What b, 4b, lb and M Mean on a Cricket Scorecard

A cricket scorecard is a compression format. It was designed to fit a full day's play onto a card the size of a postcard, and every convention on it exists because a scorer with a pen and a fixed amount of paper needed to record a complicated event in as few characters as possible. Nothing on the card is decorative. Once you know what each mark is doing, a scorecard reads faster than the commentary that produced it.

Most people learn the card by osmosis and end up with gaps. They know the asterisk means not out but have never worked out why the team total is larger than the sum of the individual scores. They can read 4-0-32-2 but could not say what the second number is. They assume the batting order on the card was the batting order the captain wrote down, which is often false. This guide takes the card apart column by column, then puts it back together.

What the card records, and what it throws away

Start with the design brief, because it explains every oddity that follows.

A scorer records deliveries. Somewhere between one hundred and twenty and five hundred of them in an innings, each one an event with several attributes: who bowled it, who faced it, whether it was legal, how many runs it produced, where those runs came from, and whether it ended anybody's innings. The scorecard is the summary that survives when all of that is collapsed onto a page.

The collapse is lossy, and it is lossy in a specific direction. The card keeps outcomes attributed to people. It discards sequence, context and cause.

So the card will tell you that a batter made 71 from 94 balls and was leg before to a particular bowler. It will not tell you that 60 of those runs came off two bowlers who were not the one who eventually removed him, that he was dropped on 12, that he faced a long run of dot balls while the required rate climbed, or that the pitch had started to grip by the time he was out. None of that is a defect. It is the price of a format that fits on a page and can be reconciled with a pen.

Knowing what has been thrown away is the difference between reading a card and being misled by one. Every column below is precise about a small thing and silent about a large one.

• 6Legal deliveries in a completed over
• 10Wickets that end an innings
• 1Runs added by a wide before anyone runs
• 5Penalty runs for most Law offences

These come from the Laws rather than from any particular match, which is why they never change and can always be used as a check.

The two halves of a card

Every innings on a scorecard has two blocks. The first lists the batting side, one row per batter, in the order they came to the crease. The second lists the bowling side, one row per bowler who sent down at least one delivery, in the order they first bowled. Between them sit the extras line, the total, and the fall of wickets.

A full match card is that structure repeated: twice for a limited-overs game, up to four times for a Test or first-class match. The header above each block tells you whose innings it is and, in a chase, what the target was.

The two blocks are not independent. They are two views of the same set of deliveries, which is why they can be reconciled against each other, and why a card that fails to reconcile is a card with a mistake in it. The reconciliations are set out at the end of this guide, and running them is the fastest way to prove to yourself that you have understood the columns.

The batting card

The name column, and the markers hanging off it

The batter's name appears with markers attached. Conventions vary between publishers, but the common ones are stable.

• (c) after a name means captain.
• (wk) or a dagger symbol means wicketkeeper. A player can carry both.
• An asterisk placed before a name, in a printed team list of the sort a newspaper or almanack uses, also means captain. This is the single most common source of confusion on a card, because an asterisk placed after a score means something entirely different.
• (sub) appears against a fielder's name inside a dismissal, never against a batter's, because a substitute fielder may not bat. The exception is a concussion replacement, which is a full replacement rather than a substitute and appears as an ordinary row.

Why the batting order is not the order they batted

The rows are printed in the order the batters actually walked out. That is not the same as the order the captain planned, and the gap between the two is where several of cricket's more interesting decisions hide.

A nightwatchman is the obvious case. A specialist bowler is sent in ahead of a recognised batter late in the day to absorb a few hostile overs. On the card, the nightwatchman sits at number three or four and the batter he protected sits below him. The card records the promotion and says nothing about why it happened.

A chase promotion is the mirror image. A side needing 60 from four overs sends its hardest hitter up the order regardless of where he normally bats. Two weeks later the same player appears at number seven. Nothing on either card explains the difference.

Injury and retirement reshuffle things too. A batter who retires hurt on 20 and returns at the fall of the eighth wicket keeps his original row, because that is where he first came in, even though his innings finished nearly two hours after several batters below him started theirs. Read the fall of wickets alongside the batting order and you can watch this happening: the names come out of sequence.

A concussion substitute produces a row that had no place in the original eleven at all. The replacement bats where the match situation requires, which may be nothing like the position of the player replaced.

Then there is the plain collapse. A side three down for very little may send a bowler in to see out a spell, or a captain may promote himself. The card shows what happened, not what was intended, and that distinction is the reason the order is worth reading rather than glancing at.

The asterisk

An asterisk against a batter's runs means the batter was not out when the innings ended. It is a statement about how the innings finished, not about quality. A batter who is 63 not out was still at the crease when the overs ran out, when the tenth wicket fell at the other end, or when a declaration was made.

This matters more than it looks. A not-out innings is excluded from the denominator when a batting average is calculated, so the asterisk quietly changes the arithmetic of a career. It is the reason a lower-order batter who is regularly stranded can carry an average that flatters the contribution, and the reason the average alone is a poor summary of anybody. The mechanics of that, and what to read instead, are the subject of the companion piece on what an average and a strike rate each measure.

Two related notations look like not out and are not the same thing.

• retired hurt, sometimes printed as retired not out: the batter left the field injured or ill and may return later in the innings. No wicket falls. If the batter never comes back, the innings is treated as not out for averaging purposes, exactly as if he had been stranded at the other end.
• retired out: the batter left without the umpires' permission for reasons other than injury and did not return. This does count as a dismissal, so the wickets column advances, but no bowler is credited. It is close to unheard of in the long formats and turns up occasionally in T20, where a side may retire a struggling batter to get a hitter in.

The difference between those two lines is one word on the card and a whole career average underneath it.

How out: the full dismissal notation

The dismissal column is the densest shorthand on the card. Read it as a sentence with the words removed.

Written as	Means	Bowler credited
b Jones	Bowled by Jones	Yes
c Smith b Jones	Caught by the fielder Smith, off Jones's bowling	Yes
c & b Jones	Caught by Jones off his own bowling	Yes
c (wk) Smith b Jones	Caught behind by the wicketkeeper Smith	Yes
c sub (Smith) b Jones	Caught by a substitute fielder	Yes
lbw b Jones	Leg before wicket, bowler Jones	Yes
st Smith b Jones	Stumped by the keeper Smith off Jones	Yes
hit wicket b Jones	Batter broke the stumps in playing or setting off	Yes
run out (Smith)	Run out, Smith effected it	No
run out (Smith/Brown)	Run out, two fielders involved in that order	No
obstructing the field	Batter wilfully obstructed or distracted the fielding side	No
hit the ball twice	Batter struck the ball a second time other than to protect the wicket	No
timed out	Incoming batter was not ready within the permitted time	No
retired out	Batter left the field and did not return, without injury	No
not out	Innings ended with the batter unbeaten	Not applicable

The rule behind the right-hand column is one sentence. A bowler is credited when the delivery caused the dismissal. Bowled, caught, leg before, stumped and hit wicket are all consequences of the ball that was bowled. Run out, obstruction, hitting the ball twice and timing out are consequences of something else, so they sit on the card with no bowler attached. That is why the bowlers' wickets column can be smaller than the number of wickets in the total, and why a card showing 278 for 6 may only account for five wickets across the whole bowling block.

Why "b Anderson" and "c Root b Anderson" credit different things

Both lines give the bowler one wicket. In the W column they are indistinguishable. What differs is everything around the wicket.

b Anderson says the ball hit the stumps. No fielder touched it. One player is named because only one player was involved, and the line generates exactly one career statistic: a wicket for the bowler.

c Root b Anderson says the ball came off the bat and was caught. Two players were involved and the line generates two career statistics: a wicket for Anderson and a catch for Root. Fielding records are built entirely out of these entries, which is the reason the catcher's name is on the card at all. It is not commentary. It is a second ledger being written in the same line.

That is also why the order is fixed. Catcher first, bowler second, always, with the b acting as the separator. If a card appears to list the bowler first, you are reading the bowling block rather than the batting block. And when the fielder and the bowler happen to share a surname, the line reads c Smith b Smith, which is two different players, while c & b Smith is one player doing both. The ampersand is doing real work.

The dismissals people misread

Stumped is a bowler's wicket. It looks like a wicketkeeper's dismissal, and the keeper's name is on it, but st Smith b Jones credits Jones with the wicket. The batter was out of his ground because of the delivery. The keeper's role is recorded as a stumping in his own fielding column, exactly as a catch is.

A stumping can happen off a wide. This is the edge case that catches everyone. A batter who charges a spinner, misses a ball too wide to reach, and fails to make his ground is stumped, and the card shows both the stumping and a wide in the bowler's extras. The bowler is charged a run and credited with a wicket off the same delivery.

Almost nothing can happen off a no ball. Off a no ball the only dismissals available are run out, obstructing the field and hitting the ball twice. A batter cannot be bowled, caught, stumped, given leg before or out hit wicket off one. This is why a bowler who oversteps has thrown away not just a run but every wicket that delivery might have produced, and why the front-foot call is worth so much more than the single run it costs.

Hit wicket is charged to the bowler. The batter dislodged a bail with bat, body or equipment while playing at the ball or setting off for a first run. The bowler did not aim at the stumps, but the delivery caused it, so the wicket counts in full. hit wicket b Jones is a wicket for Jones.

Leg before is written with a redundant "b". lbw b Jones reads as leg before wicket, bowled by Jones, which is why some publishers shorten it to lbw Jones. Both mean the same thing. What the card does not show is whether the decision survived a review, was overturned on review, or stood on umpire's call under the ball-tracking margin, all of which are visible live and invisible afterwards. Nothing about the review system leaves a trace on a scorecard.

A run out names the fielders, not the bowler. run out (Smith) credits Smith with the run out in his fielding record and credits nobody with a wicket. Where the ball passed through more than one pair of hands the names are separated by a slash in the order they touched it, so run out (Smith/Brown) usually means Smith threw and Brown broke the stumps. Any runs the batters completed before the dismissal still count towards the total, and they still count against the bowler if they came off the bat. A run out is the only common dismissal where the bowler's analysis and the wickets column pull apart completely.

Obstructing the field now absorbs handled the ball. The two offences were merged in the 2017 Code of the Laws, so a batter who stops the ball with a hand to prevent a run out is given out obstructing the field rather than under a separate heading. Older cards still carry the old wording. No bowler is credited either way.

Timed out has a clock on it. The Laws allow three minutes for the incoming batter to be ready to receive, and competition playing conditions frequently shorten that. It is one of the rarest lines on any card and one of the few describing something that happened off the field of play. The wider set of rules that produce these lines is covered in the guide to the Laws worth knowing as a spectator.

Absent hurt is not a wicket. It appears at the bottom of the batting list as absent hurt or absent ill. The player never batted and cannot be dismissed, so a side can be all out having lost only nine wickets, or eight. An innings ends when ten wickets fall or when nobody is left to come in, whichever happens first.

Runs, balls, fours, sixes, strike rate

These five columns are usually headed R, B, 4s, 6s and SR.

R is runs scored off the bat. It excludes runs the batter physically ran that were signalled as byes or leg byes, and it excludes the penalty run for a wide or a no ball. A batter can run three, watch all three go into the extras column as leg byes, and finish the over on the same score he started it.

B is balls faced, and the counting rule catches people out. A no ball counts as a ball faced, because the batter had a delivery to deal with. A wide does not, because by definition it was out of reach. Add up the balls-faced column for a completed innings and it should equal the number of legal deliveries bowled plus the number of no balls.

4s and 6s count boundaries hit off the bat. A ball that runs away for four byes does not appear here. An overthrow that turns a single into five adds four to the batter's R column without adding anything to this one. And a six off the edge counts identically to one middled over long on, which is the card being deliberately indifferent to how a run was made.

SR is the batting strike rate, runs divided by balls, multiplied by 100. A strike rate of 140.00 means 140 runs per 100 balls faced. In limited-overs cricket this is often the first column worth reading. On a Test card it is frequently omitted altogether, because the number that matters there is the balls column on its own, and some traditional cards print minutes at the crease instead.

Did not bat

Below the last batter to appear, the card lists the members of the eleven who never came in. On a completed 50-over innings that ended with wickets in hand, this is where the specialist bowlers are.

It is also a sanity check. Batters listed, plus batters who did not bat, plus anyone absent, should come to eleven.

The distinction between this line and absent hurt matters for records, and it is worth being exact. A player who did not bat has no innings recorded, so nothing happens to his average. A player absent hurt likewise has no innings recorded, so again nothing happens to his average, but the wickets column on the total tells a different story: the side lost fewer than ten and was still all out. Neither is a dismissal and neither adds to the denominator of an average. The only line in this family that does add to the denominator is retired out, which is a completed innings ended by choice, and the only one that adds to the numerator without the denominator is retired hurt, which behaves exactly like a not out.

Extras, and why the team total is bigger than the batters' scores

This is the most misunderstood block on the card, and it earns the space.

Extras are runs credited to the batting side and to no individual batter. They exist because cricket distinguishes between runs a batter earned and runs the fielding side gave away, and it insists on recording the difference. The extras line is where the gap between the sum of the batting column and the team total lives, and on a completed card that gap is exactly the extras, to the run.

There are five kinds, and the important question about each is who pays for it.

Byes

Written b. The ball passed the bat and the wicketkeeper without touching either, and the batters ran, or it went to the boundary.

The number and the letter are written in either order depending on the card, so b 4 in an extras line and 4b against a delivery both mean four byes, and a single bye is 1b. Leg byes follow the same convention, which is where 1lb and 4lb come from.

A bye comes off a legal delivery, so the ball counts in the over and counts as a ball faced by the batter, but the runs go to nobody's batting column. It is charged to the team total and to no bowler. The reasoning is that a bowler who beat the bat did his job and the keeper did not.

Four byes are the fastest way for a card to look wrong when it is not. The team total jumps by four, no batter's score moves, no bowler's runs conceded moves, and the over remains capable of being a maiden.

Leg byes

Written lb. The ball struck the batter's body rather than the bat and the batters ran.

Leg byes are only awarded if the batter was either attempting a stroke or trying to avoid being hit. If the umpire judges that he did neither, the runs are disallowed entirely: the ball is called dead as soon as a run is completed or the boundary is reached, and nothing is added to anything. This is the only category of run in cricket that can be physically run and then deleted, and it exists to stop a batter padding the ball away and taking runs for it.

Like byes, leg byes are charged to the team and not to the bowler.

Wides

Written w. The delivery passed out of the batter's reach as he stood, judged against a line that white-ball playing conditions define far more tightly than the Test game does.

A wide is worth one run immediately. Any further runs the batters take, and any boundary that results, are added to the same wide rather than recorded separately, so a wide that runs away to the fence is recorded as five wides and not as one wide plus four byes. The delivery does not count as one of the six, so the bowler must bowl it again, and it is not a ball faced by anybody.

A wide is the bowler's error, so it is debited to the bowler in full. It also destroys a maiden.

No balls

Written nb. An illegal delivery. The most common cause is the front foot landing beyond the popping crease, but the category also covers a delivery bouncing more than the permitted number of times, a dangerous high full toss, a ball that lands off the pitch, throwing rather than bowling, and several fielding-position offences that have nothing to do with the bowler's action at all.

A no ball is worth one penalty run, debited to the bowler. The ball must be bowled again. It counts as a ball faced.

The part people get wrong is what happens to everything else that comes off it. Runs scored off the bat from a no ball are credited to the batter and debited to the bowler, so a no ball hit for four costs the bowler five: once for the penalty and four times for the boundary. Under the Laws, runs that come off a no ball without touching the bat, which would otherwise have been byes or leg byes, are recorded as no balls rather than as byes, and are debited to the bowler as well. A no ball that beats everybody and runs away for four is five no balls against the bowler's name. Scoring software and publishers vary in how they present that, so it is worth checking a card's own conventions before reconciling it to the last run.

In white-ball cricket a no ball is normally followed by a free hit, on which the batter can only be dismissed by the methods available off a no ball itself. The card shows the no ball. It shows nothing at all about the free hit, which is one of the more consequential deliveries in the format and leaves no trace on the record.

Penalty runs

Written pen, and worth five at a time. They are awarded for offences rather than for deliveries: the ball striking a fielding helmet left on the ground, a fielder stopping the ball with clothing or discarded equipment, deliberate distraction, damage to the protected area of the pitch, a deliberate short run, and various forms of unfair play.

Penalty runs are charged to nobody's bowling figures. They belong to the team, and to the team alone.

They also have a property nothing else on the card has. A penalty awarded against the side that is batting is credited to the side that is fielding, which means it appears at the head of that side's next innings, in a different block of the card, before a ball has been bowled to them. A scorecard that opens with five runs already on the board is not a misprint.

Who pays, in one table

The dividing line is responsibility, and it is worth memorising, because everything about a bowler's analysis follows from it.

Extra	Counts as a ball bowled	Ball faced by the batter	Debited to the bowler
Bye	Yes	Yes	No
Leg bye	Yes	Yes	No
Wide	No	No	Yes
No ball	No	Yes	Yes
Penalty runs	Not a delivery	No	No

That table is why a bowler's runs conceded almost never equals the runs scored while he was bowling, and why two bowlers with identical figures may have had completely different overs. Each of these extras begins life as a movement of the umpire's arms, and the visual vocabulary behind them is set out in the guide to what each umpire signal means.

1. 1The umpire calls itAn arm goes out sideways. The delivery does not count as one of the six, so this over will be seven balls long, and the bowler has to bowl it again.
2. 2The bowler is debited one runThe penalty goes into the bowler's runs conceded and into the extras line as nb 1. The over can no longer be a maiden, whatever happens in the rest of it.
3. 3The batter faces it anywayBalls faced goes up by one, because there was a delivery to deal with. This is why the balls-faced column for a completed innings exceeds six times the number of overs by exactly the number of no balls.
4. 4The four is credited twiceFour runs go to the batter's R column and a four goes into his boundary count. The same four runs go into the bowler's runs conceded, on top of the penalty. One delivery, five runs against the bowler.
5. 5The total absorbs itFive runs join the team total. Four are traceable to a batter, one is not, and the gap between the batting column and the total widens by exactly one.
6. 6What the card never showsThat the next ball was a free hit, that the batter could only be run out on it, and what he did with it. That lives in the ball-by-ball record and nowhere else.

A single illegal delivery, hit for four, followed through every column it touches. The point is that one event is recorded in four separate places, and the extras column is only one of them.

The bowling card

The bowling block is usually five columns, sometimes seven: O, M, R, W, Econ, and often Wd and Nb.

O is overs bowled. A figure like 9.3 means nine complete overs and three further balls, not nine and three-tenths. The digit after the point counts deliveries, so it can only run from 1 to 5. A part-over appears when a bowler is taken off mid-over through injury, when a bowler is removed from the attack by the umpires, or when the innings ends part way through an over.

M is maidens: an over from which no runs are scored off the bat and no runs are charged to the bowler. Byes and leg byes conceded during the over do not spoil a maiden, because they are not the bowler's runs. A wide or a no ball does spoil it, because they are. An over in which the bowler concedes nothing and also takes a wicket is a wicket maiden, occasionally given its own column on longer-format cards.

R is runs conceded: everything off the bat, plus wides and no balls, plus every run that follows from them. Byes, leg byes and penalty runs are excluded.

W is wickets credited, using the rule set out above. The wickets column for the whole bowling side will fall short of the wickets in the total whenever there has been a run out, an obstruction or a retired out.

Econ is the economy rate, runs conceded per over. It is the only column on the bowling block that the scorer does not observe. It is derived, which is why it is also the column most often printed wrong.

The economy trap

A bowler with figures of 9.3-0-57-2 has bowled fifty-seven deliveries, which is nine and a half overs. The economy rate is 57 divided by 9.5, which is 6.00. It is not 57 divided by 9.3, which would give 6.13 and be wrong.

The method is always the same: convert the overs figure to balls, divide by six, and use that as the denominator. It is a small thing that produces wrong numbers in a surprising number of places, including some published cards, and it only ever bites on a part-over.

Notice also what the bowling block does not contain. There is no bowling average and no bowling strike rate, because both need a career or at least a series behind them to mean anything, and a single card holds one innings. Those two figures, and what each of them is actually measuring, are dealt with in the piece on economy, average and strike rate as three different questions.

Reading 4-0-32-2

Written out in full, a bowling analysis runs overs, maidens, runs, wickets. So 4-0-32-2 is four overs, no maidens, thirty-two runs conceded, two wickets. The order never changes.

The confusion comes from the short form. In print and in speech a return is usually given wickets first: 2 for 32, or 2-32, or in Australian usage 2/32. The same performance therefore appears as 4-0-32-2 in a table and 2-32 in a sentence, with the numbers apparently swapped.

The rule of thumb is that the four-number version always starts with overs and the two-number version almost always starts with wickets. If in doubt, wickets cannot exceed ten, and in limited-overs cricket a single bowler's overs cannot exceed the per-bowler cap.

What the block hides is spell structure. A bowler who returns 10-1-52-2 may have bowled two spells or four, may have taken both wickets in his second over or his tenth, and may have gone for 30 in one over and 22 in the other nine. The card flattens all of it into four numbers, and the figure that looks most informative, the economy rate, is the one most likely to be an average of two completely different halves of a performance.

Fall of wickets, and how to rebuild a partnership from it

The fall of wickets line records the state of the innings at each dismissal. The modern format reads:

1-19 (Salako, 5.2 ov), 2-72 (Whitcombe, 20.4 ov)

The first number is the wicket number, the second is the team score when it fell, the name is the batter dismissed, and the over figure is the point in the innings. Older cards and some newspaper formats reverse the first two numbers, giving 19-1, so read the pair in whichever direction makes the wickets climb from one to ten.

The over notation counts completed overs and then balls, so 20.4 is the fourth ball of the twenty-first over.

This is the most underrated part of the card, because it is the only place the shape of the innings survives. Two sides can post the same total from cards that describe entirely different afternoons.

To rebuild the partnerships, subtract consecutive scores. The first-wicket stand is the score at the fall of the first wicket. The second-wicket stand is the second figure minus the first, and so on down. The final partnership, if the innings did not end with the tenth wicket, is the team total minus the score at the last fall.

Two cautions. A partnership reconstructed this way includes every extra conceded while those two batters were together, so a stand of 73 is not 73 runs off their bats. And the name on the fall of wickets is the batter who was dismissed, not the batter who stayed, so a long partnership is attributed on the card to a wicket number rather than to the pair who built it. Where a batter retired hurt and came back, one numbered partnership may involve three different players, and the card will not say so.

The total line, declarations and the follow-on

The total line carries several pieces of information at once. A typical limited-overs version reads:

Total: 278/6 (50 overs, RR 5.56)

The number before the slash is runs, the number after is wickets. In Australian usage the two are reversed, so the same total is written 6/278. Both are correct in their own tradition, and the only reliable way to tell them apart is that wickets cannot exceed ten.

The run rate, RR, is runs divided by overs. In a second innings you will also find RRR, the required run rate, which is the runs still needed divided by the overs still available. Where rain has intervened, the target line carries a revised figure and a note, because a shortened chase is not simply a proportional one; the reasoning behind those revised targets is set out in how the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method arrives at a target.

On a Test or first-class card the total line does more work.

(dec) marks a declared innings. The captain closed it voluntarily with wickets in hand, so a total of 570/7 dec is complete even though three batters never came in. The two batters at the crease are recorded not out and get the not-out treatment in their averages, which makes declarations quietly generous to whoever happens to be batting when one comes.

(f/o) marks an innings played following on. The follow-on is available to the side batting first when it leads by a defined margin after the first innings: 200 runs in a match of five days or more, 150 in a three or four-day match, 100 in a two-day match and 75 in a one-day first-class match. If the captain enforces it, the side that batted second bats again immediately, which is the only circumstance in which the same team appears in two consecutive innings blocks on a card. Read a four-innings card top to bottom without noticing the marker and the batting order will look as though it has been printed twice by mistake.

Innings forfeited is the rarest line of all. A captain may forfeit an innings before it begins, usually as part of a contrivance to manufacture a result on the final day. The block exists on the card with nobody in it.

Then there is the innings that simply ran out of time. A drawn Test can end with the fourth innings at 210/4, no declaration, no all out, four wickets down and stumps drawn. That block is not complete and never will be, both batters are not out, and both carry an asterisk. It is one of the reasons Test batting averages behave differently from limited-overs ones: the format regularly manufactures not-outs for reasons that have nothing to do with the batters who receive them.

What changes between a Test card, an ODI card and a T20 card

The columns are largely the same. What differs is which ones carry information.

A Test card has up to four innings blocks and no per-bowler over limit, so a single bowler's O column can run into the forties. Strike rate is often omitted and minutes at the crease sometimes appear instead. The blocks carry markers the shorter formats have no use for: declarations, follow-ons, and the point at which the second new ball became available after eighty overs, which changes what the bowling figures either side of it mean. Extras tend to be a larger absolute number simply because there are far more deliveries, and byes accumulate steadily against a keeper standing back to genuine pace for a whole day.

An ODI card is two blocks of at most fifty overs with a cap of ten overs per bowler, which is why the O column so often reads 10, 10, 10, 10, 10 across five names. Run rate and required run rate appear, powerplay boundaries are sometimes marked against the fall of wickets, and a rain-affected match carries a revised target line. A bowling block showing six or seven names in a 50-over innings is telling you that somebody's fifth bowler was expensive enough to be abandoned.

A T20 card compresses everything. Twenty overs, four per bowler, and a batting card where the strike rate column does most of the work; a strike rate under 100 in a T20 innings is a fact about the match rather than a footnote. Wides and no balls get their own columns more often, because a single free hit can decide a game. Some competitions add rows the other formats have no equivalent of at all: a super over appears as a separate mini card with its own one-over blocks, and leagues using a tactical substitute list the replacement as an ordinary batting or bowling row, with nothing to indicate that a substitution rule was involved.

Across all three the underlying scoring conventions are identical. Nothing about a bye or a stumping changes because the match is shorter. What changes is which columns are worth your attention first, and the vocabulary that goes with them is collected in the glossary of cricket statistics.

A live card is not a finished card

A card read during play behaves differently from the same card an hour after the match, and several of the differences trip people up.

The overs figure moves in sixths. An innings shown at 33.4 has thirty-three completed overs and four balls of the thirty-fourth, so there are 2.2 overs remaining in a 36-over allocation, not 2.3. Projected scores calculated from a live run rate are extrapolations rather than records, and they are the only numbers on a live card describing something that has not happened yet.

Not out is provisional. Every batter at the crease carries an asterisk, and it means nothing more than that they have not yet been dismissed. A batter on 40* in the fifteenth over will, in most cases, not finish with a not out at all.

Did not bat is meaningless until the innings ends. On a live card the line lists everyone who has not yet come in, which is a statement about the present rather than about the match.

The reconciliations do not hold. Balls faced will not tie to overs bowled part way through an over, and extras lag behind the total by whatever the scorers have not yet posted. A card that fails to reconcile at 33.4 overs is not wrong, it is unfinished.

Entries can be corrected. A dismissal shown as caught behind may become a run out after review, a boundary may be reduced to a three on a signal from the third umpire, and a delivery ruled a no ball changes the over count retrospectively. Completed cards are stable. Live ones are drafts, and the difference between a draft and a record is the reason archives are compiled after the fact rather than during.

A worked example

The card below is invented as an illustration. The teams, players and figures are fictional and are not drawn from any real match.

Riverton innings, 50 overs

Batter	How out	R	B	4s	6s	SR
A Whitcombe	c Delaney b Osei	34	68	3	0	50.00
R Salako	b Osei	8	16	1	0	50.00
M Fontaine	lbw b Rahimi	71	94	6	1	75.53
T Okonjo	c & b Rahimi	12	21	1	0	57.14
J Marsden	run out (Delaney)	45	41	3	1	109.76
P Sandhu (c)	not out	63	45	4	3	140.00
K Villiers	st Delaney b Rahimi	9	8	1	0	112.50
D Ferreira	not out	14	9	1	1	155.56

Did not bat: L Kowalski, S Abara, N Petrov

Extras (b 4, lb 7, w 9, nb 2) 22

Total 278/6 (50 overs, RR 5.56)

Fall of wickets: 1-19 (Salako, 5.2 ov), 2-72 (Whitcombe, 20.4 ov), 3-98 (Okonjo, 27.1 ov), 4-171 (Marsden, 38.2 ov), 5-187 (Fontaine, 39.5 ov), 6-223 (Villiers, 45.4 ov)

Kingsmere bowling

Bowler	O	M	R	W	Econ	Wd	Nb
B Osei	10	1	52	2	5.20	2	1
H Rahimi	10	0	48	3	4.80	1	0
C Whitehead	10	0	51	0	5.10	3	1
G Mbeki	9	0	58	0	6.44	2	0
E Larsen	8	0	40	0	5.00	1	0
T Ncube	3	0	18	0	6.00	0	0

Two lines in that batting block are worth pausing on before the arithmetic. Okonjo's c & b Rahimi is one player doing both jobs, so Rahimi gets the wicket and also a catch in his fielding record. Villiers was stumped by Delaney off Rahimi, which is Rahimi's wicket and Delaney's stumping, and Delaney also has two catches and a run out on this card, none of which appears anywhere in the bowling block.

41%32%18%9%

• Wides, debited to the bowler9
• Leg byes, charged to nobody7
• Byes, charged to nobody4
• No balls, debited to the bowler2

Constructed example. Of these 22 runs, the 11 wides and no balls sit inside the bowlers' figures; the 11 byes and leg byes sit outside them and are charged to the fielding side alone.

Show the numbers

The 22 extras on the invented card, and who paid for them

Item	Value
Wides, debited to the bowler	9
Leg byes, charged to nobody	7
Byes, charged to nobody	4
No balls, debited to the bowler	2

Rebuilding the innings from the fall of wickets

Take the fall of wickets line on its own, subtract consecutive scores, and for the unbroken stand at the end subtract the last fall from the total.

1st wicket19

2nd wicket53

3rd wicket26

4th wicket73

5th wicket16

6th wicket36

7th, unbroken55

Derived by subtraction from the fall of wickets on the constructed card above. Each figure includes any extras conceded while that pair were together, so these are partnership totals rather than runs off the bat.

Show the numbers

Partnerships reconstructed from the invented fall of wickets

Item	Value
1st wicket	19
2nd wicket	53
3rd wicket	26
4th wicket	73
5th wicket	16
6th wicket	36
7th, unbroken	55

The shape of the innings is now visible in a way the batting column alone never shows it. An early wicket, a rebuild, a wobble in the twenties and thirties, then a fourth-wicket stand of 73 that set the innings up, two wickets in the space of nine deliveries either side of the fortieth over, and an unbroken 55 at the death. Two of the three largest contributions to the total came from partnerships rather than from individuals, and the turning point of the innings was a pair of wickets that the batting card renders as two ordinary rows a long way apart.

The arithmetic that ties it together

Five reconciliations should hold on any completed card, and running them on this example shows what each column is really doing.

Runs. The eight batters scored 34, 8, 71, 12, 45, 63, 9 and 14, which comes to 256. Extras add 22. The team total is 278. The gap between the batters' runs and the team total is always exactly the extras.

Wickets. Six batters were dismissed. Five of those wickets went to bowlers: two to Osei, three to Rahimi. The sixth was Marsden's run out, credited to no bowler. This is why the bowlers' wickets column sums to five while the total reads 278 for 6.

Overs. The bowlers sent down 10, 10, 10, 9, 8 and 3 overs, which is 50, matching the innings length. In a 50-over match no bowler may exceed ten, and the card reflects that cap.

Runs conceded. The bowlers conceded 52, 48, 51, 58, 40 and 18, which comes to 267. The team total is 278. The difference of 11 is exactly the byes and leg byes, 4 plus 7, charged to the side but to no bowler. The wides and no balls, another 11 runs, sit inside the bowlers' figures rather than outside them.

Balls faced. The batters faced 68, 16, 94, 21, 41, 45, 8 and 9 balls, which is 302. Fifty overs is 300 legal deliveries. The extra two are the two no balls, which count as balls faced. The nine wides do not.

Those five checks are the whole logic of a scorecard. Once they make sense, no column on the card is mysterious, and a card that fails one of them has an error in it that is usually easy to locate.

What a scorecard will not tell you

The card is a record of outcomes, not of causes, and it hides as much as it shows.

It does not record who bowled to whom. A batter's 71 might have come almost entirely against the two least dangerous bowlers on the card, and nothing in the table would reveal it.

It does not record dot balls, false shots, dropped catches or the state of the pitch. A batter who was dropped on nought and went on to a hundred appears identical to one who batted flawlessly.

It does not record the match situation at the moment a batter came in. The number six who scored 63 not out in the example above arrived at 171 for four in the thirty-eighth over, a comfortable entry point. The same 63 made from 40 for four in the twelfth over would be a substantially harder innings, and the card weights them the same.

It does not record when wickets fell relative to the interval, the second new ball, or a rain break, all of which change how hard it was to score.

It does not record field placings, so c Delaney b Osei could be a thin edge to the keeper standing up or a skied pull to deep midwicket, and the two are the same line.

And it does not record intent. A total of 278 for six from fifty overs might be a side that batted as well as it could, or a side that had 330 in hand and gave it away. The card is neutral about that, which is the point of it.

For those reasons the fall of wickets and the bowling block deserve as much attention as the batting block. Read them together and the card stops being a list of numbers and becomes a description of an innings: who set it up, who accelerated, which bowler broke the partnership, and how much of the total came from the fielding side's own mistakes.

How to read a card fast

Once the columns make sense, a scorecard takes about twenty seconds if you read it in the right order. Start with the total, not the top of the batting list.

The total line first. Runs, wickets, overs, and any marker hanging off it. That tells you whether the innings was completed, curtailed, declared or abandoned, and it gives you the denominator for everything else on the card.

The fall of wickets second. Subtract the consecutive figures. You now have the shape of the innings, which is more information than any individual score gives you, and it takes one pass of the eye.

The extras line third. A large extras figure against a small total means an undisciplined bowling performance. A large byes figure specifically says something about the keeper, or about the pace and bounce he was dealing with. It is the most efficient number on the card in terms of information per character.

The bowling block fourth, looking at the O column before the W column. Who bowled a full allocation, who did not, and who was quietly not trusted. A bowler with three overs in a 50-over innings was taken off for a reason, and that reason is usually the most interesting thing on the card.

The batting card last, reading the B column alongside the R column. Runs on their own tell you very little. Runs against balls faced, cross-referenced against the fall of wickets so you know when each batter arrived and what he walked into, tell you close to everything a card is capable of telling you.

Anything unresolved after that pass needs the ball-by-ball record, and that record is increasingly public. But most questions people ask about a match are answerable from the card alone, provided it is read in the order the information actually sits in, rather than top to bottom.

More on the numbers underneath these columns, and on the rest of the sport, is collected in the cricket archive, and the career figures that all these cards eventually add up to are in the player records.