Learning how scoring works in Cricket
I used to play cricket at lunchtime in primary school but I never knew how to score properly.
Today I saw an update of the Test match between Australia and India and didn’t know what it meant so it was time for me to look into it.
From primary school, I knew that you wanted to score runs, and that you got runs when you ran from one end of the pitch to the other end without getting wicketed.
I also knew that you could score runs by hitting the ball out of the field - 4 runs for along the ground and 6 for going out of bounds ‘on the full’.
I knew an over was 6 balls, but didn’t know that it was denoted by “122.4”, meaning that it 122 overs + 4 more balls had been played (i.e. they are 4/6th of their way through the current over).
I also learnt about strike rate (SR): it’s the number of runs a batter makes in 100 balls.
In test cricket, an SR of 30-60 is considered good because it’s more about staying in than scoring big. In other cricket formats where the number of overs is limited, the SR should be higher to be considered good.
Though even after taking this into account, it seems Australia is doing better than India.
- Australia scored 474 / 122.66 = 3.86 runs per over
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India is scoring 199 / 57 = 3.49 runs per over
- Australia averaged 474 / 10 = 47.4 runs per batter
- India is averaging 199 / 6 = 33.17 runs per batter
At their current rate, India will finish their first innings with 332 runs and Australia will be ahead.
But also their current batter has a pretty good strike rate (based on 1 over) so who knows - maybe he can pull it back.
That’s all from me for now.
Thanks for tuning in.