Scoring (cricket) facts for kids

Scoring in cricket is a way of showing how well each team did during the game; it shows which team had more runs (points), as well as sometimes showing how well each of their players did during the game.

Winning scores

A game of cricket is won by the team with more runs at the end of the game, so long as the team with fewer runs has completed all of its innings. In games of cricket with time limits, there can be a "draw" result, which means no team wins if not enough innings are completed on time (the follow-on is one way that teams try to stop this from happening). When a game of cricket is played with multiple innings per team, the winning team can sometimes win while batting fewer times than its opponent; how many fewer times they batted is sometimes shown in their score.

Although a team's victory is based only on runs and innings (and sometimes the time limit of the game), team scores can also show, sometimes during different innings, the number of wickets lost by (batters who are out on) a team, as well as the number of balls/deliveries (which can also be shown as overs) batted by the team. These last two things can be useful to know because in most forms of cricket, a team's innings will almost always end either when almost all players on the team are out, or in games of cricket where each team had limits on the number of legal deliveries that could be bowled to them, they have batted a certain number of legal deliveries.

Images for kids

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  An example of a scorecard

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  Cricket Scorers' wides notation

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  No-Balls

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  The scoreboard at the Adelaide Oval.