How to Read a Cricket Scorecard Guide
The batting card
Each batter gets a row: their name, how they were dismissed, their runs, and the balls they faced. The dismissal is written in a shorthand worth learning. b Smith means bowled by Smith. c Jones b Smith means caught by Jones off Smith's bowling. lbw b Smith is leg before wicket. st Jones b Smith is stumped by the keeper Jones off the spinner Smith. run out (Jones) is a run out, credited to the fielder, not to any bowler. An asterisk next to a score, like 63*, means the batter was not out. A batter listed as did not bat never came to the crease because the innings ended first.
Rarer dismissals and symbols
The Laws of Cricket give nine ways to be out, one Law each from Law 32 to Law 40, and most scorecards only ever show the common five. The rarer ones are written out in full. hit wicket means the batter knocked off their own bails while playing a shot or setting off for a run. obstructing the field covers deliberately getting in the fielders' way, and since 2017 also includes handling the ball, which used to be a dismissal of its own. timed out is given when an incoming batter is not ready to face within the time allowed; it happened for the first time in an international match when Sri Lanka's Angelo Mathews was given out at the 2023 World Cup.
A batter who leaves the field injured is shown as retired hurt and can come back later; one who is not able to bat at all is absent hurt. Many cards also mark the captain with (c) and the wicketkeeper with a dagger (†) beside their names.
Bowling figures
Each bowler's line reads as four numbers: overs, maidens, runs, wickets, often written like 24-6-58-3. That is 24 overs bowled, 6 of them maidens (an over with no runs off the bat), 58 runs conceded, and 3 wickets taken. Divide runs by overs and you get the economy rate, how expensive they were; runs per wicket is their average for the innings. A strike rate, for bowlers, is balls per wicket. The best spells are cheap and penetrative at once: plenty of overs, few runs, several wickets.
Extras
Runs the batting side scores without a batter hitting them are grouped as extras. Wides (wd) and no-balls (nb) are the bowler's fault and cost the fielding side a run plus, usually, another ball. Byes (b) are runs taken when the ball beats everyone including the keeper; leg-byes (lb) come off the batter's body, not the bat. Extras count toward the team total but not toward any batter's score.
Fall of wickets, and the total
The fall-of-wickets line shows the team score at which each wicket went down, so you can see whether the innings was a steady accumulation or a collapse: 1-15, 2-18, 3-24 means three wickets fell for almost nothing. The team total is written as runs for wickets, so 237 all out or 237/9 declared. In the longer game a captain can declare, ending the innings voluntarily to give themselves time to bowl the other side out. The result line at the top, like "won by 45 runs" or "won by six wickets", tells you the margin: by runs if the side batting first defended its total, by wickets if the side batting second chased it down.
Every way a match can end
The result line has more forms than "won by runs" and "won by wickets". Won by an innings and 50 runs means the winning side batted once and still scored 50 more than the losers managed in two innings, which usually follows a follow-on. A draw is a Test that runs out of time with neither side winning; a tie is a finished match with the scores exactly level, which has happened only twice in Test cricket. In limited-overs cricket a no result means too little play was possible for a result, and DLS after a margin means rain shortened the match and the target was revised with the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method.
A worked example: the 2019 World Cup final
The scorecard of the 2019 final shows how much a card can tell you. New Zealand's innings reads 241 for 8, with 30 extras. The fall-of-wickets line, 1-29, 2-103, 3-118, 4-141, shows a steady innings with no big partnership after the second wicket. England's bowling figures show where the pressure came from: Liam Plunkett 10-0-42-3 and Chris Woakes 9-0-37-3.
England's reply tells a different story. Their fall of wickets reads 1-28, 2-59, 3-71, 4-86, then jumps to 5-196: Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler added 110 for the fifth wicket. After that come six wickets for 45, and the last two batters are both run out, going for second runs in the final over. Stokes finished 84 not out from 98 balls, and England finished 241 all out, level with New Zealand. The result line, "Match tied (England won on boundary count)", tells you the rest. Every part of the story is on the card.
See it on a real card
The batting and bowling shorthand above is used on every scorecard in CricArcade's Test archive, which holds every men's Test since 1877, and its ODI archive. Read a couple with this guide open and the shorthand becomes second nature, then take on an innings yourself in The Follow-On.