The crease inside the pitch

Everybody knows the pitch is 22 yards. Law 6.1 says so: "The pitch is a rectangular area of the ground 22 yards/20.12 m in length and 10 ft/3.05 m in width". What fewer people know is where the 22 yards start and stop, because the clause says that too, in its next sentence, and the answer is not the line the batter stands on.

Bounded by the bowling creases

Law 6.1 continues: the pitch is bounded at either end by the bowling creases, and on either side by imaginary lines five feet from the line joining the middle stumps. The bowling crease is the line the stumps stand on. So the 22 yards run from stumps to stumps, and the width of ten feet is measured five feet either side of them.

That is the whole of the pitch, as the Law defines it. It says nothing yet about where anybody stands.

Law 6, The pitch: MCC Laws of Cricket, 2017 Code →

Four feet in front

Law 7 draws the lines. Clause 7.2 makes the bowling crease 8 ft 8 in long, marking the end of the pitch. Clause 7.3 puts the popping crease "4 ft/1.22 m" in front of it, parallel to it, and marked to a minimum of six feet on either side of the line of the stumps.

Four feet in front of the bowling crease means four feet inside the pitch. The popping crease at each end sits within the 22 yards, not at the edge of them. A rectangle drawn from popping crease to popping crease is 58 feet long, not 66.

Clause 7.4 adds the return creases, at right angles to the popping crease, 4 ft 4 in either side of the middle-stump line, marked from the popping crease to a minimum of eight feet behind it. Those run the other way, back past the stumps and off the end of the pitch.

Law 7, The creases: MCC Laws of Cricket, 2017 Code →

What the drawing gets wrong

The common diagram shows a rectangle 22 yards long with a line at each end and a batter standing on it. That puts the batter on the bowling crease, level with the stumps. The Law puts the batter’s line four feet in front of the stumps, and the bowler’s line four feet in front of the other set.

The difference is eight feet across the length of the pitch, and it is not a small thing to get wrong, because the popping crease is the line the rest of the code uses. It is the line a batter must be behind to be in his ground and the line a bowler’s front foot is judged against. It is the working edge of the pitch, and it is inside the pitch.

What the Law does with the difference

Nothing, directly. Law 6 defines an area of ground and Law 7 marks lines on it, and neither clause says why the lines are where they are. The four feet is simply stated, as the 22 yards is simply stated.

But the two Laws together fix a fact the diagrams lose: that the pitch is longer than the distance between the creases, and that the stumps stand at the end of it while the batter stands inside it. A batter standing on the popping crease has four feet of pitch behind him before the stumps, which is the four feet a stumping is made in.

The umpires

Law 6.2 is one sentence: "The umpires shall be the sole judges of the fitness of the pitch for play". Law 7.1 has the creases marked in white lines, and Law 2 has the umpires check before the toss that they are correctly marked. Between them, the 22 yards, the four feet and the eight feet eight inches are somebody’s responsibility before a ball is bowled.

Twenty-two yards, minus eight feet

The number everybody quotes is the length of the pitch. The number the game is played across is the distance between the popping creases, which is 58 feet, and the number a bowler works to is the 62 feet from his own front line to the far stumps. None of those three is wrong. Only one of them is on the diagram.

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No. 16 in By the Book, a series of 17.

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