The Follow-On Rule, Explained Policy & Terms

In a two-innings match, the team that bats second can be made to bat again immediately, without the side that bowled them out batting in between, if they fall far enough behind on first innings. That's the follow-on: instead of Team A batting, Team B batting, Team A batting again, Team B declaring, it's Team A batting, Team B batting, Team B batting again straight away. It saves the team that's ahead a whole innings of time, which is the entire point in a match with a hard five-day limit.

It is the fielding captain's choice, not automatic. Enforcing it is not always the right call: it can mean bowling two long innings back to back on a wearing pitch, with no rest for your attack in between, and if the follow-on side bats well the pressure flips back onto the team that enforced it.

The side that bowled first has to be at least a set number of runs ahead to have the option. In a modern five-day Test that margin is 200 runs. Cricket has never used one number for every match length, though: the Laws set smaller margins for shorter first-class games, and in Test cricket's early decades, when matches were often scheduled for three or four days rather than five, the working margin was smaller too, closer to 150.

The simulator is era-aware here, not just in the modern game. A Test drawn from the 1880s-1930s uses the smaller, period-correct follow-on margin that matched those shorter scheduled matches; a Test from the post-war five-day era uses 200. The AI captain then weighs the same trade-off a real one does, pitch wear, the state of the bowling attack, and how many overs are actually left in the match, when deciding whether to send you back in.

Captain a five-day Test yourself and you'll get the choice from the other side too: bowl a team out cheap enough, and it's your call whether enforcing it is worth the risk.

Every follow-on actually enforced in a real Test since 1877 is in the archive, searchable by team, year and venue. Or captain your own: play The Follow-On.