Leg spin is a type of spin bowling in cricket. A leg spinner bowls right-arm with a wrist spin action. The leg spinner's normal delivery causes the ball to spin from right to left when the ball bounces on the pitch. For a right-handed batter, that is away from the leg side, and this is where it gets the name leg break.
Deshabandu Muttiah Muralitharan is a Sri Lankan cricket coach, businessman and former professional cricketer. Averaging over six wickets per Test match, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport. He is the only bowler to take 800 Test wickets and more than 530 One Day International (ODI) wickets. As of 2024, he has taken more wickets in international cricket than any other bowler. Muralitharan was a part of the Sri Lankan team that won the 1996 Cricket World Cup.
Off spin is a type of finger spin bowling in cricket. A bowler who uses this technique is called an off spinner. Off spinners are right-handed spin bowlers who use their fingers to spin the ball. Their normal delivery is an off break, which spins from left to right when the ball bounces on the pitch. For a right-handed batsman, this is from his off side to the leg side. The ball breaks away from the off side, hence the name 'off break'.
Bowling, in cricket, is the action of propelling the ball toward the wicket defended by a batter. A player skilled at bowling is called a bowler; a bowler who is also a competent batter is known as an all-rounder. Bowling the ball is distinguished from throwing the ball by a strictly specified biomechanical definition, which restricts the angle of extension of the elbow. A single act of bowling the ball towards the batsman is called a ball or a delivery. Bowlers bowl deliveries in sets of six, called an over. Once a bowler has bowled an over, a teammate will bowl an over from the other end of the pitch. The Laws of Cricket govern how a ball must be bowled. If a ball is bowled illegally, an umpire will rule it a no-ball. If a ball is bowled too wide of the striker for the batsman to be able to play at it with a proper cricket shot, the bowler's end umpire will rule it a wide.
A topspinner is a type of delivery bowled by a cricketer bowling either wrist spin or finger spin. In either case, the bowler imparts the ball with top spin by twisting it with his or her fingers prior to delivery. In both cases, the topspinner is the halfway house between the stock delivery and the wrong'un - in the wrist spinner's case his googly, and in the finger spinner's case his doosra.
Underarm bowling is a style of bowling in cricket. The style is as old as the sport itself. Until the introduction of the roundarm style in the first half of the 19th century, bowling was performed in the same way as in the sport of bowls, with the ball being delivered with the hand below the waist. Bowls may well be an older game than cricket and it is possible that it provided a template for delivering a ball with a degree of accuracy.
The Laws of Cricket is a code that specifies the rules of the game of cricket worldwide. The earliest known code was drafted in 1744. Since 1788, the code has been owned and maintained by the private Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in Lord's Cricket Ground, London. There are currently 42 Laws, which describe all aspects of how the game is to be played. MCC has re-coded the Laws six times, each with interim revisions that produce more than one edition. The most recent code, the seventh, was released in October 2017; its 3rd edition came into force on 1 October 2022.
In the game of cricket, the cricket pitch consists of the central strip of the cricket field between the wickets. It is 22 yd (20.12 m) long and 10 ft (3.05 m) wide. The surface is flat and is normally covered with extremely short grass, but can be completely dry or dusty soil with barely any grass or, in some circumstances, made from an artificial material. Over the course of a cricket match, the pitch is not repaired or altered other than in special circumstances - meaning that it will change condition. Any grass on the pitch in the game's first over, for example, may have disappeared by twentieth over due to wear.
This is a general glossary of the terminology used in the sport of cricket. Where words in a sentence are also defined elsewhere in this article, they appear in italics. Certain aspects of cricket terminology are explained in more detail in cricket statistics and the naming of fielding positions is explained at fielding (cricket).
In cricket, an over consists of six legal deliveries bowled from one end of a cricket pitch to the player batting at the other end, almost always by a single bowler.
In cricket, a no-ball is a type of illegal delivery to a batter. It is also a type of extra, being the run awarded to the batting team as a consequence of the illegal delivery. For most cricket games, especially amateur, the definition of all forms of no-ball is from the MCC Laws of Cricket.
A doosra is a particular type of delivery by an off-spin bowler in cricket. The doosra spins in the opposite direction to an off break, and aims to confuse the batter into playing an unavoidable shot.
In the sport of cricket, the crease is a certain area demarcated by white lines painted or chalked on the field of play, and pursuant to the rules of cricket they help determine legal play in different ways for the fielding and batting side. They define the area within which the batsmen and bowlers operate. The term crease may refer to any of the lines themselves, particularly the popping crease, or to the region that they demark. Law 7 of the Laws of Cricket governs the size and position of the crease markings, and defines the actual line as the back edge of the width of the marked line on the soil, i.e., the edge nearest to the wicket at that end.
In cricket, a dismissal occurs when a batter's innings is brought to an end by the opposing team. Other terms used are the batter being out, the batting side losing a wicket, and the fielding side taking a wicket. The ball becomes dead, and the dismissed batter must leave the field of play for the rest of their team's innings, to be replaced by a team-mate. A team's innings ends if ten of the eleven team members are dismissed. Players bat in pairs so, when only one batter remains who can be not out, it is not possible for the team to bat any longer. This is known as dismissing or bowling out the batting team, who are said to be all out.
In cricket, a run is the unit of scoring. The team with the most runs wins in many versions of the game, and always draws at worst, except for some results decided by the DLS method, which is used in rain-shortened limited-overs games when the two teams have had a different number of opportunities to score runs.
In the sport of cricket there are two broad categories of bowlers: pace and spin. Pace bowlers rely mostly on the speed of the ball to dismiss batsmen, whereas spin bowlers rely on the rotation and turn off the ball to deceive the batter.
Run out is a method of dismissal in cricket, governed by Law 38 of the laws of cricket. A run out usually occurs when the batters are attempting to run between the wickets, and the fielding team succeed in getting the ball to one of the wickets before a batter has crossed the crease line near the wicket. If the batter is judged run out, the run does not count and the bowler does not get credit for the wicket.
Stumped is a method of dismissing a batter in cricket, in which the wicket-keeper puts down the striker's wicket while the striker is out of their ground. It is governed by Law 39 of the Laws of Cricket.
Throwing, commonly referred to as chucking, is an illegal bowling action in the sport of cricket. This occurs when a bowler straightens the bowling arm when delivering the ball. Throws are not allowed when a bowler bowls to a batsman. If the umpire deems that the ball has been thrown, they will call a no-ball, which means the batsman cannot be given out from that delivery.
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game that is played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a 22-yard (20-metre) pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. Two players from the batting team stand in front of either wicket holding bats, with one player from the fielding team bowling the ball towards the striker's wicket from the opposite end of the pitch. The striker's goal is to hit the bowled ball with the bat and then switch places with the nonstriker, with the batting team scoring one run for each exchange. Runs are also scored when the ball reaches or crosses the boundary of the field or when the ball is bowled illegally.
