Commentators shout it, crowds celebrate it and players treasure the match ball because of it. The hat-trick is one of the most famous phrases in sport, yet it means something a little different depending on which game you are watching. This guide explains what a hat-trick is in football, what it is in cricket, what makes a perfect one, and how a Victorian cricket custom involving an actual hat gave sport one of its best expressions.
What Is a Hat-Trick in Football?
In football, a hat-trick is when one player scores three goals in a single match. It does not matter when the goals come: three in the first half, three late on, or spread across the whole game all count the same. Penalties count too, so a player can complete a hat-trick without scoring from open play.
By tradition, a player who scores a hat-trick keeps the match ball, signed by team-mates if the dressing room is feeling generous. Commentators add one refinement worth knowing: a so-called perfect or flawless hat-trick means scoring once with the left foot, once with the right foot and once with the head. It changes nothing official, but fans treat it as the most elegant version. Scoring two goals, for the record, is called a brace, and four is sometimes described as a haul. If you are building your football vocabulary, our guide to the offside rule in football explains the law that confuses new fans the most.
What Is a Hat-Trick in Cricket?
Cricket’s version is stricter and rarer. A hat-trick in cricket happens when a bowler dismisses three batters with three consecutive deliveries. Three wickets in one over with ordinary balls in between does not count; the three successful balls must come one after another, with nothing in between.
Those three balls do not even have to be in the same over, or the same innings for bowlers in multi-innings matches: a bowler can take a wicket with the last ball of one over and two more with the first balls of the next. Because bowlers only deliver a fraction of the balls in a match and every delivery must defeat a different batter, cricket hat-tricks are genuinely rare events, far rarer than football ones, and they can turn a match in under two minutes. Our explainer on how long a football match lasts shows how differently the two great games handle their drama.
Where Did the Name Come From?
The phrase was born in cricket in the nineteenth century. When a bowler achieved the three-in-three feat, it was custom for a collection to be taken among the crowd or the club, and the bowler was presented with a new hat bought with the money. The achievement became known, simply, as the hat trick.
Football borrowed the expression later, once scoring three goals in a match became recognised as the equivalent individual feat, and from sport it spread into everyday language. Newspapers now use hat-trick for any threefold success, from three awards in one night to three election wins in a row.
Which Is Harder?
There is no fair contest here, because the two feats ask for different things. Good strikers in football score hat-tricks regularly across a season somewhere in the leagues, and the very best collect several in a career. A cricket hat-trick, by contrast, can be absent from a whole tournament and might happen to an ordinary bowler once in a lifetime, partly by luck: the third batter still has to make a mistake or receive an unplayable ball at exactly the right moment.
That contrast is the charm of the phrase. One name covers both the striker’s finishing masterclass and the bowler’s two minutes of perfection, and every fan of either sport knows instantly that something special has just happened.
