As the Covid-19 pandemic takes hold, many are choosing to stay in to avoid contracting or conveying the novel Coronavirus, with social distancing widely encouraged, and cricket fans are no exception.
Ben Gardner picks out the five best cricket quizzes on Sporcle to tear your hair out over if you find yourself with a spare evening.
With evening schedules suddenly free, Sporcle offers a perfect solution, with the trivia website hosting a near-limitless supply of quizzes and games, including many cricket-themed puzzlers. Below is a selection of the best and trickiest the site has to offer:
Can you name the teams to have played men’s ODIs?
A seemingly simple one to start, until you realise you haven’t brushed up on the 1996 World Cup in a while and you have no idea why a team would have played its first ODI in 1975 and yet only managed two more in the intervening period. Still, any self-respecting cricket fan should be scoring in the 90 per cent bracket.
Can you name all the Test triple-centurions?
Again, you’d think this would be easy. Bringing up a triple is one of the surest ways to carve your name indelibly into the annals of Test cricket, with the list containing plenty of the true greats of the game. But if you are going to get a perfect score, you’ll need to dredge deeply into the memory banks too, for those one-daddy wonders who went big once and went home soon after.
You’ll also need to not get distracted by the fascinating statistical minutiae. Does it mean anything that three of the four lowest triples have been made since 2014? And why have 23 triple tons have been made in even-numbered years, compared to only eight in odd-numbered years? Plenty to ponder, and it looks like plenty of time to ponder in.
Umpiring scenarios: Out or not out?
A slightly different sort of Sporcle quiz, testing not your knowledge of the stats tables and scorecard data, but of the MCC Laws of Cricket. That’s right, no cheating on Statsguru with this one; if you’re not sure, you’ll just have to trust your instincts to figure out what you’d do if presented with a scenario that, probably, no one will ever be presented with.
Can you name the top Ashes run-scorers of all time?
Now we’re cooking with gas. This quiz will really help separate the nuffies from the casuals; all you’re given is the number of runs each player has scored during the Ashes, with no career spans or nationalities, and just cycling through the great and the good to play for each nation will only get you so far. The list is littered with older names, when most cricket played was England-Australia contests. An average score of 39 per cent makes it by one measure the hardest on this list, though you’ll surely have a better chance at scoring a perfect mark on the fifth quiz…
Can you name all the English Test cricketers since 2000?
There’s no hiding place with this quiz. If you can’t figure out who scored 325 against West Indies in 1930, you can console yourself with the fact that not only were you not sentient, neither was anyone you know. With this, if you’re 20 or older, you lived through it. Plenty of these players would have gripped you, inspired you, infuriated you. You’ll have held candles for some and decried the selections of others. And now they’re all but forgotten, only rushing back to the surface as the clock ticks into the red and you curse how you could ever have let them slip your mind. Prepare to tear your hair out.
