Player Names On Play-Cricket

Accurate, well-formed and consistent names in player records will assist greatly in identifying players across clubs and leagues and enable their playing records to be brought together into a single entity.

Each club, or league if they require registration of players, has been left to decide its own protocol for player names. Most have settled on a simple first name (or the name by which a player is normally known) and last name, with extra information (middle initial(s), jnr/snr etc.) only required if there are conflicts within a club’s own database. This is the only place where this matters – as long as it is possible to uniquely identify each of a club’s players when inputting the details for any given game then what other clubs might call their players is irrelevant as there is no access to them other than through a given game.

On Play-Cricket scorecards only first and last name are displayed, so from a club view, and for registration with a league, convention should be that distinguishing information should be included in those fields.

Plain initials rather than a full first name is not sufficient – JC Smith could be John Charles, James Christopher or any one of thousands of other combinations. It would also require detailed knowledge of which individuals have which initials in order to identify a person, which is not something that opposition scorers have on most occasions

A list of full first names is unwieldy – scorecards would simply become unreadable as the proliferation of names would drown out all the real information

We would always go down the road of ‘sufficient information to identify the individual within their current club’ – as that is where any conflict of identification is going to take place. So if there are identically named individuals then a middle initial (or two) should be suffixed to the first name; if it is father and son or similar then suffix snr/jnr to the first name; and so on.

With reference to suffixes, these should be associated with the player’s first name rather than the last name. This means that the matching process for multiple records when registering a player should find all of the relevant records; suffixes on the last name may affect this.