List A cricket is a classification of the limited-overs (one-day) form of the sport

Sport

A Sport is all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical fitness and provide entertainment to participants. Sport may be competitive, where a winner or winners can be identified by objective means, and may require a degree...

 of cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

. Much as domestic first-class cricket

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 is the level below international Test match

Test cricket

Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

 cricket, so List A cricket is the domestic level of one-day cricket

One-day cricket

Limited overs cricket, also known as one-day cricket and in a slightly different context as List A cricket, is a version of the sport of cricket in which a match is generally completed in one day, whereas Test and first-class matches can take up to five days to complete...

 below One Day Internationals.

Status

Most cricketing nations have some form of domestic List A competition. The number of over

Over (cricket)

In the sport of cricket, an over is a set of six consecutive balls bowled in succession. An over is normally bowled by a single bowler. However, in the event of injury preventing a bowler from completing an over, it is completed by a teammate....

s in List A cricket ranges from forty to sixty overs per side.

The categorization of cricket matches as "List A" was not officially endorsed by the International Cricket Council

International Cricket Council

The International Cricket Council is the international governing body of cricket. It was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 by representatives from England, Australia and South Africa, renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965, and took up its current name in 1989.The...

 until 2006, when the ICC announced that it and its member associations would be determining this classification in a manner similar to that done for first class matches. The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians

Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians

The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians was founded in England in 1973 for the purpose of researching and collating information about the history and statistics of cricket...

 created this category for the purpose of providing an equivalent to first-class cricket, to allow the generation of career records and statistics for comparable one-day matches. Only the more important one-day competitions in each country, plus matches against a touring Test team, are included. The list was the work of Philip Bailey and the name is derived simply from there being a list A and a list B.

Matches that qualify as List A

• One-day Internationals (ODIs)
• Other international matches
• Premier one-day tournaments in each country
• Official matches of a touring Test team against main first-class teams

Matches that do not qualify as List A

• Twenty20 cricket including internationals
• World Cup warm-up matches
• Other Tourist matches (for example, against first-class teams that are not part of the main domestic first-class competition, such as universities)
• Festival and friendly matches

External source

• ICC clarifies what counts and what doesn't, from Cricinfo, 30 July 2006