Problems | T20 cricket's highs and lows

 Meet 10 players playing a tournament like the IPL. From the clues given, can you pair them into their respective teams and find out who scored how many runs?

I have always found the IPL less interesting for cricket than for the permutations and combinations it throws up. A lot of teams play each other twice, so many matches to go, so many remain, and who must defeat whom, and which team needs to depend on which other team to defeat which third team.

One thing I may not have tried with the IPL before, but which I am trying now, is to construct an Einstein puzzle in that setting. This is only mildly challenging, but you hopefully enjoy solving it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

In a small country hosting a tournament among 10 teams along the lines of the IPL, five of the teams hire a batter each from two countries we may call Winland and Nothingland. These team names prove appropriate in the first game for each team, coincidentally playing one or the other among the remaining five teams.

Each player from Winland scores at least 100, and all five have different scores, but no one gets a really big score (it’s T20, after all), the top score being 104. The top score among their teammates from Nothingland, on the other hand, is 5. Again, all five scores are different. The only saving grace is that none of them gets out for a duck.

The Winland players are called Alvin, Brian, Clive, Gary and Viv. Those from Nothingland are Douglas, Fred, Geoff, Ian and Wall-E. Any resemblance to cricketers living or dead, as the format goes, is purely coincidental.

1. Winland’s Alvin, who scores 102, has Fred as his teammate from Nothingland.

2. Clive scores 103, while his Nothingland teammate scores exactly 100 less than that.

3. Brian’s teammate from Nothingland scores 5.

4. Among other recruits from Nothingand, Geoff is gloating 3 because his score is more than Wall-E’s score.

5. Wall-E’s score, incidentally, is 2, while Douglas manages 3, and Fred 4.

6. Viv’s teammate is Ian, an all-rounder.

7. Wall-E’s teammate is Gary, who scores 3 more than Viv.