Cricket’s Three Formats, Explained: Test, ODI and T20

Five days or three hours, red ball or white — why the same sport is played at completely different lengths, and how to tell which one you’re looking at.

Torch Editorial · 6 min read · Updated September 2026

Almost every confusing thing about cricket, for a newcomer, comes from one fact: it is played in three very different lengths, all at the top level, often by the same players in the same month. A match can finish in three hours or run for five days and still end in a draw. Once you know which format you are watching, everything else follows.

The idea all three share

In every format, two teams of eleven take turns batting (scoring runs) and bowling and fielding (stopping them). The bowling side delivers the ball in sets of six called overs. The batting side scores until ten of its eleven batters are out, or until it runs out of overs. What changes between formats is how many overs each side gets — and that single number changes the entire character of the game.

Test cricket — up to five days

The oldest and longest form. Each side bats twice, with no limit on overs, across a maximum of five days. It uses a red ball and players wear white.

Because nobody is racing a clock, a batter can choose to score nothing for an hour, and that can be the right decision. The bowling side has to take twenty wickets — dismiss the opposition twice — to win. If it cannot, and the batting side simply survives to the end of day five, the match is a draw: no winner, despite five days of play. That outcome frustrates newcomers and is, to most long-time followers, the format’s finest feature.

One-day internationals — 50 overs a side

The middle format: each team bats once, for a maximum of 50 overs (300 balls), finishing in a single day of around eight hours. White ball, coloured clothing, and a guaranteed result in almost every case.

The 50-over game is the strategic compromise — long enough that a batter can build an innings patiently, short enough that the clock always matters. Fielding restrictions, known as powerplays, limit how many fielders can be spread to the boundary in certain phases, which shapes when teams attack. The men’s and women’s Cricket World Cups are played in this format.

T20 — twenty overs, about three hours

The short form, and the one the Olympics chose. Each side bats once for a maximum of 20 overs — 120 balls — and the whole thing fits in roughly three hours, comparable to a baseball game.

Twenty overs is not enough time to be careful. Batters attack from the first ball, bowlers are capped at four overs each so no one can dominate, and the fielding restrictions in the opening overs push the game toward boundaries. The result is a format built for people who have never watched cricket before — which is exactly why it is the version going to [LA28](/guides/cricket-at-the-olympics-t20).

How to tell which one you are looking at

• The scoreboard shows overs out of 20 → T20, done in an evening.
• Out of 50 → a one-day international, done today.
• No overs limit, a day number (“Day 2”), and two innings per side → a Test.
• Players in white → almost certainly a Test or another multi-day game. Coloured kit → a limited-overs match.

And the shorter ones

Below T20 sit newer, shorter experiments: T10 (ten overs a side, about 90 minutes) and England’s The Hundred, which replaces overs entirely with a count of 100 balls per innings. Both are domestic competitions rather than international formats, and neither is part of the Olympic programme.

If you are starting from zero, start with T20. It asks the least of your time and shows the sport at its loudest.