How Cricket Scoring Works: Runs, Wickets, Overs and Formats

Two batters are at the crease at any time, one at each end of a 22-yard pitch. When a batter hits the ball, the pair may run to the opposite ends, and each completed crossing is one run. Two crossings score two, and so on, as long as neither is run out on the way. If the ball is hit along the ground to the boundary rope, that is four runs without running. If it clears the rope without bouncing, it is six.

Runs also come from the bowling side's mistakes, called extras. A wide, a ball too far from the batter to reach, gives one run. A no-ball, usually the bowler overstepping the line, gives one run and, in most formats, a free hit on the next ball. Byes and leg byes are runs taken when the ball passes the batter without being hit, or comes off the body rather than the bat.

A wicket is a batter dismissed. Each side has eleven players, and because two must always be batting, an innings ends when ten have been out. There are ten ways of being dismissed, but five account for almost everything:

• •Bowled: the ball hits the stumps
• •Caught: a fielder catches the hit ball before it bounces
• •Leg before wicket: the ball hits the batter's leg when it would otherwise have hit the stumps
• •Run out: the batter is short of the crease when a fielder breaks the stumps
• •Stumped: the wicketkeeper breaks the stumps while the batter is out of the crease after missing the ball

The bowler delivers six balls from one end, which is one over. Then a different bowler delivers six from the other end, and so on. Bowlers cannot bowl consecutive overs, and in limited-overs cricket each bowler has a maximum share of the total. Overs are the clock of the game. A score written as 245 for 6 after 48 overs tells you how much time the batting side has used as well as how well it has done.

The bowler's own figures are written the other way round: 3 for 42 means three wickets taken for 42 runs conceded. A bowler's economy rate is runs conceded per over; a batter's strike rate is runs per hundred balls faced. Reaching fifty runs is a half-century and a hundred is a century, the individual landmark the sport most celebrates.

Test cricket lasts up to five days, and each side bats twice. The winner is the side with more runs across both innings, but only if the other side has been bowled out twice or has been set a target it failed to reach, which is why a Test can end in a draw after five days with one side far ahead. A captain can declare an innings closed early to leave time to bowl the opponents out, and a side far behind can be made to follow on, batting again immediately.

One-day internationals give each side a single innings of fifty overs. Twenty20, or T20, cuts that to twenty overs a side and finishes in about three hours; it is the format of the Indian Premier League and most domestic competitions now. In both limited-overs formats a side is all out or out of overs, and the result is decided on runs, so there are no draws. When rain shortens a match, the target is recalculated by the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, which adjusts for both overs lost and wickets in hand.

A scorecard lists each batter with their runs, the balls they faced and how they were dismissed, then each bowler with overs, maidens, runs and wickets. A maiden is an over in which the bowler concedes no runs at all, so a wide or no-ball spoils it. Extras are totalled separately. The fall-of-wickets line, which reads something like 1-24, 2-31, 3-98, tells you the team score at each dismissal, which is the quickest way to see how an innings unfolded: a collapse from 200 for 2 to 230 all out is a very different story from a steady 230 for 6.

The last thing to know is the language of targets. A side chasing 250 to win needs 251 runs, because a tie is a tie. A side that wins while batting second is said to win by the number of wickets it still had in hand; a side that wins batting first wins by runs. Those two phrasings, by six wickets or by 40 runs, confuse newcomers more than anything else in the game, and they simply say which side batted last.

One small piece of notation trips up almost every newcomer. An innings of 48.3 overs does not mean forty-eight and three tenths of an over. It means 48 complete overs and 3 balls of the next one, because the number after the point counts balls out of six. So 48.3 overs is 291 balls, and the figure after the point never goes above 5, since six balls make a new over. When you need to do arithmetic with it, convert first: 48.3 overs is 48 and a half overs, written 48.5 in a calculation.

That matters most in net run rate, the tie-breaker used in many tournament tables. It is a team's runs scored per over across the competition, minus the runs it conceded per over. Suppose a side makes 180 in its 20 overs and then bowls the opponents out for 150 in 18.3 overs. Its scoring rate is 9.0. For the bowling side of the calculation, a team that is bowled out is treated as having used its full 20 overs, so 150 runs over 20 overs gives 7.5. The net run rate from that match is plus 1.5.

The follow-on is easier to understand with numbers. In a Test scheduled for five days, the side batting first can enforce it if it leads by at least 200 runs after both first innings. Suppose the home side make 450 and the visitors reply with 230. The lead is 220, so the home captain may send the visitors straight back in. If they then make 300, their combined total is 530, a lead of 80, and the home side need 81 to win. Had the visitors made only 200 second time round, they would have finished 20 behind and lost by an innings and 20 runs.

Captains do not always enforce it, because their bowlers may be exhausted and batting last on a worn pitch can be hard. Teams that follow on rarely win, but there are famous exceptions. At Headingley in 1981 England followed on against Australia, then Ian Botham's attacking century and Bob Willis's eight wickets turned the match into an 18-run win. At Kolkata in 2001 India followed on against Australia, VVS Laxman made 281 and Rahul Dravid 180 in a partnership that lasted the whole of the fourth day, and India won by 171 runs.

A bowler's figures do not include every wicket that falls while they are bowling. Bowled, caught, leg before wicket, stumped and hit wicket, where batters knock over their own stumps while playing the ball or setting off for a run, are all credited to the bowler. Run outs are not, because the bowler did not beat the batter, and on the scorecard the fielders involved are named instead. So a bowler can finish an innings with nought for 40 even though three run outs happened in their overs. The rare dismissals, such as obstructing the field and hitting the ball twice, are not credited to the bowler either.

Extras change what is possible too. Off a no-ball a batter cannot be bowled, caught, leg before or stumped, which is why the free hit that follows one in limited-overs cricket is so attractive: on that ball, too, the batter can in practice only be run out. The oddest dismissal, timed out, applies when a new batter is not ready to face within a set time after the previous wicket falls. It had never happened in international cricket until 2023, when Sri Lanka's Angelo Mathews was given out timed out against Bangladesh at the World Cup after a problem with his helmet strap.

A cricket score is two counts at once: runs scored and wickets lost, tracked over a fixed or open number of six-ball overs. Learn the five common dismissals, the meaning of extras, and how Test, one-day and T20 formats end, and any scorecard becomes readable.