Cricket umpire signals and what the scorers write down

The ball beats the bat, thuds into the pad and runs away behind square for four. The crowd claps, the scoreboard ticks over, and the striker's own total does not move at all. He is still on 34. Nobody announces why. The only explanation offered was the umpire lifting a knee and tapping it with one hand while the ball was still rolling.

That gesture is the whole answer, and it was not aimed at anyone in the stands.

This is the thing that makes cricket umpire signals confusing, and it is also the thing that makes their meaning obvious once you see it. They are not a performance for the crowd or an announcement to the players. They are one half of a working conversation between the umpire and two people in a small room at the far end of the ground, who are writing down the only version of the match that will still exist tomorrow.

Read them as a protocol between the middle and the scorebox and every strange feature falls into place. Why some signals are given twice. Why the umpire stands there with his arm out, apparently waiting for nothing. Why one signal is answered by a wave from a window and another is not. And why the same ball crossing the same rope can be worth four to the batter, four to the extras column, or five to nobody at all, depending entirely on which signal the umpire gave first.

Cricket umpire signals are addressed to the scorers, not to you

The code that governs the game gives the umpires their own law and the scorers their own law immediately after it, and the second is much shorter than people expect. The scorers have three duties: to record the runs, to record the wickets, and to record the overs. That is it. Everything they write, they write because an umpire told them to.

The scorebook is the match. Not the scoreboard, which is a courtesy to the ground and is frequently wrong. Not the television graphic, which is a commercial product assembled from a feed. The two scorers keep the official record, they are required to agree with each other at regular intervals, and if the book and the board disagree, the board is what changes.

So the umpire has a communication problem. He is standing in the middle of a field, possibly a hundred yards from the scorebox, with a wind blowing and eighteen thousand people making noise. He has information that must reach two specific people accurately, immediately, and without ambiguity. Shouting will not do it. Writing it down will not do it, because the game has to carry on. What he has is his arms.

That constraint explains the design of every gesture in the set. Each one is visible in silhouette from distance, distinguishable from the others when seen small, and holdable for several seconds without looking absurd. Nobody sat down and invented a language of elegance. They invented a language that survives being viewed through a small window on a grey afternoon at Derby.

It also explains what is missing. There is no signal for anything the scorers do not need to write down.

• 14Signals set out in the Laws
• 3Made while the ball is in play
• 11Made to the scorers and acknowledged
• 0Signals meaning not out

Structural counts taken from the signals section of the Laws. Competitions add several more of their own on top, including the free hit and the powerplay.

The two families of signal, and only one gets a reply

The Laws split the signals into two groups, and almost nothing about umpiring makes sense until you know which group a gesture belongs to.

The first group is made while the ball is in play. There are three of them: no ball, wide, and out. They are given the instant the umpire judges the thing has happened, they are accompanied by a call in the voice, and nobody acknowledges them.

The reason they are given immediately is that they change what the players may do right now. A batter who hears no ball called knows within a fraction of a second that they cannot be bowled, caught, stumped or given out lbw off this delivery, and they can therefore swing at it in a way they would not otherwise dare. A fielding side that hears wide knows the delivery will have to be bowled again. A raised finger tells a batter to leave. All three are operational, and an operational signal that arrives late is useless.

The second group is made when the ball is dead, and it is much larger. Boundary four. Boundary six. Bye. Leg bye. Short run. Five penalty runs to the batting side. Five penalty runs to the fielding side. Dead ball. New ball. Commencement of the last hour. Revoke last signal. Eleven gestures, and every single one is directed at the scorers, and every single one must be acknowledged before the game continues.

The division is not arbitrary. The first family alters the state of play. The second family alters a record. A record can wait a few seconds for the ball to stop moving, and it must not be entered while the umpire's attention is still needed on the field.

Which leads to a small oddity that catches people out. No ball and wide appear in the first family, but they also have to reach the scorers, so the umpire gives them twice. Once with a shout while the ball is live, for the players. Once again in silence once the ball is dead, for the book. Watch a bowler overstep and you will see the same arm go out twice, several seconds apart, and the second one held until somebody waves back.

The umpire is waiting for a wave, and he will not start again without it

This is the part that no televised broadcast ever explains, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it.

When an umpire signals to the scorers, he holds the signal. He does not drop his arm and turn round. He faces the scorebox and stays there. What he is waiting for is an acknowledgement, and the Laws are unusually blunt about it: play is not to proceed until each signal has been separately acknowledged by a scorer.

Separately is the operative word. If the umpire has two things to communicate, he gives the first, waits for the wave, then gives the second, and waits again. He does not fire off both and hope.

At a club ground the acknowledgement is a raised hand out of a window or a wave from a bench. At a first-class ground there is usually a light, a board or a bell wired to the scorebox so the scorer can answer without leaving their seat. The mechanism varies. The obligation does not.

What it prevents is worth stating plainly, because it sounds like ceremony and is nothing of the sort. A signal that goes unnoticed produces a scorebook that is wrong and will stay wrong. Four leg byes entered as four to the striker are four runs the batter never made, sitting in a career record forever, and they are also four runs the bowler is charged with and did not concede. Nobody discovers this at the time. It surfaces at tea, when the two scorers compare books and find they disagree by four, and then somebody has to reconstruct twenty minutes of cricket from memory.

The acknowledgement is a handshake in the networking sense. The message is not considered delivered until the receiver confirms it, and the sender blocks until then. Cricket worked this out about two centuries before anyone wrote it into a communications protocol, for the same reason: an unreliable channel with no error correction produces garbage that is discovered far too late.

There is a second effect, less obvious and more useful. Because the umpire must stop and face the box, the acknowledgement forces a pause into the game at exactly the moment a decision has been made. It gives him a beat to think, and it gives everyone else a beat to see that something has been decided. An umpire who signals and turns away has, in effect, mumbled.

The scoring signals, and the column each one opens

Here is the set that decides where runs land. Every one of these is really an instruction about which column of the scorebook is about to be written in, and reading a completed scorecard is largely the reverse operation: working backwards from the columns to the signals that must have been given.

Boundary four. The arm waved from side to side in front of the body, finishing across the chest. Four runs, the ball having touched the ground or a fielder before reaching or crossing the boundary.

Boundary six. Both arms raised straight above the head. Six runs, the ball having passed over the boundary without touching the ground first. The common misconception is that the ball must land beyond the rope. It does not. It must have been beyond the rope while in the air, and a fielder who catches it while touching the boundary has conceded six.

Bye. An open hand raised above the head. The ball touched neither the bat nor the batter, ran through to the keeper or past him, and the batters ran. The runs go to the batting side as extras and are charged to nobody.

Leg bye. A raised knee, touched with the hand. The ball hit the batter somewhere other than the bat or the glove holding the bat, and runs were taken. This is the signal that is most misunderstood, because it is not a description of what happened. It is a ruling. Leg byes are only allowed if the batter was making a genuine attempt to play the ball, or a genuine attempt to avoid being hit by it. A batter who lets the ball strike their thigh with no intention of either is entitled to no runs at all, and the umpire signals dead ball instead once the batters stop running. The knee tap therefore contains a judgement about intent, delivered without a word.

No ball. One arm extended horizontally. Given live with a call, then repeated dead for the scorers.

Wide. Both arms extended horizontally. Same procedure. The gesture is deliberately the doubled version of the no ball, which makes the two impossible to confuse at distance even though they use the same limb position.

Five penalty runs to the batting side. One shoulder tapped repeatedly with the opposite hand. Five runs into the batting side's total as extras, charged to no bowler, awarded immediately.

Five penalty runs to the fielding side. One hand placed on the opposite shoulder and held there. The same five runs, pointing the other way. The difference between the tap and the hold is small on purpose: the two signals are relatives, and the umpire wants the scorers to see immediately that this is the penalty family and only then read which direction it goes. Penalty runs to the fielding side do not appear in the current score at all if that side is not batting. They go to their next innings, which is why a scorer has to record them somewhere unusual, and why umpires are careful with this one.

Short run. One arm bent upwards, the fingertips touching the near shoulder. A batter failed to ground themselves or their bat behind the popping crease before turning back, so one of the runs they ran does not count.

Now the detail that ties the set together. Look at what is not in that list. There is no signal for one run, or two, or three. There is no signal for a single. The umpire signals four, six and five penalty runs, and nothing else numeric.

Everything else the scorers count for themselves. They are watching, they can see two batters cross twice, and the umpire trusts them to add up. What the umpire supplies is the classification: which pot the runs go into, plus any correction to the count that the scorers could not make from where they sit, such as a short run at the far end. The signal set is not a scoring system. It is a set of labels attached to a count somebody else is keeping.

• Runs to the striker
• Runs charged to the bowler

Four, off the bat44

Bye, then four00

Leg bye, then four00

No ball, then four05

Wide, then four05

The same delivery reaching the same rope, in every case except the first without touching the bat. The only variable is which signal the umpire gave before the boundary signal.

Show the numbers

One boundary, five different scorebooks

Item	Runs to the striker	Runs charged to the bowler
Four, off the bat	4	4
Bye, then four	0	0
Leg bye, then four	0	0
No ball, then four	0	5
Wide, then four	0	5

Compound signals, and why the order changes the scorebook

Most deliveries need one signal or none. A fair ball defended back down the pitch needs nothing at all. But a surprising number of deliveries need two, and the moment there are two, sequence becomes load-bearing.

The rule is simple to state and almost never stated: the qualifier comes first, the quantity second. The umpire tells the scorers which column, then how many. Bye, then four. Leg bye, then four. No ball, then four. The scorers open the column named by the first signal and write the number given by the second into it.

Reverse the order and the message is ambiguous at best. Four followed by leg bye could reasonably be read as four to the striker and then a separate leg bye event, and a scorer who reads it that way has entered five runs where four occurred. The convention exists precisely so that no scorer ever has to guess.

The separate acknowledgement requirement is doing real work here too. Two signals, two waves. If a scorer waves once when the umpire has given two signals, the umpire knows the message did not land and repeats it.

A second ordering matters just as much, and it runs the other way. When a delivery is both illegal and productive, the no ball is signalled live, before anything else has happened at all, because at that point it is not a scoring instruction. It is a warning to the batter. The dead-ball repeat of that no ball then arrives before the boundary signal, so the sequence the scorers see is no ball, wait, four, wait. Three separate pieces of information delivered in a fixed order, each one confirmed.

Now the part that produces the strangest-looking scorebook entries. Byes and leg byes do not exist on a no ball. Under the Laws, every run that comes from a no ball and does not come off the bat is recorded as a no ball extra, all of it, including runs that would obviously have been byes had the delivery been legal. So an umpire who has signalled no ball does not then signal bye. There is nothing left for that signal to do.

Which produces the following, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. A ball that misses everything and runs to the rope, bowled legally, is four byes: nothing to the striker, nothing charged to the bowler, four to the team. The identical ball, bowled with the front foot a centimetre over the line, is five no balls: nothing to the striker, five charged to the bowler's analysis, five to the team. One centimetre of boot changes a bowler's figures by five runs and changes the batting side's total by one, and the only thing communicating any of it is the order of two arm movements.

1. 1The front foot lands over the popping creaseThe bowler's end umpire calls "no ball" aloud and extends one arm horizontally, while the ball is still travelling. This first signal is not for the scorers. It is for the striker, who now knows they cannot be bowled, caught, stumped or given out lbw off this delivery, and for the fielding side, who now know the ball will have to be bowled again.
2. 2The ball beats the bat and the keeper and reaches the ropeNothing is signalled while it runs. The umpire watches the boundary and waits for the ball to be dead, because every signal from here belongs to the second family and none of them may be given until play has stopped.
3. 3The umpire signals no ball again, and waitsArm out, held, facing the scorebox. The same gesture is now doing a completely different job: it is a scoring instruction, opening the no ball column. He does not move until a scorer acknowledges it.
4. 4The umpire signals boundary four, and waits againArm sweeping across the chest. Separate signal, separate acknowledgement. The scorers now have both halves of the message: the column, then the number.
5. 5The scorers write five no ballsOne run for the penalty, four for the boundary, all of it in the extras column as no balls, none of it to the striker, all five charged against the bowler's analysis. No byes are recorded, because byes cannot exist on a no ball.
6. 6The over does not advanceThe delivery does not count towards the six. Had this been a legal ball that beat everything, the identical passage of play would have been four byes: four to the batting side, nothing to the striker, and nothing at all charged to the bowler.

A constructed delivery, traced from the bowler's foot to the scorebook. The sequence is the one the Laws require; the runs are worked through as an example rather than taken from a match.

Out is a signal. Not out is not.

The raised index finger is the most recognisable gesture in the sport and one of the least representative of the set. It belongs to the in-play family, it is given the moment the umpire has decided, and nobody acknowledges it.

Why no acknowledgement? Because the scorers do not need telling. A wicket announces itself: a batter walks off, another walks on, and the scorers can see both. The signal is directed at the players, particularly at a batter who may not be sure whether the appeal was upheld. It is the umpire's answer to a question that was asked, and the question matters, because without an appeal there is no question and therefore no signal, however plainly the ball hit the stumps in front of everything.

The Laws also cover the awkward case where a raised finger goes unnoticed and play carries on regardless. The umpire then calls dead ball, which stops everything and forces the situation to be dealt with. A dismissal that half the field has missed is exactly the sort of mess the dead ball exists to clean up.

And there is no signal for not out. None. The code contains fourteen signals and not one of them means the batter survives.

This is not an oversight. It is the same logic running consistently. A refused appeal changes nothing that anybody records. The bowler goes back to his mark, the batter stays, the ball count is unaffected, and there is nothing for the scorers to write. So the umpire says the words, or shakes his head, or does the thing experienced umpires do best, which is nothing at all with great conviction. Silence is a decision, and the fielding side is expected to read it.

That absence occasionally shows up on television as a gap in the vocabulary. When a review comes back and an on-field decision has to be reversed from out to not out, the umpire needs some way of showing that the finger has been withdrawn, and there is no purpose-built gesture for it. What he uses is the revoke signal, which was written for a different job, or a wide sweep of both arms that reads clearly on camera and is not in the code at all. Neither is a not-out signal. They are ways of unmaking something.

The signals only one of the two umpires may give

Two umpires stand on the field. They are not interchangeable, they do not share a job description, and only one of them ever talks to the scorers.

The bowler's end umpire stands behind the stumps at the bowler's end, looking straight down the pitch. That line of sight gives him everything that depends on knowing where the ball pitched and where it went: lbw, caught behind, bowled, the wide, and the run out at his own end. He also has the crease directly underneath him, which is why the front foot and back foot no balls are his and nobody else's. And he makes every signal to the scorers. All of them.

The square leg umpire stands side-on, usually at square leg though permitted to move to the off side with the fielding captain's agreement. That position is worth precisely what it can see from ninety degrees. Whether the batter's foot was inside the crease when the bails came off, which is a stumping. Whether the bat was grounded, which is a run out at that end. Whether the batter dislodged their own stumps, which is hit wicket. Whether the wicketkeeper had part of himself in front of the stumps before the ball reached the striker, which is a no ball. And whether the bowler's arm straightened through the delivery swing, which is the one judgement that is genuinely impossible from behind the bowler and genuinely available from the side.

What the square leg umpire does not do is signal to the scorers. If he judges a stumping, he raises his finger to give the batter out, and that is a decision rather than a scoring signal. If he sees a run short at his end, he calls it and signals it to his colleague, who then signals short run to the scorebox. The relay is deliberate. It means the scorers only ever have to watch one person, and it means the two umpires have to agree before a record is altered.

The division is pure geometry. There is no judgement in cricket that both umpires are equally well placed to make, so the code hands each one to whoever can actually see it. Where both can see something, such as a fielder encroaching on the pitch or an illegal arm action, the Laws let either call it, because the cost of missing it exceeds the cost of a duplicated call.

One further responsibility sits with the bowler's end umpire and is easy to miss. He counts the deliveries. The scorers count them as well and the two counts are checked against each other, but the umpire's is the one that ends the over. When those counts diverge, which happens, it is resolved between the umpires and the scorers, and it is the sort of thing that takes four minutes and looks from the stands as though nothing whatsoever is going on.

Dead ball, the signal that deletes what you just watched

Crossing and re-crossing the wrists below the waist. It is the least dramatic gesture in the set and by some distance the most powerful, because it can erase a boundary or a wicket that every person in the ground has already seen.

Dead ball sits in the group made to the scorers, which tells you what it is doing at that point: it is an instruction that the passage of play just recorded did not happen and must be struck out. The umpire may also call and signal it in the moment to stop play immediately, for a serious injury, an intervention from someone not in the match, a batter who was not ready, or a delivery the umpire judges should never have been bowled.

Both uses share a purpose, and it is the same one behind the acknowledgement requirement: keeping the record and the reality in agreement. Whatever the crowd saw, the scorebook must contain only what counted.

The signal is worth learning simply as a viewer, because at grounds where nothing is announced it is often the first and only indication that what you just watched has been unwound. Somebody hits the ball to the rope, the fielders relax, the batters jog through, and the umpire's wrists cross. Four runs never existed. Nobody says so.

Its relationship to the wider set of laws a spectator actually needs is that dead ball is the general reset the whole code leans on. Almost every dispute about timing resolves into a question about the exact moment the ball became dead, and the signal is the public marker of that moment.

The TV square, the third umpire, and the soft signal that got deleted

The rectangle drawn in the air with both index fingers is the newest gesture that most viewers know, and it is not in the Laws at all. It is a playing condition, written by whoever runs the competition, which is why it appears in an international and may not appear at a league ground.

It is also, strictly, not a signal to the scorers. It is a signal to the third umpire, and it is one of the very few gestures in cricket whose intended recipient is watching on a monitor. The scorers get nothing from it except notice that a decision is pending, and they wait.

The third umpire, notably, has no hand signals. None. He is the only official in the game who cannot use his arms, because nobody can see them. His verdict travels by radio to the on-field umpire, or by the light boxes and screens the ground provides, and it is the on-field umpire who then makes whatever signal the outcome requires. Every review therefore ends with a gesture from the middle, even though the decision was taken indoors. The full machinery of who may ask for what, and how many failed attempts a side is allowed, is a separate system with its own logic.

Then there is the soft signal, which is now a piece of history and is instructive precisely because it was abandoned.

Under it, an umpire referring a disputed catch or a low grab upstairs was required to give a provisional decision first, out or not out, before drawing the square. That provisional call became the default. The third umpire could only overturn it with conclusive evidence, and on the specific question of whether fingers got under a ball travelling at speed, the replays are very often not conclusive. So the outcome frequently turned on a guess made from twenty yards away by somebody who had already admitted, by referring it at all, that he could not tell.

The ICC removed it in 2023. The reasoning is straightforward once stated: an umpire who does not know should be allowed to say that he does not know, and a system that forces him to commit to an answer and then treats that answer as authoritative is manufacturing certainty rather than finding it.

The parallel with umpire's call in lbw reviews is worth drawing, because the two look similar and are not similar at all. Umpire's call preserves the on-field decision because the technology's own margin of error genuinely covers both answers, which is an honest statement about a measurement. The soft signal preserved the on-field decision because a procedure said it must, on a question the umpire had already conceded he could not answer. One was calibrated. The other was a default dressed as a judgement.

Playing conditions can be deleted between seasons. Laws cannot, or not easily, which is why the soft signal could disappear quietly while the fourteen gestures in the code carry on unchanged.

The administrative signals nobody photographs

The remaining signals are the ones that never make a highlights package, and two of them are among the most useful things an umpire tells the scorers all day.

New ball. The umpire holds the ball above his head. In a format where the fielding side may take a replacement after a set number of overs, this is the moment the innings changes character, and the scorers need it because the ball's age is recorded and because everything that follows belongs to a different ball. For anyone watching, it is a genuine tactical marker: hard ball, more pace off the surface, the seamers back on.

Commencement of the last hour. One wrist raised, pointed at with the other hand. In a timed match the final hour brings a minimum number of overs that must be bowled regardless of the clock, and the signal starts that count. It is the point at which a captain chasing a result and a captain playing for a draw begin to want completely different things, and it is announced by a man pointing at his own arm.

Revoke last signal. Both shoulders touched, each with the opposite hand. The umpire has given a signal, the scorers have acknowledged it, and it was wrong. This one has to be acknowledged like any other, and the correct signal is then given afterwards and acknowledged separately.

Revoke is the quiet admission that the whole system needs an undo. Signals are given quickly, sometimes by somebody who has just been concentrating hard on something else, and the alternative to a formal withdrawal is an umpire walking to the boundary at the end of the over to sort it out by shouting.

Beyond the code, competitions add their own. The free hit, indicated by a hand circling above the head, is a playing condition. So is the powerplay signal, an arm rotated in a windmill, marking the change in fielding restrictions that governs which phase of the innings the field is set for. Short-form competitions have added others as their formats required them, including markers for strategic timeouts and for the substitutions that exist in some leagues and not others.

And there are gestures which are not signals at all in the formal sense but which do a job anyway. An umpire tapping his own shoulder after a bouncer is counting it, telling the bowler and his colleague that one of the permitted short deliveries in the over has gone. That is not in the signal list. It is a piece of communication the game invented because somebody needed to be told something, which is exactly how the fourteen in the code came into existence in the first place.

1. 1Something is signalled, and acknowledgedThe umpire raises a finger, or signals leg bye and then four, and the scorers write it down. From this point the record contains it, and the record now has to be actively corrected.
2. 2Route one, the decision is reviewedThe umpire draws a rectangle in the air. The third umpire, who has no hand signals of his own, works from the replays and sends a verdict back by radio or by the ground's light system.
3. 3Route two, the umpire realises he was wrongNo technology involved. He saw the ball come off the glove and knows he signalled leg byes. The code allows a decision to be changed provided the change is made promptly, which in practice means before the next delivery.
4. 4The revoke signal goes to the scorersBoth shoulders touched, each with the opposite hand, and held until acknowledged. On its own it does nothing except delete. It tells the scorers to strike the previous entry and wait.
5. 5The corrected signal follows, separatelyBoundary four on its own, acknowledged in its turn. The scorers now credit the striker with the four and remove it from extras, and the bowler's analysis moves with it.
6. 6The scorebook, not the scoreboard, is now rightThe ground's board may take another over to catch up, and the television graphic may never explain what happened. The official record was corrected in the two seconds the umpire spent with his hands on his shoulders.

The two routes by which something already signalled gets reversed. The review route is a competition playing condition; the revoke signal is in the Laws.

How to read cricket umpire signals from the boundary

Once you know the protocol, the umpire becomes the most informative person on the field, and he is telling you things the commentary usually will not.

Watch what happens after the ball goes dead, not during the delivery. The in-play signals are loud and obvious. The interesting ones come afterwards, in silence, aimed at a window.

Count the signals. One signal means one piece of information. Two means a qualifier and a quantity, and the first of them is the one that decides whose runs those are. If you see an arm go out horizontally and then sweep across the chest, the batter has just been credited with nothing at all and the bowler has been charged with five.

Watch for the wait. An umpire standing still with his arm held out is not posing. He has not had his acknowledgement yet. The length of that pause tells you something about how busy the scorebox is, and a long one usually means the scorers are already untangling something else.

Learn the four that look similar. One arm out is a no ball. Two arms out is a wide. Two arms up is six. One open hand up is a bye. They are deliberately distinguishable at three hundred yards, and after a season of looking for them you will read them faster than the scoreboard updates.

Notice the ones that never appear. No not-out signal, no signal for a single, nothing at all from the third umpire, nothing from square leg towards the scorebox. Each absence is the same rule doing its work: a signal exists only where somebody needs the information and cannot otherwise get it.

Watch the two umpires differently. The one behind the bowler is talking to the scorers. The one at square leg is talking to his colleague. If square leg's finger goes up, it is a stumping, a run out at that end, or hit wicket, and you can narrow it down before the replay arrives.

The reward for all of this is that you stop needing anybody to tell you what happened. A ball flies to the rope, the striker's score does not move, and you already know why, because you saw the knee come up. A bowler's figures go from nought for nineteen to nought for twenty-four on a delivery that nobody hit, and you know the ball crossed the rope after his boot crossed the line. Those relationships are the same ones that make the geometry of the field a captain has set readable, and they sit underneath everything else in the cricket section here.

Two people in a small room are writing the only record of this match that will survive it. The man in the middle is dictating to them, in a language of fourteen gestures, and he will not let the game continue until they have confirmed that they heard him. That is what the arms are for.