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.

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. 

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.