Forty-five, and they won

Australia won the toss at Sydney in January 1887 and put England in. Two bowlers were making their Test debuts that morning: a fast-medium bowler called Charlie Turner and a left-armer called J.J. Ferris.

They bowled unchanged through the innings. It lasted 35.3 overs.

Thirteen for five

Billy Bates and Billy Barnes both went at 11. Arthur Shrewsbury, the captain, was caught at 13. Dick Barlow was bowled at 13. Billy Gunn, on debut, was bowled at 13.

Five wickets had fallen for thirteen runs and three of them without the score moving. William Scotton made 1. Maurice Read made 5. George Lohmann, coming in at number nine, made 17, which was the highest score of the innings by nine runs.

England were all out for 45. Turner's figures were 18–11–15–6. Eleven of his eighteen overs were maidens. Ferris took 4 for 27. Between two men playing their first Test, they had taken all ten.

Full scorecard: Australia v England, 1st Test, Sydney, 28–31 January 1887 →

The rest of the first day

Australia then batted, and by the close they were 76 for four.

Fourteen wickets fell that Friday. England’s entire innings, the one remembered as a humiliation, took 35.3 overs and was over well before the interesting part of the day had finished. Australia needed 113.1 overs to make 119.

What happened after

Australia made 119 and led by 74, which on that surface was a substantial lead. England made 184 in the second innings, Johnny Briggs top-scoring with 33. Australia needed 111 to win.

Percy McDonnell went in the first over. Jack Blackham went in the second. Australia were five for two.

Billy Barnes then bowled forty-six overs. Twenty-nine of them were maidens. He took 6 for 28. Alec Bannerman batted eighty-four minutes for 4 and Harry Moses batted a hundred and seventy-six minutes for 24, and the innings crawled along at 0.90 runs an over, which even in 1887 was a side trying not to lose rather than trying to win.

Australia were all out for 97. England won by 13 runs.

The version that came later

The story as it is usually told has a shape: humiliation, then redemption. England are bowled out for 45, the lowest total in their history to that point, and heroically recover to win.

The four innings do not support that reading. Forty-five, 119, 184, 97. On that pitch, in that match, 45 was a bad morning rather than a catastrophe, and the eventual margin of 13 runs came from a surface where nobody could score. The redemption arc was applied afterwards by people writing about a number rather than about a game.

This is the thing the blog keeps finding. A figure survives, detached from the conditions that produced it, and acquires a meaning it did not have at the time.

What neither of them said

Turner and Ferris went on to take a great many Test wickets between them. Neither ever set down what he bowled that morning, what the pitch was doing, or whether either man understood that he was in the middle of the best spell of his life; and by the time anyone thought the question worth asking, both were long past being able to answer it.

One name on the card is worth reading twice. One of the two umpires was Charles Bannerman, who had faced the first ball ever bowled in Test cricket ten years earlier and gone on to make the first Test century. His brother Alec was batting at number six for Australia.

Ten years is all it had been. The sport was still small enough that the man who started it was standing in the middle of it in a white coat, watching his brother bat.

The match was Test number 25. There is a scorecard, a result and a handful of newspaper paragraphs. There is no over-by-over account of the collapse and there never was.

••••••

No. 4 in Collapse, a series of 4.

TomorrowNine wickets, not ten