Day three, no play

England were winning at Faisalabad. They had made 292, Chris Broad scoring 116, and by the close of the second day Pakistan were 106 for five and still 186 behind.

Broad had batted 339 balls for his 116. Gatting made 79 from 81, which was the fastest scoring anybody managed all match, and Pakistan had then lost five wickets for 106 to Neil Foster and John Emburey on a surface where nobody scored quickly.

England needed to win to square a three-match series they were losing 1–0. They had three days to take five wickets and bat once.

The last over of the day

Mike Gatting was moving a fielder as the light went. Shakoor Rana, umpiring at square leg, stopped the bowler and accused the England captain of sharp practice: moving a man behind the batsman's back after the bowler had begun his run.

Gatting disputed it. The exchange escalated into the two of them standing a foot apart, pointing, in front of a full ground and a television camera. Bill Athey pulled his captain away.

That was the end of the second day's play. It was also, as it turned out, the end of the third day's.

Day 3, no play

Rana declined to take the field the next morning without a written apology. Gatting declined to write one. Neither side's board resolved it that day, and an entire day of a Test match was lost.

Then the scheduled rest day arrived. The Test had been played on the Monday and Tuesday, lost the Wednesday to the argument, and was contractually idle on the Thursday. Two full days passed in which no cricket was played and none was going to be.

Play resumed after Gatting wrote an unconditional apology on a scrap of paper. By then two days remained and the match was dead.

England declared at 137 for 6, Pakistan finished on 51 for 1, and the game was drawn. Pakistan won the series 1–0.

Full scorecard: Pakistan v England, 2nd Test, Faisalabad, 7–12 December 1987 →

Three words

The permanent record of all of this is a line in the close-of-play table: Day 3, No Play.

It is the same notation the card would use for a waterlogged outfield, a dust storm or a power failure. A day of Test cricket, a captain's reputation, an umpire's reputation, the shape of a three-match series and one of the ugliest confrontations the game has staged between a player and an official are all compressed, in the only document that will outlast everyone involved, into a form of words designed for weather.

Shakoor Rana appears once on the scorecard, under Umpires, next to Khizer Hayat.

Everyone else on that card is recorded in full. Iqbal Qasim bowled 35.2 overs and took five for 83. Abdul Qadir bowled 42 and took four for 105. Foster took four for 42. Saleem Malik batted 169 balls for 60 to keep Pakistan in it. Aamer Malik played the first Test match of his life.

The scorecard is meticulous about all of them and silent about the only thing anybody remembers.

What both men said

Each accused the other of what the other denied. Rana said the captain had sworn at him. Gatting said he had been accused of cheating and had not been cheating. Both held to their accounts for the rest of their lives.

There was no stump microphone. No television angle resolved the words. No inquiry produced findings, and the two people with direct knowledge of what was said are the two who disagreed about it.

What England would have done with the two days they lost is unanswerable, and it is unanswerable because of an argument that lasted about ninety seconds.

••••••

No. 3 in Not Out, a series of 3.

TomorrowThe umpire who said so afterwards