Cricket, Lovely Cricket

There is a common and legitimate complaint that, in an increasingly internationalised world, British crosswords are simply too British. Whilst we might be forgiven for assuming that Johnny Foreigner is aware that we have a Prime Minister rather than a president, and that Cockneys drop their aitches, we tend to take our parochialism a lot further than that.

A far from infrequent indicator of our cultural insularity is the clue that makes some sort of reference to the curious sport of cricket. For many of us, in places all over the world, cricket is a sacred pillar, the very reason that our distant ancestors bothered crawling out of the sea; but the fact remains that there is a serious chunk of the Anglophone world in which it is largely dismissed as being just one of those strange little things that foreign people do for reasons best known to themselves. Given that the very word cricket has become synonymous with fair play, we should, at the very least, consider the fairness of leaning so heavily on niche terminology.

The setter’s temptation to draw on the cricketing lexicon is plain to see. The world’s finest sport has a rich and lyrical language all of its own, and there are plenty of strings that can neatly be clued via references to the game. In the days before crosswords had any significant international reach, cricket was an absolute boon to the setter, but in the age of the internet I’d argue that it no longer has quite as much of a place.

This guide, therefore, is intended primarily for solvers rather than setters. My guide to setters would simply be: don’t go too deeply into cricketing terms unless you’re compiling a puzzle for a cricket-based setting. It’s just not fair to expect a solver in Arkansas to know that cover point is a fielding position, or that Malcolm Marshall was the best fast bowler who ever drew breath — however important it might be to actually know such things, that simply wouldn’t be cricket.

Cricket clues will not, of course, vanish overnight on the back of this blog post, so here’s a handy, if by no means exhaustive, guide to some terms that might be encountered, provided in the hope that it will help uninitiated solvers to spot them even if it doesn’t begin to explain them.

Teams and sides

Cricket is played between two teams, or sides, of eleven players, and cricket team, cricket side or simply eleven may therefore indicate XI.

This is all perfectly intuitive, provided that you hail from a cricketing country.

Needless to say, however, it isn’t quite that simple. A cricket field also has two sides: ON and OFF. The on side, just to keep you on your toes, is interchangeably known as the LEG side.

Thus cricket side might conceivably lead to XI, ON, OFF or LEG, whereas cricket team is much more likely to indicate XI.

A batter who is currently batting is IN; once dismissed, they are OUT. Both words naturally offer setters all manner of mischief.

Overs, runs and the scorecard

Balls are bowled in groups called OVERS, each consisting of six valid deliveries. Wides and no-balls have to be bowled again, so an over may in practice contain more than six actual deliveries.

Anything referring to a batch of balls or deliveries might therefore be leading us towards OVER.

An over in which no runs are charged to the bowler is a MAIDEN.

The traditional bowling section of a scorecard contains four particularly useful letters:

• O — overs
• M — maidens
• R — runs
• W — wickets

All four frequently crop up as single-letter substitutions.

Unfortunately, O has another cricketing use. A batter dismissed without scoring has made a DUCK, represented by the zero or O on the scorecard. Two ducks in the same match constitute a PAIR — something that could be represented by OO.

Other scoring terms worth knowing include TON for a century (100 runs from an individual batter) and BOUNDARY, a shot that clears the field, scoring either four or six runs.

Runs not credited to the batter are known as EXTRAS (sundries in Australia) and provide even more potential substitutions:

• B — bye
• LB — leg bye
• W — wide
• NB — no-ball

A batter who survives to the end of the innings may be marked N.O., for not out.

Bowling

Bowlers and their deliveries come in a variety of styles, from the speed merchants — PACEMEN or fast bowlers — who launch their rock-hard missiles at speeds in excess of 90 mph, to the slower and trickier SPINNERS.

Spin bowling provides particularly fertile ground for wordplay. The two broad varieties are OFF SPIN and LEG SPIN, while terms such as OFF BREAK, LEG BREAK, CHINAMAN, GOOGLY and WRONG ’UN may also appear.

Other bowling terms worth recognising include SEAM(ER), SWING, BOUNCER, BUMPER, CUTTER and YORKER.

A SPELL can refer to a sequence of overs bowled by the same bowler, whether magical or otherwise.

Batting

The batter may address the delivery with any of a large number of SHOTS, and shot may therefore be represented by words such as DRIVE, HOOK, PULL, CUT or GLANCE.

A turn at batting is an INNINGS, sometimes informally a KNOCK.

A batter may TAKE GUARD or be ON STRIKE, and is equipped with a BAT or, rather more poetically, a WILLOW.

The CREASE is the marked line associated with the batter’s ground and is another wonderfully ordinary-looking word that may acquire a cricketing definition without warning.

An OPENER is one of the first two batters in an innings. The weaker batters towards the bottom of the order form the TAIL, and a particularly hopeless batter may traditionally be described as a RABBIT (shorthand for “like a rabbit in the headlights”); hence a rabbit could be a TAIL-ENDER.

Getting out

Should one of those shots go awry, the batter can be dismissed in several ways.

The most crossword-friendly scorecard abbreviations are:

• C — caught
• B — bowled
• RO — run out
• ST — stumped
• LBW — leg before wicket

Since R may mean run, run out can also provide a setter with an excuse to remove an R from something.

Some of cricket’s other modes of dismissal — hit wicket, hit the ball twice, handled the ball, obstructing the field and timed out — are sufficiently unusual that even many cricket followers could go a lifetime without witnessing them on a scorecard, so we can safely ignore them.

For a batter to be given out, the fielding side normally makes an APPEAL to an UMPIRE — sometimes UMP — traditionally expressed by the cry HOWZAT?, a contraction of “How’s that?”

Wickets, stumps and bails

Cricket has also managed the impressive feat of giving the word WICKET several different meanings.

It may refer to the physical target defended by the batter, a dismissal, the pitch itself in certain contexts, or a batter’s continued presence at the crease.

The wicket consists of three STUMPS, topped by two BAILS.

Fielding positions

Fielding positions are altogether less intuitively named than those in baseball, but happily a solver is unlikely to be expected to know exactly where deep backward cover is standing, or what on Earth a silly mid-off might be.

The specialist position most worth knowing is the WICKETKEEPER — also KEEPER or, colloquially, WICKIE — who stands behind the stumps and can be abbreviated to WK.

Other fielding positions that may conceivably appear include:

SLIP, GULLY, POINT, COVER, MID-ON, MID-OFF, SQUARE LEG, FINE LEG, THIRD MAN, SHORT LEG, SILLY POINT, LONG-ON and LONG-OFF.

You certainly don’t need to know where all of these people are standing. It is enough to recognise that, in the right context, they may be references to someone or something on a cricket field.

The game itself

A few other terms regularly escape cricket and find their way into general language. Not least is the name of the game itself, which has come to mean FAIR PLAY.

A captain may DECLARE, voluntarily ending an innings. A side may be asked to FOLLOW ON. A player selected for a national team receives a CAP. An international match played under the longest form of the game is a TEST. A short international match is known as a One-Day International and can be shortened to ODI.

England and Australia notably compete for THE ASHES, while MCC stands for Marylebone Cricket Club, the body responsible for the Laws of Cricket.

Grounds

Cricketing venues do occasionally pop up in crosswords.

The two most obvious are LORD’S (which took its name from the ground’s original owner, rather than anything to do with the aristocracy) and THE OVAL, the two main London grounds, but British puzzles may also make occasional reference to EDGBASTON, HEADINGLEY, TRENT BRIDGE or OLD TRAFFORD.

The fact that several of those names also denote districts (and, in the case of Old Trafford, a football ground, too) increases the reliance on specialist knowledge.

Cricketers

Specific players are less likely to be mentioned, but if anyone were to employ a DbE for cricketer, the most obvious candidates would probably be the legendary Australian SIR DONALD BRADMAN or, further back in time, the bearded Victorian chap Doctor W. G. GRACE — players whose names transcend their sport in some timeless fashion, like those of Joe DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali and Pelé, to dwell in the realms of general knowledge rather than sporting trivia.

In his famous book, Ximenes stated that “LEN at once suggests Sir Leonard Hutton”, and indeed in the Britain of 1966 it might well have done. Hutton was a legendary English batter who had retired a decade previously.

To my mind, though, such things merely impose both temporal and geographical restrictions on the solvability of a clue, however tempting it might be to employ the name of a contemporary titan such as JOE ROOT.

And this brings me back to my advice to setters: just leave cricket out of it, however tempting it might be to play with all that lovely lingo.

Players such as Waqar Younis, Viv Richards, Sarah Taylor and Allan Donald may have achieved a level of god-like immortality in your mind, as they undoubtedly have in mine, but it really isn’t reasonable to expect a solver in Canada to know them from Adam.

Cricket in Crosswords: Quick Reference

Cricket team / cricket side / eleven → XIEleven players.

Cricket side → ON / OFF / LEG / XISides of the field or a set of eleven players.

Batting → INCurrently at the crease.

Dismissed → OUTNo longer batting.

Over → OSix valid deliveries.

Maiden → MAn over conceding no runs charged to the bowler.

Run(s) → RThe unit of scoring.

Wicket → WA dismissal; also the physical wicket.

Duck → O / BLOBA score of zero.

Pair → OOTwo ducks in the same match.

Bye → BAn extra scored without the ball hitting the bat or batter.

Leg bye → LBAn extra scored after the ball strikes the batter’s body.

Wide → WIllegal delivery beyond reach.

No-ball → NBIllegal delivery.

Not out → N.O.The batter remains undismissed.

Caught → CA mode of dismissal.

Bowled → BA mode of dismissal.

Run out → ROA mode of dismissal.

Stumped → STA mode of dismissal.

Leg before wicket → LBWA mode of dismissal.

Appeal → HOWZAT?A request for the umpire’s decision.

Umpire → UMPA match official.

Century → TONA score of 100.

Bat → WILLOWThe traditional material used to make a bat.

Batting turn → INNINGS / KNOCKA period at the crease.

Fast bowler → PACEMAN / SEAMERA pace bowler.

Slow bowler → SPINNERA spin bowler.

Spinning delivery → GOOGLY / WRONG ’UN / BREAKTypes of spin delivery.

Delivery → BOUNCER / YORKERTypes of delivery, commonly associated with pace bowling.

Bowling stint → SPELLA sequence of overs bowled by the same bowler.

Shot → DRIVE / CUT / HOOK / PULL / GLANCEBatting strokes.

First or second batter → OPENERAn opening batter.

Weak batter → RABBIT / TAIL-ENDERA rabbit is a weak batter; a tail-ender bats towards the bottom of the order.

Wicket components → STUMPS / BAILSThe wicket consists of three stumps topped by two bails.

Marked line → CREASEA line marking a batter’s or bowler’s position.

Fielder → SLIP / POINT / COVER / GULLY / LONG-ON / LONG-OFF / FINE LEG / MID-ON / MID-OFF / THIRD MANFielding positions.

Wicketkeeper → KEEPER / WICKIE / WKThe specialist fielder behind the wicket.

Long international → TESTA Test match.

England v Australia → ASHESThe Test series contested between England and Australia.

Laws of cricket → MCCMarylebone Cricket Club.

London cricket ground → LORD’S / OVALMajor Test venues.

Other English grounds → EDGBASTON / HEADINGLEY / TRENT BRIDGE / OLD TRAFFORDTest venues.

A small cultural footnote: many will take issue with my having used the word BATTER rather than the more traditional BATSMAN. I fully respect that opinion and am always more than happy to debate it with anyone — provided that they can wield the willow as well as Meg Lanning, of course!