Cricket fielding positions explained, from slip to fine leg

Cricket fielding positions are almost always explained as a list to be memorised, which is exactly why so few people ever learn them. Forty-odd names, arranged alphabetically, each with a sentence attached. Nobody retains that.

There is a better way in, and it takes about ten minutes. The names are not really names. They are coordinates in a system with three axes and six modifiers, and once the system is in your head you can place a position you have never heard of, correctly, first time. Better than that, you can look at eleven people standing on a field and read the plan they were put there to carry out.

That is the real prize. A field setting is a captain's intention made visible, published to the batter and to everybody watching, several seconds before the ball is bowled.

The map is drawn from the batter, not from the ground

Start here, because everything else hangs off it.

The off side is the half of the ground the striker faces as he stands in his stance. The leg side, also called the on side, is the half behind his legs. Neither is a fixed part of the ground. Both are defined from the body of whoever is on strike, which is why the entire map flips when the batters cross for a single and a left-hander takes over.

For a right-hander, the off side is the side his off stump sits on, the side the ball travels when he plays a cover drive. For a left-hander it is the mirror image. On the standard television angle from behind the bowler's arm, a right-hander's off side is the left of your screen and his leg side the right, and for a left-hander you reverse it. The camera has not moved. The batter has.

The second axis is the square line. Draw an imaginary line through the popping crease, at right angles to the pitch, running out to the boundary on both sides. It cuts the ground into the half in front of the batter and the half behind him. Anything in front is described as forward of square or in front of square, anything behind as backward of square or behind square.

That gives four quadrants. Off side in front, off side behind, leg side in front, leg side behind. Every named position in cricket sits in one of them, and knowing which quadrant a position belongs to is most of knowing what it is for, because each quadrant collects a different family of shots. In front of square on the off side is where drives go. Behind square on the off side is where edges and cuts go. In front of square on the leg side is where the whip and the flick go. Behind square on the leg side is where the glance and the hook go.

The third axis is distance, and it is the one that turns a quadrant into an address.

The three bands: catching, ring, boundary

Fielders stand in one of three bands, and a fielder's band tells you what the captain expects to happen more reliably than his name does.

The catching band is close enough that the fielder is there for a chance and not for a run. It runs from the slip cordon at the keeper's shoulder round to short leg at the batter's hip. Nobody in this band is saving anything. If the ball is hit properly at a man in the catching band it goes past him, and the captain accepted that before the over began.

The ring is the band of infielders at roughly saving-one distance, close enough to reach a well-struck ground shot and throw before the batters complete a run. In limited-overs cricket the ring is a painted line, the thirty-yard circle. In a Test it is a habit rather than a marking, but it exists all the same: point, cover, mid-off, mid-on, midwicket and square leg, standing in an arc perhaps twenty-five to thirty yards from the bat.

The boundary band is the rope, or a few yards inside it. These fielders concede one, sometimes two, to prevent four. Their job is arithmetic. A deep fielder who turns eight would-be boundaries into eight singles across a T20 innings has saved more runs than most bowlers concede in an over.

• 11Players on the fielding side
• 9Outfielders a captain actually places
• 2Fielders allowed behind square on the leg side
• 30Radius of the inner circle, in yards

Rule-defined counts from the Laws and the ICC playing conditions. Everything else about a field is the captain's choice.

Nine is the number that matters most. The bowler is placed by his run-up and the wicketkeeper by his trade, which leaves nine bodies for a field with something like forty candidate positions. A field is therefore not a diagram. It is a budget, and every man spent in one place is a man not available somewhere else.

Six words that let you decode a position you have never heard

The modifiers are consistent. Learn these and any position on the field can be built from first principles.

• Fine means close to the line running from the batter through the stumps and out behind him. Fine leg is behind square on the leg side, near that line. A fine edge is one that barely deviated.
• Square means level with the batter, at right angles to the pitch. Square leg stands on the square line, and a square drive travels along it.
• Forward and backward move a position across the square line. Forward short leg is in front of the batter's hip, backward point is behind the line on the off side. A fielder told to go "squarer" is being moved away from fine and towards that line.
• Short means closer to the bat than the standard version. Short third, short midwicket, short cover. It usually means the captain has decided a single matters more than a boundary.
• Deep and long both mean the boundary. Deep goes with square-ish positions, deep cover and deep midwicket and deep square leg, and long with straight ones, long on and long off.
• Silly means unreasonably close, inside the arc of the batter's stroke, helmet on. Silly point, silly mid-off, silly mid-on.

Stack them and you get positions that sound invented and are perfectly precise. Deep backward square leg is on the boundary, behind the square line, on the leg side, out towards the side of the ground rather than fine. Short extra cover is inside the ring, in front of square, on the off side, between cover and mid-off. Nobody has to memorise those. They can be read.

That is why the naming system has survived unchanged for so long. It compresses a two-dimensional coordinate into two or three words a captain can shout from mid-off in a stiff breeze and a fielder eighty yards away will understand.

The cordon: cricket fielding positions behind the bat

The catching cordon is the oldest and most specialised group on the field, and it is built around a piece of physics. When a fast bowler's delivery takes the outside edge, the ball leaves at close to its original speed and at a shallow angle, so it carries a long way and arrives quickly. The cordon is the shape that outside edges make.

The wicketkeeper is the reference point for the whole arrangement. He is the only fielder permitted gloves and external leg guards, and the only one obliged to stand behind the stumps until the ball is delivered. Where he stands sets where everyone else stands: the slips take their depth from him, usually on a shallow arc a stride or two in front of his line so that the wider catchers are not hidden behind the ones inside them. Whether he stands up to the stumps or back is a tactical decision as much as a technical one, because standing up pins the batter in his crease and turns any advance down the pitch into a risk. That trade, and the footwork it demands, has a piece of its own on what a wicketkeeper is actually doing.

Slips stand beside the keeper on the off side, numbered outwards. First slip is nearest, then second, third, fourth. The numbering matters because it maps onto edge thickness. First slip takes the faint one that barely changed direction. By third and fourth slip you are catching thicker edges off a firmer stroke, which travel squarer and flatter. A side that posts a fourth slip is making a public statement that it expects an edge every over.

How deep the cordon stands is not a matter of taste. It follows the pace of the bowler and the carry of the surface. Against genuine pace the cordon goes back, because the edge arrives faster and a catcher standing too close cannot react to it. Against fast-medium it comes in. On a slow, low pitch with poor carry the whole cordon moves several yards closer and often crouches lower, because the edge that would reach second slip comfortably on a hard surface dies in front of him on a soft one. A cordon set too deep for the pitch drops nothing and catches nothing. It watches edges bounce twice.

Gully sits wider and squarer than the last slip, in the gap the cordon leaves before point. It has three jobs. It catches the ball fended off the splice from a short delivery. It catches the thick edge off a firm-footed slash at a wide one. And it catches the squirted push from a batter drawn into playing at a ball he should have left. Gully is often occupied by the best young catcher in a side, because the ball arrives fast and at knee height and there is no time to think about it.

Leg slip and leg gully mirror the arrangement on the leg side, for the ball that swings in and takes the inside edge, or the short one fended off the ribs. They are used sparingly because each of them consumes one of only two permitted places behind square on that side.

Third man takes his name from an era when sides posted a third fielder in the slip region. The fielder was later pushed back towards the boundary and the name went with him, so third man now means the deep fielder behind square on the off side, mopping up the edge that beats the cordon and the deliberate steer or ramp. Short third is the same idea brought inside the ring to stop the single, and it has become one of the most contested pieces of ground in white-ball cricket because so many batters now target the area on purpose. Fly slip is the compromise between the two, deeper than the cordon and finer than third man, for the thick edge that would otherwise land in front of a boundary rider.

The off side, quadrant by quadrant

Point stands square of the wicket on the off side. Close in, it is a catching position for the cut and the hard-handed push. Pushed back, it saves the square drive and the cut. Backward point is the same position moved behind the square line, and it has become the busiest off-side ring position in the modern game because it covers the cut, the steer and the ramp from one spot.

Cover point, always shortened to cover, is in front of square and exists to stop the cover drive. Extra cover sits between cover and mid-off, straighter and wider than the name suggests, and it is there because a drive played fractionally early goes exactly there rather than to cover. Short cover and silly point are the same line brought progressively closer, the second worn as a helmet position and used almost only against spin, to catch the ball that pops off bat and pad.

Mid-off stands straight and in front, just to the off side of the bowler's follow-through. He stops the straight drive, and he does something that appears on no field diagram: he talks to the bowler at the end of every over. Captains stand at mid-off for that reason, and when a captain moves himself across to mid-on midway through a spell it is usually because he wants a quiet word about a plan rather than because he expects the ball there.

The boundary versions are deep point, deep cover and deep extra cover, collectively the sweeper, and long off, straight and fractionally off-side of the sightscreen. Long off is one of the two most valuable boundary positions in limited-overs cricket, because the lofted straight drive is the highest-percentage big shot in the game and closing it changes what a batter is prepared to attempt.

The leg side, and the rule that shapes it

Mid-on mirrors mid-off. Midwicket is wider and in front of square, covering the whip off the pads and the shot played across the line, with short midwicket inside it and deep midwicket on the rope. The region between deep midwicket and long on, where slogs and slog sweeps land, has been called cow corner for a very long time. It is a scoring zone rather than a fielding position, but the name persists because the zone is real.

Square leg stands on the square line, close in when saving the single and back when saving the boundary. He shares that stretch of grass with the square leg umpire, who is standing there for entirely different reasons. Short leg, also called forward short leg or bat-pad, is the helmeted position a couple of yards in front of square and close enough to touch the batter's pad. It is the worst job in cricket and it is generally given to the youngest player in the side, which tells you how it is regarded. It exists to catch the ball that comes off the inside edge onto the pad when the ball is turning in.

Fine leg is behind square, near the line of the stumps, on or close to the boundary, and takes the glance, the flick off the pads and the top edge of the hook. Long leg is fine leg pushed squarer and deeper. Short fine leg is the ring version, saving the single off the pads, and in white-ball cricket it is one of the most argued-over placements on the field.

This is where the most influential restriction in the game bites. No more than two fielders may be behind the square line on the leg side at the instant of delivery. A third makes it a no ball. The rule descends from the response to sustained short-pitched bowling at the batter's body with a packed leg-side field, and its practical effect is enormous: it guarantees that a short ball can always be pulled or hooked into open ground somewhere behind square. Remove it and the bouncer becomes close to unanswerable, because every escape route could be blocked at once. It is one of a handful of Laws that shape how the game is played rather than merely how it is officiated, and it sits alongside the others in the rundown of the Laws that actually matter to a watching fan.

Two further constraints apply everywhere. No fielder other than the bowler may encroach on the pitch before the ball reaches the striker. And no fielder may make significant movement once the bowler begins his run-up, which stops a side shuffling into position at the last instant to deceive the batter. A captain who wants to change his field must do it early enough for the batter to see it, and that forced visibility is why field setting becomes a game of bluff.

Region	Positions	What it is there for
Behind square, off	Slip 1 to 4, gully, fly slip, short third, third man	Edges, steers, ramps, the fend off the splice
Behind square, leg	Leg slip, leg gully, short fine leg, fine leg, long leg	Glances, the inside edge, the top edge of the hook
Square, off	Silly point, point, backward point, deep point	The cut, the square drive, the bat-pad pop-up
Square, leg	Short leg, square leg, deep square leg	The pull, the sweep, the inside edge onto pad
In front, off	Short cover, cover, extra cover, mid-off, deep cover, long off	Drives, all of them, along the ground and in the air
In front, leg	Silly mid-on, mid-on, midwicket, deep midwicket, long on	The whip, the flick, the slog, the slog sweep

Why the map flips for a left-hander, and why television makes it worse

None of these positions are places on the ground. They are places relative to a body. When a right-hander and a left-hander are batting together, every single they run inverts the field.

In practice sides do not physically swap nine men every ball. They keep a shape that works for both and move two or three fielders, which is one reason a left-right partnership is genuinely awkward to bowl to and why over rates suffer against one. The bowler changes his line, the captain changes his angles, and the fielders hold two versions of the plan in their heads at once.

The confusion on television comes from a mismatch between two frames of reference. The camera behind the bowler's arm gives a fixed picture: left of screen, right of screen. The commentary uses a moving one: off side, leg side. For a right-hander the two happen to line up in a way most viewers absorb without noticing, so off side becomes quietly synonymous with "the left of my screen". Then a left-hander takes strike, nothing on the screen changes, and the words start pointing the other way. The viewer learnt a mapping rather than a system, and the mapping breaks.

The fix is to stop using the screen and use the batter. Find his feet. The side he faces is off, the side behind his legs is leg. Do that consciously for one over of a left-hander and the problem does not come back.

Attacking and defensive fields, and reading a captain's mind

Here is the part worth having. Every field is a position on a single spectrum, running from "I will concede runs to take a wicket" to "I will concede a wicket to save runs", and it is legible from one glance.

An attacking field puts fielders where the ball goes when the batter makes a mistake. Catchers behind the bat, close catchers in front of it, nobody on the rope. It accepts that a well-struck shot goes for four, because the whole arrangement is a wager that the mistake arrives before enough good shots do. Four slips and a gully to a new ball is that wager at its most extreme.

A defensive field puts fielders where the ball goes when the batter succeeds. Boundary riders on the rope, ring fielders at saving-one, the catching band empty. It accepts that a mistake will land safely, because it is buying dot balls and time instead of chances.

Almost every real field sits somewhere between the two, and the position on the spectrum is countable. Count the men in the catching band. Count the men on the rope. The ratio is the captain's declared plan, and he cannot hide it.

44%44%11%

• Catching band, slips and gully4
• Ring, stopping the drive4
• Boundary, fine leg only1

An illustrative arrangement of the nine outfielders, not a transcription of a particular match. The bowler and the wicketkeeper are not counted.

Show the numbers

A constructed new-ball field in a Test, by band

Item	Value
Catching band, slips and gully	4
Ring, stopping the drive	4
Boundary, fine leg only	1

Read that split and the plan is unambiguous. Eight of the nine fielders are positioned for something going wrong for the batter, and the single boundary rider is at fine leg because the leg-side glance is the one stroke the arrangement cannot otherwise cover, and because four leg byes or a flicked four off the pads is the cheapest way to lose control of a session.

Now watch what happens over the next hour. A slip is withdrawn and sent to third man. Then a second slip goes to deep point. Then mid-on drops back twenty yards. Nothing has been announced and no signal has been given, but the bowling side has stopped attacking and started containing, and the batter can see it as clearly as the crowd can. This is why senior batters describe the field "spreading" as a milestone in an innings. It is the fielding captain conceding that his first plan has failed.

The reverse is more dramatic and just as visible. A sweeper is brought up into the ring. A second slip appears. A short leg jogs in and straps on a helmet. Something has changed in the ball, the pitch or the batter's footwork, and the captain has decided to spend runs on a chance again.

Building a field from nothing, decision by decision

Captains do not place nine men in an arbitrary order. There is a sequence, and it runs from the non-negotiable to the discretionary, because the last two or three fielders are the only ones that represent a genuine choice.

1. 1Start from the plan, not the positionsDecide what the bowler is trying to make the batter do: drive at a widish ball, play at one leaving him, hit against the spin, or hit into the long boundary. Every placement follows from that one sentence.
2. 2Post the compulsory men firstSome ground cannot be left open whatever the plan. In a Test that usually means mid-off, mid-on and a fine leg. In a T20 it means the two straight boundary riders. These are overheads rather than choices.
3. 3Spend on chances, up to your nerveAdd catchers where the mistake will go: slips and gully for the ball leaving the bat, short leg and silly point for the ball turning in. The number is a judgement about the pitch and the ball, and it is the most revealing decision a captain makes all day.
4. 4Take away the batter's best shotIdentify the one stroke this batter plays better than the rest and close it. Against a good puller, deep square leg. Against a good sweeper, deep backward square. It costs a single fielder and changes the entire exchange.
5. 5Count what is leftUsually one or two men. That is the whole discretionary budget, and it is where the trap goes: the deliberately empty gap, the second man back for the short ball, the catcher posted for a shot not yet attempted.
6. 6Check the restrictions before the ball is bowledNo more than two behind square on the leg side. In limited-overs cricket, the right number inside and outside the circle for that phase. Getting this wrong is a no ball, and in the formats with a free hit it is worse than that.

The order matters. Each step spends fielders from a budget of nine, and the choices left at the end are the ones a batter should be watching.

The fourth and fifth steps are the interesting ones. The first three are close to automatic and any competent stand-in captain produces them. The difference between captains lives in the last two fielders.

The field changes with the bowler

A field is set for a delivery, not for a match. Change the bowler and every assumption underneath the arrangement changes with him.

Fast bowling with a new ball. The ball is hard, it carries, and it moves. The field is built around the edge: keeper, two or three slips, a gully, a point and a cover, mid-off and mid-on to stop the drive, a fine leg for the glance. Nobody is deep because nobody expects a deliberate boundary. If the ball is swinging away from a right-hander the off side thickens, and a catcher often appears at short extra cover for the drive on the up. If it is swinging in, the shape moves the other way: a leg slip, sometimes a short leg, midwicket squared up and mid-on straighter, because the bowler is hunting the inside edge, the pad and the leg before.

Reverse swing. This is the moment a spread field contracts again, and it is one of the most reliable tells in cricket. The ball is thirty or more overs old, the field has been defensive for an hour, and then a slip comes back and mid-on moves straighter. Reverse swing moves late and towards the shine rather than away from it, which beats a batter who has settled into playing conventional movement, and the fields are correspondingly full and straight because the dismissals it produces are bowled and leg before rather than caught behind. The mechanism behind that late movement is set out in the piece on how an old ball starts swinging the wrong way.

The off spinner to a right-hander. The ball turns in, so the mistake is an inside edge onto the pad or a leading edge back down the ground. Catchers go to short leg and silly point, with a slip kept for the one that goes straight on. The scoring is on the leg side, through the sweep, the slog sweep and the whip, so the protection goes to deep midwicket and long on. A well-set off-spin field is conspicuously lopsided, catchers on one side of the wicket and boundary riders on the other, and that asymmetry is the quickest way to identify what kind of bowler is operating without seeing the ball released.

The leg spinner to a right-hander. The stock ball turns away, so the edge flies to the off side and the slip stays, often with a silly point or short extra cover for the bat-pad off a drive. The googly turns the other way and produces exactly the inside edge an off spinner does, so a short leg is frequently kept as well. Wrist spin is the hardest bowling in the game to set a field for, because one action produces mistakes in two opposite directions and the captain cannot cover both without emptying somewhere else. The differences between the deliveries, and the fields each of them demands, are laid out in the guide to the varieties of spin. When a left-arm spinner goes round the wicket into the rough outside a right-hander's leg stump, the leg side fills to the legal limit and the batter is invited to hit against the turn.

Death bowling. Everything inverts. Chances become irrelevant, boundaries become everything, and the field goes to the rope: long off, long on, deep midwicket, deep cover or deep point, a fine leg. The bowler is then expected to bowl to the field rather than the other way round. The wide yorker with a packed off side and the short ball into the body with two men back on the leg side are both fields disguised as deliveries.

Fielding restrictions, and what the circle does to the ring

Limited-overs cricket adds a marked inner circle: two semicircles of thirty yards radius, centred on the middle stump at each end, joined by parallel lines down the sides of the ground. Its purpose is not decoration. It exists to guarantee gaps, because if a fixed number of fielders must stay inside it then the boundary cannot be fully protected, and attacking strokeplay becomes mathematically rational rather than merely brave.

T20, overs 1-62

T20, overs 7-205

ODI, overs 1-102

ODI, overs 11-404

ODI, overs 41-505

Test, any over9

From the ICC playing conditions for the standard formats. A Test has no circle at all, which is why the last bar is the interesting one.

Show the numbers

Fielders permitted outside the inner circle, by phase

Item	Fielders allowed out
T20, overs 1-6	2
T20, overs 7-20	5
ODI, overs 1-10	2
ODI, overs 11-40	4
ODI, overs 41-50	5
Test, any over	9

The three-step ODI shape and the two-step T20 shape are the whole architecture of white-ball tactics, and they are set out properly in the explainer on how powerplays work across the formats, which is worth reading alongside this piece. The short version for field-reading purposes is this: during a restriction the captain is choosing which two boundaries to protect out of the five or six that matter, and every one of those choices is a bet he has to live with for six overs. What the restrictions then do to squad building, bowling plans and the value of a fielder who can cover ground is worked through in what the restrictions do to a twenty-over innings.

A Test has no circle. A captain may put all nine on the rope or all nine within fifteen yards of the bat, subject only to the leg-side limits. That freedom is exactly why Test fields carry more information than white-ball fields. Nothing about a Test field is compulsory, so everything about it is a choice.

The best fields invite a shot rather than block one

A field that blocks everything dismisses nobody. Good captains use placement as bait, and the patterns are consistent enough to spot from the stands.

The deliberate gap. Leave one obvious hole in an otherwise tight field, in the area the bowler wants the batter playing towards, and make sure the shot that fits through it is the one the batter likes. A cover boundary left open with the bowler pitching full and wide is not an oversight. It is an invitation to drive at a ball that is moving away, and the fielder who matters in that arrangement is not the one at deep cover but the one at second slip.

The short ball with two men back. Deep square leg and long leg go out, using both permitted places behind square on the leg side. The batter can see them. He knows the bouncer is coming, and the captain knows he knows. Concealment is not the trap; the pull shot is. The batter is being told he may pull, into a large but patrolled area, at a ball rising into his eyeline, and the whole exchange rests on whether he can resist an invitation he has been handed in writing. The better captains assemble the shape gradually, moving one man an over early and the second at the last moment, so that it never announces itself in a single gesture.

The catcher for a shot not yet played. A short midwicket appears against a batter who has been whipping across the line without yet mistiming one. Nothing has gone wrong. The captain has decided the mistake is due and has spent a fielder on it in advance, which is a bet on a batting habit rather than on a delivery.

The double bluff. Sweeper out, ring tight, and then the bowler bowls straight rather than wide, because the field has already persuaded the batter to look for a gap the delivery will not offer. A batter playing the field instead of the ball has lost the exchange before it starts, and every trap above works by tempting him into exactly that.

Where the fielders actually stand: T20 against Test

Take the same nine players on the same ground and the two formats produce fields that barely overlap.

In a Test the centre of gravity is behind the bat and close to it. Catchers dominate the first hour, the ring is set to stop the drive, and the deep is nearly empty. Runs are conceded willingly if the arrangement raises the chance of a dismissal, because there is no scoreboard pressure worth the name and a wicket is worth an unlimited number of runs. The field then spreads and contracts across a session as the ball ages and the pitch changes, so a spectator watching the fielders can date the passage of play as accurately as one watching the scoreboard. That is the same information a scorecard preserves in another form, which is why reading a field and reading a scorecard properly turn out to be closer skills than they look.

In a T20 after the powerplay, five men are on the rope, four are in the ring saving the single, and the catching band is empty apart from the keeper. That distribution is essentially fixed by the playing conditions, so the tactical content is not the shape but the selection: which single boundary the captain is willing to leave open, and whether his bowler can bowl to it under pressure with a batter charging at him. Most T20 fields are the same nine positions with two of them moved, and those two are what a captain is paid for.

The middle overs of an ODI sit between the two and are the most delicate field-setting problem in the sport. Four men out is enough for a sweeper, a deep midwicket, a fine leg and one straight boundary rider, which leaves the ring set to save the single so that the batting side has to take a risk to accelerate. It is a field designed to make patience unprofitable. That is why the middle overs of a fifty-over innings look slow and are not.

Reading a field in the two seconds before the bowler runs in

The gap between a bowler reaching his mark and starting his run is long enough to do all of this. Here is the order to look in.

Count the catchers. Two or more men in the catching band means the fielding side believes a wicket is available now. None means it does not, whatever the bowler's body language suggests.

Count the boundary riders, then find the gap. There will be one, and it is almost never accidental. Ask which shot fits through it, and which delivery would have to be bowled to make that shot tempting.

Look behind square on the leg side. Two men back is the short ball, and it is the least concealable plan in cricket. One man back with a fielder at short fine leg is a plan built around the batter's pads instead.

Then look for the position that does not fit. A leg gully in the fortieth over. A short cover to a set batter. A silly point brought in against a bowler who has not turned one all day. The anomaly is the plan, and everything else on the field is the standing arrangement around it.

Add the wicketkeeper's depth, and the bowler's grip if the camera gives it to you, and the delivery is readable before it is bowled. Field setting is the one part of cricket published in advance, in plain sight, to anybody who has learnt to read it, and most of the sport's tactical vocabulary follows from that same habit of watching what the fielding side is telling you rather than waiting for the replay. More of it, applied across the formats, sits in the cricket section of this site.

None of this needs memorising. Find the batter's feet, split the ground into four quadrants, count three bands, and the forty names take care of themselves.