How to play cricket

The easiest way to understand cricket is to start playing it, or watching a game with someone who can explain it. There are lots of different variations to the traditional game that makes it easy to play almost anywhere.

In its traditional form, cricket is played between two teams, normally with 11 players a side. One team will elect to bat, the other fields and bowls. The batting team aims to score as many ‘runs’ as possible by batting in pairs.

Batters try to hit a ball that is 'bowled’ toward them from a set distance along a ‘pitch’. A run is scored when a batter safely completes the distance running from one end of the pitch to the other. A batter can make a score without running, by hitting a ball over the ‘boundary’ of the field of play, which counts for 4 or 6 runs, depending on whether it bounces before clearing the boundary.

The team can also accumulate runs from bowlers’ and fielder’s mistakes, such as a ‘no ball’ where the bowler is too close to the batter when they bowl, or a ‘wide’ when the ball is too far away from the batter, making it too hard to hit.

The aim of the fielding side is to get the batters ‘out’ by taking ‘wickets’ or restricting the number of runs scored.

Once the ‘innings’ is completed the teams switch between batting and fielding. The innings is completed when the batting team is all ‘out’ or all ‘overs’ have been bowled.