The innings that never happened

It rained at Centurion for three days.

Days two, three and four were not shortened. They were lost entirely. All the fifth Test had to show for itself was the first day: 6,750 people in a stadium built for far more, watching South Africa reach 155 for six in a series that was already gone, 2–0 with two to play.

On the morning of the last day the match had produced one innings, six wickets and no possibility of a result.

The offer

On the final morning South Africa batted on to 248 for eight and declared. Hansie Cronje then walked to the England dressing room and proposed to Nasser Hussain that each side forfeit an innings, leaving England a target and the match a result.

Hussain accepted.

England forfeited their first innings. South Africa forfeited their second. England were set 249 on the last day of a match that had been dead since Friday.

It was received as generosity. A captain with a series already won, giving a rained-out crowd something to watch. Wisden treated it that way and so did most of the press box.

What the scorecard had to invent

The Laws did not allow it. A side could forfeit its second innings; there was no provision whatsoever for forfeiting a first. What the two captains had agreed was not merely unprecedented, it was outside the rules of the game they were in the middle of playing.

The match referee solved it by instructing the scorers to write England’s first innings down as 0/0d.

Nought for nought declared. An innings that was never played, recorded as a declaration that was never made, because the officials had no lawful way to write down what had actually happened in front of them.

Full scorecard: South Africa v England, 5th Test, SuperSport Park, 14–18 January 2000 →

The cricket

It was a good day. England went after 249 and got there with two wickets in hand. Michael Vaughan made 69 and took the match award. Alec Stewart made 73. Chris Adams batted with a fractured finger. Nantie Hayward and Shaun Pollock took three each and had England eight down before it was settled.

Darrell Hair and Rudi Koertzen stood in it. Hair has turned up here before, at Melbourne, calling Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing on Boxing Day.

By any ordinary measure this was the only result in a ruined week and a credit to everyone involved in producing it.

Hussain, for his part, has been consistent ever since that he thought he was being offered a game of cricket and took it. Nobody has ever suggested otherwise.

What came out afterwards

Within months the King Commission established that Cronje had been taking money from a bookmaker.

He admitted that the Centurion declaration was one of the things he had been paid for. A bookmaker had offered him money to make sure the match produced a result rather than a draw, and he had taken it, and then he had walked to the England dressing room with his offer.

The generosity had a price. The price had been paid before the offer was made.

Cronje was banned from cricket for life. There was then a question, raised seriously at the time, about what to do with the match itself. A result manufactured by a corrupt captain is not obviously a result. But England had won it on the field, in a genuine chase, against bowlers trying to take wickets, and no mechanism existed for striking a Test from the record because of why it had been set up.

So it stands, and it is the only Test in history in which both sides forfeited an innings.

What is left standing

The result. England won by two wickets and the record says so, and there has never been a serious suggestion that anyone in the England side knew anything.

So the card stays as it is. A South African declaration bought by a bookmaker. An England first innings of nought for nought declared, sanctioned by a match referee because the Laws could not describe it, in which nobody ever batted. And a genuine, hard-fought, two-wicket win in the middle of it.

Cricket keeps its records to be authoritative. Every number on this one is accurate. Very little of it is true.

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No. 3 in Declared, a series of 15.

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