We’ll get them in signals: A history of cricket scoring

It started with a stick. The scorers sat at midwicket, scratching – scoring – a groove for every run. There was no scoreboard: when the chasing team needed one to win, the notchers, as they were called, informed the players. A translation of a 1706 poem written in Latin by William Goldwin describes the scene:

On a low mount, whence clear the view,
Repose a trusty pair and true:
Their simple task, with ready blade,
Notches to cut, as runs are made.

A painting at Lord’s, The Game of Cricket as Played in the Artillery Ground, London 1743, portrays a notcher at work. Kent’s archive includes a stick, a rare survivor. It cannot be much younger than 1769, when paper is first known to have replaced stick for the Duke of Dorset’s XI against Wrotham. The sheet, held by the county council, records another first: John Minshull’s 107, the earliest documented century. It contained four fours – all run, in those days.

In 1773, T Pratt, a Sevenoaks printer who was also scorer at The Vine CC, had the idea of producing souvenir scorecards. After England beat aHambledon side (now regarded as Hampshire) by an innings on June 29, he sold an attractive print, adorned with an engraving of the match. He continued his enterprise for another 15 years or so – but still notched a stick during the game itself. In July 1783, Pratt was scoring for Kent when they were involved in first-class cricket’s first tie, against Hampshire. Soon after, the story goes, he found he had inadvertently lengthened an 11th notch, rather than a tenth, when Kent were batting. Realising Kent might have won, Pratt asked the Hampshire scorer to check his stick – but was met with a curt refusal.

For nearly 150 years, the score was not displayed: word of mouth sufficed. It was not until 1846 that a scoreboard first appeared, at Lord’s. Two years later, for a game between MCC and Sussex, Fred Lillywhite turned up with a portable printing press: spectators could buy a scorecard, updated to the fall of the last wicket. The press soon travelled to The Oval and Hove; in 1859, it even went to North America, with George Parr’s England team. It was pushed to its limits in upstate New York, when John Wisden took 29 wickets for 62 in a two-innings game against a USA and Canada XXII. Parr was pushed to his limits too. The printing machinery was so cumbersome it caused delays of up to three days, and by New York, he had had enough. According to one report, Parr “in plain language consigned both Lillywhite and his contraption to an unmentionable place”.

The first known ready-printed scoring sheet was sold at H Farley’s Toy and Fancy Repository, and City Conjuring Depot, at 31 Fleet Street, London, in July 1843. The next April, cricket outfitters M Dark & Sons of Lord’s produced their own; JT Nightingale of Shrewsbury followed suit in 1845. One of theirs, used by Montgomery CC in Wales in 1851, is the oldest completed example.

That year, Lillywhite unveiled his next innovation: the scorebook. Bell’s Life reviewed it with awe: “It is well got up, and ruled so as to render every information that may be required after a match is over. The scoring book, we opine, will have a large sale.” It started a vogue. Within a month, Thomas Mellard of Stourbridge had rushed out his own version, and The Era was awed in turn: “His scoring book is perfectly unique. It is so ruled that the result of every ball is clearly shown. The value of such a book is obvious. Existing modes of constructing averages are worse than useless, but by this plan no mistake can arise.”

If only that had been true. Lillywhite’s scorebooks, soon adopted in county cricket, required runs to be marked against the batter in one table, and against the bowler in another – and the two had to agree. Charles Box, who laid out meticulous instructions in his 1877 book The English Game of Cricket, emphasised the importance of concentration: a lapse in attention, and the sums wouldn’t work. But the Box method is still the norm at clubs everywhere – and so are lapses and unworkable sums.

The first suggestion of an alternative came in August 1876. Minutes after Middlesex beat Surrey by one run at The Oval, Surrey secretary Charles Alcock told the umpires the scorers had missed a run. To prove it, he produced his own sheet – a matrix requiring only one entry per ball, not two. The official scorebooks were checked, and the result changed to a tie. Alcock was not alone in discovering the merits of a matrix.

In 1893, John Atkinson Pendlington, a businessman from Tyneside, was reading his Wisden when he became convinced of the need for a single-entry scoring method. He had it ready by September, when he recorded every ball of CI Thornton’s XI against the Australians at Scarborough – then presented his sheet to WG Grace.

Eleven years later, Bill Ferguson, a directory clerk from Sydney, asked his dentist – Australia batsman Monty Noble – if he could wangle him a place on the 1905 Ashes tour as the team’s baggage-handler and scorer. Ferguson had never scored before, and was astonished to be appointed: he started at £2 a week, and did the job for various Test sides for half a century. He soon developed his own matrix – columns for batters, rows for bowlers – which became known as the linear method. He also invented the wagon wheel, and scored all Don Bradman’s 6,996 Test runs. Since linear scoring eliminated the problem of unequal batting and bowling tallies, it was strange that no county adopted it until Surrey in 1971, especially since it was, by then, widely used for radio and television coverage.

The BBC first employed a scorer in 1934, prompted by a difficult broadcast at the Lord’s Ashes Test. As Hedley Verity bowled England to victory, Howard Marshall tied himself in knots attempting ball-by-ball radio updates without a scorer. He insisted on one for the next game, at Old Trafford, and signed up a trainee accountant from the Lancashire groundstaff named Arthur Wrigley, who worked on Test Match Special until his early death in 1965. Finding a successor was tricky. Wrigley’s deputy, Jack Price, had predeceased him, while Michael Fordham and Arnold Whipp, who scored for radio broadcasts of county games, declined to quit their day jobs. Then the BBC received a letter from a young insurance inspector, fresh out of national service.

Bill Frindall is the only scorer to have become a household name. He finessed Ferguson’s linear method and, from 1975, published a series of books containing his scoresheets. He was a prolific statistician for Wisden, and editor of the Playfair Cricket Annual. “It was Bill who really showed me the importance of records,” says the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew. “He, more than anyone, made scoring interesting.” Frindall was an exacting man. “If Bill didn’t like you, you knew about it. He certainly didn’t like it when Henry Blofeld got the players’ names wrong.”

Peter Baxter, who produced TMS for 25 years, says: “In a way, I think Bill reckoned we were all working for him. He was the one constant. He was there when I joined, and he was there when I retired.” But Baxter rarely took Frindall on winter tours. “I never had a big enough budget – and, if I had, I’d have taken an engineer!”

Andrew Samson, who first scored for the BBC on the 2010/11 Ashes tour, was no less a statistician, but showed a lighter side, as Agnew recounts: “The best prank TMS ever pulled was at The Oval in 2017. Geoffrey Boycott was going on and on about the 40th anniversary of his 100th hundred, and I was desperate to shut him up. I gave Andrew about ten minutes to come up with something.” Samson suggested an ICC press release, stripping one Boycott century of first-class status. Boycott was incredulous. The wind-up went viral.

In 2020, with Samson unable to leave his home in South Africa because of the pandemic, Adam Mountford – Baxter’s successor – offered the Tests to cricket-mad comedian Andy Zaltzman. “Before he brought me in, I hadn’t scored a match since school, and I’d never done linear,” he says. “Plus my handwriting is terrible. But I had a look at some Frindall sheets, and adapted them. And as long as I can read my scores, I can say something useful.” In fact, armed with an array of online databases, Zaltzman can answer almost anything. Frindall carried round a library of books, and never used the internet. “The kind of questions they throw at Zaltzman these days…” says Baxter. “If they had asked Bill, he would have been furious.”

BBC Television’s scoring dynasty began with Roy Webber, whose beautiful handwritten scorecards accompanied their 1950s broadcasts. He suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 48, in 1962. Frindall half-believed there was a curse among Test match scorers: Wrigley, Price and Webber had all died suddenly; Fordham, who married Webber’s widow, also had a heart attack, lifting her luggage out of a taxi in Miami; Whipp was washed off a rock while birdwatching in the Dee Estuary; and Frindall himself died, in 2009, soon after contracting Legionnaires’ disease in Dubai. Irving Rosenwater eventually succeeded Webber, but defected to Packer’s World Series Cricket in 1977, and was replaced by Wendy Wimbush, surely the only scorer to have been immortalised in music: the 1991 Half Man Half Biscuit song “Christian Rock Concert” contains the lyric “Wendy Wimbush on a spacehopper was drunk in the tented village”. From 1989, BBC TV used Malcolm Ashton who, in the mid-1990s, found himself the unwitting centre of a scorers’ controversy: who should be selected for England?

When England scorer Clem Driver was hospitalised on the tour of India in 1992/93 (another heart attack), Alec Stewart approached captain Graham Gooch: “Dermot Reeve’s mum knows how to score.” “What, properly?” Monica Reeve had been to every one of her son’s England games, and travelled to India on a shoestring. “It was a dream come true for her,” says Dermot. “She was brought into the team hotel. Everything she’d booked was upgraded. She even ended up sitting in on team meetings. I was afraid she’d make some crucial mistake, but she ended up having a much more successful tour than me.”

Who, though, would accompany England in future? For the next two winters, it was Alex Davis of Warwickshire. But, from the 1995/96 tour of South Africa onwards, England manager Ray Illingworth wanted Ashton, a former BBC colleague. Ted Lester, chairman of the scorers’ association, called it “a gross and inexcusable slur on county scorers”. Surrey’s Keith Booth accused the ECB of “running roughshod over us”. In 1997, Lester and Booth proposed a strike, for August 31. Not every scorer was in favour. Vic Isaacs of Hampshire said he would resign if it was approved. At Yorkshire, John Potter was phlegmatic: “Keith was very upset. But I’d never have done it.” The strike never happened, which was just as well, since most games were washed out, and the death of Princess Diana occupied every column inch. Ashton stayed with the England team until 2004, helping them evolve the role from scorer to analyst.

In 1984, in order to fix a problem with the Headingley scoreboard, Dr Jim Briggs had developed the first cricket scoring program; seven years on, a variation was installed in all county scoreboxes. When its backers withdrew, the then Test and County Cricket Board poured £140,000 into developing new software – Cricket Record – rolled out in 1993.

Booth and his colleagues soon realised it was full of bugs. Batsmen were assumed to lose their wickets in the order they had come in, run-outs were credited to the bowler, and 128 overs were added to the bowling statistics every time a wide was entered. In Wisden 1994, Frindall wrote: “I could fill several pages with quotes from scorers’ correspondence, to illustrate the frustration and despair they suffered. The friendly atmosphere of the scorebox, with its rich banter, was totally destroyed.” But Potter, the longest serving of the current scorers, feels this was a case of mountains and molehills: “When I started at Yorkshire in 1988, I’d never used a computer. But it wasn’t hard to fix the errors as you went along.”

Scoring on a computer and linear sheets, while identifying and rectifying mistakes, requires phenomenal powers of concentration – and a few aides-memoires. Frindall reckoned his national service stint in the NATO war room at Fontainebleu taught him self-discipline. Byron Denning, Glamorgan’s scorer from 1983 to 2001, was struck by how “fourth ball” rhymes with “Porthcawl”, and associated each delivery in an over with a town in South Wales, running east to west: Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend, Porthcawl, Neath, Swansea. A seventh ball, if an umpire miscounted, was Llanelli. One of Denning’s successors, Andrew Hignell, takes his mind for a wander between deliveries, “like Mike Brearley used to switch off, hum, and walk to square leg when he was batting”.

A creative hobby has helped many a mind rest. Jack Mercer, a Northamptonshire scorer of the 1960s and 1970s, was a member of the Magic Circle, and entertained the press box with conjuring tricks during breaks in play. Polly Rhodes, who when she retired from the Somerset scorebox in 2025 was one of five female county scorers, would settle down for an evening’s needlework. “Like scoring, it’s a bit like creating order out of chaos,” she says. Home and work life eventually converged. One of a county scorer’s jobs is to look after the team flag, making sure it is flown at away games. When Somerset’s became threadbare, Rhodes sewed a new one. “It was about 90 hours’ work. Of course, when other counties saw it, they asked me to do theirs. I said no!”

One of the complaints of modern scorers is the lack of recognition. “We are at the end of the food chain,” says Mel Smith, chair of the Association of Scorers in Professional Cricket. “The Laws of Cricket make it clear we’re just as crucial as the umpires. We’re a team. But at international matches we’re not allowed to communicate with the on-field umpires at all. We’re not even trusted to calculate DLS targets in county games. The ECB insist on someone else doing it. That’s their only job.” And scorers never appear on official scorecards, even though, from newspapers to the internet, the umpires and match referee are routinely named. “We never get invited to the post-game presentations,” adds Smith. “They don’t even read out our names. In 2014, at the end of Blast finals day, I went down to the podium and stood in line. All four umpires were awarded a medal. I received an ECB biro.”

Then there are the minutiae, the tiny changes to scoring itself. None is universally welcomed. For more than a century, the bowling analysis was inviolable by extras: the only permissible entries were dots and runs. From 1983, wides and no-balls counted against the bowler and, in 2000, byes and leg-byes changed from dots to triangles. “That was very controversial,” says Sue Drinkwater, the ECB’s scorer education manager. “It still is. A lot of scorers were writing Bs and Ls, and they didn’t like being told there was a new way to do it. They thought triangles were meaningless.” There is a meaning, however: a triangle pointing up denotes the umpire’s hand raised for a bye, and pointing down denotes hand touching leg for a leg-bye.

In the 2020s, the ECB set a target of 55 per cent of club matches to be electronically scored, ideally using their proprietary software, Play Cricket Scorer. In 2025, the actual number was 75 per cent – truly a digital revolution. But this doesn’t mean the end of the handwritten triangles. “One day, the power will go off, and the computers will go down,” says Hignell. “We’ll all have our sheets. We won’t miss a ball.”

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