Cricket is a sport that can seem entirely incomprehensible to a newcomer. Even before you start talking about googlies, silly mid-offs and Nelsons, even some of the ways that cricket works in general can be tough to get your head around. Why does the bowler change end between each over? What are the massive big screens at either end of the ground? How come the umpire looks like he’s in Saturday Night Fever depending on what the batsman did? Also, why is it that there are six balls per over and has it always been so?
When Cricket First Began
It is difficult to put an exact date to when cricket first began being played. What we do know is that there was a definitive reference to it in the mid-16th century as a sport in the South-East of England. As the British Empire grew, cricket began to be spread around the world, leading to the first international matches in the second-half of the 19th century. The first time that an over was recorded, it lasted for four balls. Four balls remained the go-to for bowlers to bowl and batsmen to face until 1889, which was the point at which it changed.
You might imagine that a move to six balls came into being at that point, but that is not the case. Instead, 1889 saw a change to five balls being bowled, with the experiment with six balls not coming until a year later. Even then it wasn’t the norm. There was no recorded reason for the decision to move from four balls to five, nor from five balls to six. That might help to explain the fact that cricket wasn’t done with experimenting with how many balls were in an over and that six balls wouldn’t become standard across the sport for 80 years.
The Eight-Ball Over
In spite of the fact that the first reference to cricket can be dated back to 1598, it was considered to be a child’s game for much of its existence. As a result, it is perhaps not all that surprising that the game that we know and love today took a long time to be finalised as far as its rules were concerned. Although English cricket introduced six-ball overs in 1900, it still wasn’t locked in place as the way things worked at that point. In the 1922-1923 season, Australian cricket played eight-ball overs, with New Zealand following suit two years later.
Dramatic eight-ball over by Chris Green in his BBL centennial ends with the Sixers winning with a single on the final ball of the game.
— Rick Eyre on cricket (@rickeyrecricket.com) 21 December 2024 at 11:38
In 1939, England decided to trial the eight-ball over for two years, only for the outbreak of the Second World War to mean that the experiment reached a premature conclusion. South Africa played eight-ball overs from 1938 to 1958, whilst Pakistan did so between 1974 and 1978. New Zealand chopped and changed several times, not reverting to the six-ball over until the rest of the world did. Although it might seem utterly ludicrous to have to face eight balls nowadays, it wasn’t seen as such for a long time in numerous parts of the world.
Why Did it Move to Eight-Ball Overs?
The entire point of cricket as a sport is that it is supposed to be entertaining. As a result, it was felt in some quarters that the shortness of four-ball overs meant too many over changes during the course of a day, which was less entertaining for the watching audience. This resulted in the move to five-ball overs, but this was also not long enough. It also didn’t allow a bowler to get into any sort of rhythm as they plotted a dismissal. As a result, the decision to move to a six-ball over came in, before eight balls became a thing.
154 overs isn’t, however, the *longest* innings to feature only four bowlers. Alec Bedser, John Warr, Freddie Brown and Denis Compton sent down 129 eight ball overs (equivalent to 172 six ball overs) vs Australia at Adelaide 1950-51 – and Compton only bowled 6 of them!…
— Association of Cricket Statisticians & Historians (@ACScricket) January 30, 2025
In Australia, the thinking behind the move to the eight-ball over was that it would get more balls bowled in a day’s worth of play, given the bowling of eight balls meant fewer changes of end. Part of the reason why eight-ball overs were eventually abandoned, however, was that they would wear bowlers out. As the day wore on they would slow down towards the end of an over for fear of picking up and injury or simply running out of steam. In the end, therefore, it was the entertainment of the sport that meant none of four, five or eight-ball overs worked.
Settling on Six-Ball Overs
As mentioned, there is no officially recorded reason for the move to six-ball overs after the end of the 1978-1979 season. What we do know, though, is that the International Cricket Council initially suggested that either six or eight-ball overs were allowed depending on the conditions of play that were available in the host country. Then, for the 1979-1980 season, the ICC confirmed that six-ball overs would become the standard and that has remained the case ever since; at least as far as Test cricket is concerned, with other variations available.
@about.sports7 Do you know why cricket uses six-ball overs? #foryou #fyp#sports#facts#motivation#viral#foryoupage ♬ الصوت الأصلي – About Sports
It is likely that the six-ball over was seen as a happy balance, with five considered to be too few and eight too many. Presumably whoever decided against trialling seven balls was the sort of person that can’t cope with turning the TV volume up to 19 instead of 20. Regardless of the rationale, cricket has, for the most part, seen six-ball overs in place ever since the 1979-1980 season and is unlikely to change again any time soon. Not that the variations on the over-theme haven’t presented us with some interesting stats over the years.
If you want to understand Bazball, this six overs leading up to the new ball is it in a nutshell. Old convention would be to use the six overs to play yourself in before the new ball. Bazball says that the old ball is easier to face so try to make hay. Hence Stokes going hard.
— Daniel Norcross (@norcrosscricket.bsky.social) 29 November 2024 at 22:16
In 1957, for example, Hugh Tayfield bowled 137 dot balls in a row, meaning that the batsman didn’t manage to gain a run for any of the balls that Tayfield sent his way. In spite of this remarkable feat, the fact that it was achieved in the era of eight-ball overs meant that he only held the record for the most successive maidens for a short period. It last for around 17 overs, which was overtaken by Bapu Nadkarni in 1964 who bowled 21 six-ball maidens in a row in a Test that took place in Madras, which was fewer balls but more overs.
