The best way to explain cricket scoring to a beginner is to answer the questions they are already asking, in the order they think of them. This piece is that — a Q&A written for someone who has just been asked to score their kid's academy match on Sunday and has never done it before.
The examples reference ForthUmpire, but the answers hold for any live scoring app or a paper book. Read once now; refer back during the match if you have a wobble.
Q: What am I actually doing when I score?
You are recording every legal delivery that gets bowled, plus every illegal one, plus every wicket. That is the whole job. Everything else — the batting averages, the run rate, the fall-of-wickets list, the winning margin — is arithmetic the app or the paper book does for you. The scorer is the person who feeds accurate events in.
Think of it as taking a photo of the match, one ball at a time. Two hundred photos, in order, and you have the whole innings.
Q: Do I need anything special?
A phone with a browser and a charged battery. That is it. If you are worried about the battery lasting a whole match, bring a small power pack; a full innings' worth of scoring costs about fifteen percent of a modern phone. There is no login, no download, no waiting for anything to install — you open the browser, go to the app, tap Quick Match and you are scoring.
If you would rather score from your phone as a dedicated app, ForthUmpire's iOS app is on the App Store and the Android version is coming to Play Store shortly. The web version has feature parity, though, so most beginners just start from the browser.
Q: The bowler is about to bowl — what do I do?
Watch the ball, not the phone. Your thumb should be hovering over the run-count row. Once the ball is played (or the umpire signals), tap what happened. If it was a normal delivery and the batters ran two, tap 2. If it was a dot, tap 0. That is the whole cycle for a legal ball.
Q: The umpire signalled something — what do the signals mean?
The five signals you will see all afternoon:
- Arms wide out to the side, held there — that is a wide. Tap wide.
- One arm out at shoulder height — that is a no-ball. Tap no-ball, then any runs the batters made.
- One arm straight up above the head — that is a bye. Ball missed the bat and the keeper. Tap byes, then the count.
- Tap on a raised knee — that is a leg-bye. Ball touched the pad, batters ran. Tap leg-byes.
- Finger up — that is out. Tap the wicket dialog.
Boundaries have their own signals — one arm swept across the chest at waist height is a four; both arms above the head is a six. You will pick these up in the first over.
Q: What if I miss a ball?
Do not guess. Wait for the end of the over and ask the umpire what happened on ball three; they will know. Between the umpire and the striker, the two of them can rebuild any single delivery you were slow on. In the app, when you know what should have been recorded, use the undo gesture to walk back to the missed ball and insert the correct event.
What you must not do is tap something wrong on purpose to "hold the place." A wrong entry ripples — the striker's card, the bowler's economy, the run rate all go slightly off. Ask, catch up, move on.
Q: A wicket has fallen — what do I record?
Tap the wicket-fell button. The app opens a small dialog with three questions:
- Which batter is out — striker or non-striker (mostly striker, occasionally the non-striker on a run out).
- How were they out — bowled, caught, LBW, run out, stumped, hit wicket, or one of the less-common modes.
- Who took the wicket — bowler, fielder, or both in the case of a catch.
Answer the three, and the app builds the fall-of-wickets line for you. The incoming batter's name goes in on the next screen; nothing further is required from you until the next ball is bowled.
Q: How do I know when the innings is over?
Two ways. Either the last legal ball of the last over has been bowled — in which case the app closes the innings automatically when you tap that ball — or the tenth wicket has fallen, in which case the wicket dialog closes the innings after you confirm the tenth batter is out. In a limited-overs match, the second innings' target appears the moment the first innings closes; you do not have to calculate it.
Q: My phone died mid-match — is the score gone?
No. Every ball you tapped up to the crash is saved on the server. Charge the phone, open the app, and the match is exactly where you left it. If a friend has your live link open, they can even hand you their phone during the outage and you can score from theirs on the same match — it is a shared record, not a device-local file.
This is the one reason most club scorers switched from paper. A soaked paper book loses the match; a dead phone loses the next thirty seconds.
Q: How do people at home watch?
Send them the live link. At the top of the scoring screen there is a share icon; it copies the match link to your clipboard. Paste it into a WhatsApp group, an email, or a text message. Anyone with the link sees the scoreboard as it updates. Grandparents in another country, siblings at university, the parent who could not skip work — they are all in the same virtual seat as long as the link is open.
Do this at the toss, not after the first over. The people who care will refresh the link between every ball; the sooner they have it, the more of the innings they see.
Q: Can two of us score together?
The elegant version is one person on the phone, one person on a paper backup. They meet at innings break, compare notes, resolve any differences. The paper backup is your insurance against a phone problem, and the phone is your insurance against a paper problem — either can rescue the other. If both agree, the match's book is trustworthy.
Two people on two phones on the same match is possible in principle but rarely worth it — the second person almost always ends up watching, not scoring, and the taps race each other.
Q: What happens after the last ball?
Tap End Match when the app prompts. The final scorecard writes itself — runs, wickets, batter cards, bowling figures, extras, result — and the share link stays live forever. If a captain asks for the scorecard the next morning, you send the same URL you sent at the toss. Nothing to email, nothing to file.
The mindset shift after your third match
The first match, you will feel like a passenger. The second, you will feel like you are keeping up. By the third, you will feel like you have an opinion about the game — the run rate looked a bit low that innings, the bowler dragged their second spell on too long, the number four does not walk out fast enough between wickets. That is the moment you stop being a beginner and become the scorer the captain trusts.
If you would like to try scoring before Sunday, start a Quick Match against yourself on the sofa. Imagine two teams, invent an over, and score it. Twenty minutes and you will not be nervous when the real bowler runs in on the weekend.