its like baseball, you have innings, each sides balls and bats twice.

so say its england v australia.

the idea is to score as many runs as possible when batting, you can do this by hitting the ball and running to each wicket, each time you run to the wicket, you get 1 run, you can do this as many times as you like but if the balling side recover the ball quickly, you can get run out like baseball.

you can also hit the ball so it goes over the edge of the boundary of the field, and thats 4 runs, if it goes over the boundary without hitting the ground, its 6 runs.

so if the score was say 269 for 5, that means they have scored 269 runs, but lost 5 wickets (batsmen have got out, through either being caught, run out, or bowled out)