Types of Cricket Shots Explained: Pick the Shot From the Ball

Every guide you will find with the types of cricket shots explained is organised the same way: front foot shots, back foot shots, unorthodox shots, twenty-five names in a row. That order is useless at the moment you need it. Standing at the crease you do not think "I would like to play a square drive now." The ball arrives, it pitches somewhere, and that pitching point tells you which shot is available. One choice, made in about half a second.

So this guide runs the other way round. Length first, shot second.

The short answer

Cricket shots are named by which foot you move onto and which side of the pitch you hit to. Fuller deliveries are met on the front foot with drives, sweeps and defensive pushes. Shorter deliveries are met on the back foot with cuts, pulls and hooks. There are roughly two dozen named shots in cricket, but six of them answer most balls you will ever face: the forward defence, the straight drive, the cover drive, the flick, the cut and the pull.

Length is the question the shot answers

Length means how far down the pitch the ball bounces. Line means how wide of the stumps it is heading. Length picks your feet, line picks your direction. Get those two in the right order and shot selection stops being guesswork.

There are five lengths worth naming, from the batter's toes outward:

Yorker. Pitches right at your feet or just under the bat.
Full toss or overpitched. Lands well up the pitch, close enough to reach comfortably on the front foot.
Good length. Lands in the awkward zone where you are not sure whether to come forward or go back. This is why it is called a good length.
Back of a length. Slightly short, comes through around waist height.
Short. Bounces halfway down and arrives at chest or head height.

Every shot below is a response to one of those five.

Types of cricket shots explained by the ball that invites them

Yorker: dig it out or get out of the way

The only shots on offer are the jam, which is bat straight down behind the ball, and the flick off the toes if the line is leg side. Nothing scores well here, and that is the point of the delivery. A yorker is survived, not hit. If you want the bowling side of this, the blog has a separate piece on how yorkers are actually bowled.

Full and reachable: the drive family

This is the free ball, and the whole drive family lives here. The name changes with the direction you send it.

Straight drive. Back past the bowler. Safest scoring shot in cricket because the bat face and the ball are travelling in the same line.
Off drive and cover drive. Off side of the wicket, cover drive wider and squarer. The cover drive is the famous one and it is riskier than it looks, because the bat is coming across the ball's line.
On drive. Leg side and straight, played to a ball that is full and angled into your pads. Awkward shot, badly underrated.
Square drive. Very wide and very full, hit almost at right angles.
Lofted drive. The same swing, hit up and over the ring instead of along the ground. This is the standard six in short formats.

Good length: defence, or the flick

Against the genuinely good length ball, the honest answers are the forward defence (front foot out, bat angled down, ball dies at your feet), the back foot defence, and the leave if it is going past off stump and not at the stumps. Leaving is a shot. It is scored as a decision, not as cowardice.

If a good length ball is angling towards your legs, the flick or whip turns it square on the leg side off the front pad. This is the highest value low-risk shot in limited overs cricket, because the ball goes where the fewest fielders are.

Against a spinner, the good length ball is also where the sweep lives. You go down on one knee and hit across the line towards square leg. It is a shot that beats the field rather than the bowler.

Back of a length: the cut

Slightly short and wide of off stump, and you are on the back foot. The cut hits it square behind the wicket, the square cut slightly in front, and the upper cut deliberately over the slip fielders. Cut shots are efficient because the ball's own pace does the work. You are steering, not swinging.

Short: the pull and the hook

Chest high or above, and you have two shots. The pull is played with the ball at chest height, hit flat and hard towards midwicket. The hook is played to a genuine bouncer, hit behind square on the leg side, usually in the air. The pull is a bread and butter shot. The hook is the most dangerous stroke in orthodox cricket because you are hitting a rising ball upward with your eyes half off it.

The unorthodox shots

The reverse sweep, the switch hit and the scoop or ramp over the keeper's head all exist to hit the ball where no fielder is standing. They are not harder to swing than a cover drive. They are harder because you commit to them before the ball has fully arrived, so a change of length leaves you with nothing.

The six shots that cover most balls

If you learn nothing else in your first month, learn these, in this order:

Forward defence. It buys you time to work out the bowler.
Straight drive. Your scoring shot against anything full.
Flick off the pads. Your scoring shot against anything straight.
Cut. Your scoring shot against anything short and wide.
Pull. Your scoring shot against anything short and straight.
The leave. Your answer to everything outside off stump that you do not need.

Those six put a bat on roughly nine balls in ten and lose you very few wickets. Everything else on the list above is refinement.

Shot selection beats shot execution

Here is the part that the pages with all the types of cricket shots explained tend to skip. In a short match, most dismissals are not technical failures. They are the right shot played to the wrong ball. A cover drive to a good length ball is an edge to slip. A pull to a ball that is only back of a length is a top edge. The swing was fine. The choice was not.

The practical version of that rule sounds almost too simple: play the shot the length gives you, not the shot you feel like playing. Restlessness is what gets short format batters out, and it costs more than a technical flaw.

Practising the choice, not just the swing

The problem with learning shot selection is that you need someone actively trying to trick you. A bowling machine repeats the same length. A net bowler at your own club bowls what they can bowl. Neither teaches you to read length under any pressure.

This is where playing helps. On Howzat Live you play cricket online in your browser in a live 1v1 match: one of you bats, the other bowls, in 3D, free, with no download and no install. Because a real person is picking the length, they will notice you love the cut and stop giving you width. That adjustment is the thing you cannot get from practice equipment, and it is the whole skill.

You can play a quick match against a stranger, or send a private link to a friend, in 5, 10 or 20 over formats, day or night conditions, with chat in the match. There are also three bots (Gully, Club and Academy) if you want to drill length reading without an audience, though bot results count at half weight, are capped at a few a day, and cannot carry your Scale badge past 3. The badge itself runs 0 to 10 and appears after five rated matches, and beating stronger opponents moves you up faster. Real people are how you climb, which you can see for yourself on the leaderboard.

Where to start

Take the five lengths above, and for one match do nothing but name them out loud as the ball lands. Yorker. Full. Good length. Back of a length. Short. Do not worry about scoring. By the end of the innings you will be picking length two or three balls earlier than you were, and that is the moment a list of the types of cricket shots explained stops being trivia and starts being a menu you can actually order from.

Create a free account and face a real bowler. Reading length against someone who is deliberately hiding it is the fastest version of this lesson there is.