college basketball, the NHL, college football, the NBA, MLB, the NFL, the WNBA and soccer. More cricket games: Cricket Wordle, Cricket Grid, Build a Cricket Player and Cricket Career Simulator.