One run, and a printed sheet

Mark Boucher hit the fifth ball of the forty-fifth over at Kingsmead for six, looked across at the dressing room, and blocked the last one.

The players walked off. The rain came. South Africa were out of the World Cup they were hosting.

The evening

Sri Lanka had made 268 for nine. Marvan Atapattu batted 129 balls for 124 and Aravinda de Silva made 73 from 78. Jacques Kallis took three.

Rain had already shortened the chase. South Africa needed 230 from 45 overs on a Duckworth-Lewis calculation, and with more weather forecast every ball carried a second number behind it: the par score, the total that would be enough if the match stopped right there.

Herschelle Gibbs made 73. Graeme Smith 35. Shaun Pollock was run out at 212. Boucher came in and batted with the game and the sheet at the same time.

His six took South Africa to 229.

Full scorecard: South Africa v Sri Lanka, Kingsmead, Durban, 3 March 2003 →

The difference between 229 and 230

Two hundred and twenty-nine was the Duckworth-Lewis par score. Reaching par ties the match. Winning requires par plus one.

Boucher had the sheet. He had been sent a message from the dressing room. Every account of that evening agrees that he believed 229 put South Africa ahead, and he defended the last ball of the over rather than risk his wicket, expecting to resume after the rain with the match in hand.

Play never resumed. The match was tied.

A tie split the points. Sri Lanka took two, South Africa took two, and two was not enough to go through.

Whose mistake

This is where accounts stop agreeing.

One version has the dressing room sending the par score rather than the winning score, an error of transcription under pressure. Another has the correct number sent and misread. A third has the sheet itself correct, the message correct, and Boucher reading the line for the wrong over.

Boucher has spoken about it many times and has never blamed anyone but the process. The coaching staff of that side have not produced a document.

What is not in dispute is that a piece of paper in a dressing room, transmitted to a batsman by hand signal in fading light, was the mechanism by which a host nation left its own tournament.

What the card shows and does not

It shows 268 for nine, 229 for six, and the two words Match tied with a note that the D/L method applied. It shows Boucher not out 45.

It does not show the par score. There is no column for the number a batsman was working to, which in a rain-shortened chase is the only number that matters and the one the scorecard has never had a way to record.

Ninety-nine per cent of the information needed to understand that innings is on the card. The remaining one per cent was on a sheet of paper that nobody has published.

Two men on that field

Srinivas Venkataraghavan was one of the umpires. Twenty-eight years earlier he had captained India at Lord’s in the match where Sunil Gavaskar batted through sixty overs for 36, an innings nobody has explained either.

Lance Klusener was at the other end to Boucher, one not out from eight balls. In 1999 he had been at the crease when South Africa were run out of a World Cup semi-final with the scores level. Four years later he stood twenty-two yards away while it happened again, to the same country, over the same margin of one run, by an entirely different mechanism.

Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained that either, because there is nothing to explain. It is just what the card says.

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No. 4 in The Rain Rule, a series of 9.

NextThree overs after the end