How Cricket Scoring Works: Runs, Wickets, Overs and Formats
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A cricket score reads like a fraction: 245 for 6, or 245/6. To an outsider it looks like a code, and in a sense it is, because it compresses two separate things a team is trying to do at once. The batting side is trying to score runs. The bowling side is trying to take wickets. Once you hold both counts in your head, the rest of the game's numbers fall into place.
Runs: how the batting side scores
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.
Wickets: how the bowling side fights back
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
Overs: how the game is paced
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.
The three formats
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.
Reading a scorecard
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 no runs were scored off the bat. 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.
The takeaway
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.