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How to score a cricket match without losing the plot.

Whether it is a five-over gully game or a full club fixture, the same few ideas make a scorecard useful. Here is how to do it ball by ball.

6 min readUpdated 30 October 2026

The scorer’s job is to record what happened, ball by ball, in a way that still makes sense when the match is over. You do not need to know every law of cricket. You need a clear routine and a few rules of thumb.

The three numbers

A cricket score has three parts: the runs scored, the wickets lost and the overs completed. We write it as runs / wickets and add the overs: 54/1 after 5.2 overs means the batting side has scored 54 runs, lost one wicket and bowled five full overs and two balls of the sixth.

Notice that 5.2 means 5 overs and 2 balls, not five and two tenths. An over has six balls, so the number after the dot only ever goes from 0 to 5. After 5.5 comes 6.0. This trips up many beginners, and we cover it in run rate explained.

How to record an over

An over is six legal deliveries by one bowler. Each dot, single, boundary or wicket takes one of those six balls. A wide or a no-ball adds a run but is not a legal delivery, so the bowler has to bowl it again and the over continues until six legal balls have been bowled.

After each over the bowling side switches the bowler (the same bowler cannot bowl two overs in a row) and the batters swap ends, so the batter who was not on strike now faces.

Over strip example•   1   4   WD   2   W   1 means: dot, single, four, a wide, two runs, a wicket and a single. That is six legal balls and one wide, so seven entries, 9 runs and one wicket.

Runs and who is on strike

Runs scored off the bat go to the batter and to the team total. Track which batter is on strike, because that is where scorers lose the plot. The rule is simple: an odd number of completed runs (1 or 3) swaps the batters, an even number (0, 2, 4, 6) does not. Then the end of the over swaps them once more.

  • A four or a six is not a completed run, so the same batter stays on strike.
  • If the batters cross for a single on the last ball of an over, they swap once for the run and once for the new over, so the striker is unchanged.

Extras

Extras are runs that do not come off the bat: wides, no-balls, byes and leg byes. They go in the team total but not in any batter’s score, and the scorecard lists them separately (for example Extras 7 · wd 4, nb 3, b 0, lb 0). The details are in cricket extras explained.

Wickets

When a batter is out, record how: bowled, caught, LBW, run out, stumped or hit wicket, plus the bowler and fielder where relevant. A scorecard line looks like c Dev R b Nikhil T, which reads “caught by Dev R, bowled by Nikhil T”. Then bring in the next batter and decide who is on strike. If a wicket falls on the last ball of an over, the new batter is at the non-striker’s end for the next over. See scoring symbols and abbreviations.

Ending the innings and deciding the result

An innings ends when the overs are bowled, the batting side is all out, or, in the second innings, the target is reached. The side batting second needs one run more than the first innings total to win. If they finish exactly one short, the scores are level and the match is tied. In the second innings, a scorecard also shows what is still needed: “Titans need 32 off 12” means 32 runs from 12 balls.

Paper or app?

A scorebook is perfectly good when the scorer is comfortable with it. A cricket scoring app helps when the match is fast, extras are frequent or several people want to follow along. Scorecord keeps the run keys large, handles wides, no-balls, free hits and strike changes for you, saves matches on your phone and can share a live link with your team. See how Scorecord scores a match.