Fifty-six minutes at Sabina Park

England won the toss at Sabina Park on 29 January 1998 and batted. Fifty-six minutes later they were 17 for three and play was suspended. Ten minutes after that the players left the field, and an hour and a half after that the match was over.

It was the first Test of a six-match series. It is Test number 1396.

What the card records happening

Mike Atherton was caught at 4 off Courtney Walsh, for 2. Mark Butcher was caught first ball at 4. Nasser Hussain was caught off Curtly Ambrose at 9, for 1. Alec Stewart was 9 not out from 26 balls and Graham Thorpe 0 not out from 10 when it stopped.

Walsh bowled 5.1 overs for 10 runs. Ambrose bowled five overs, three of them maidens, for 3. Nixon McLean, on debut, did not get to bowl.

The five batters faced 62 balls between them, one of them Ambrose’s no-ball, and made 12 runs off the bat. Four byes and the no-ball brought the total to 17. Atherton lasted seven balls, Hussain eighteen, and Butcher one.

The card then says why. Play was suspended after 10.1 overs, 56 minutes, after the batsmen had been struck several times by balls which lifted dangerously off a length. Lengthy discussions followed. The players left the field after another ten minutes, and an hour and a half later the match was abandoned. The four remaining days are listed as cancelled.

Full scorecard: West Indies v England, 1st Test, Kingston, 29 January 1998 →

What was decided afterwards

An additional Test was scheduled for the following week at Port of Spain, which is how a five-match series became a six-match one. And the question of whether the match had happened at all went to the ICC.

The card quotes its chief executive, David Richards: it was possible for the ICC to rule that the match should be scrubbed out, but he thought it unlikely. It was ruled valid. Every performance in it counts towards career records, so Butcher has a first-ball duck in his Test aggregate from a match that lasted an hour, and Ambrose has five overs for three runs.

Two ways to stop

Eleven years later at North Sound a Test was abandoned after ten balls because the bowlers could not stand up in the run-ups, and moved to another ground two days later. Sabina Park is the earlier case: ten overs and a ball, a pitch that hit the batters rather than the bowlers, and a replacement Test bolted onto the end of the series instead of the start.

Both are on the record as Tests. Both have a result line that reads Match drawn. Neither contains a match.

What a ghost game looks like

The Sabina Park card has one batting innings with five names in it. The West Indies eleven is listed as a playing XI with no columns at all. Two umpires, a television umpire and a referee are recorded as having officiated, for fifty-six minutes. Srinivas Venkataraghavan and Steve Bucknor stood. Barry Jarman was the referee.

Seventeen men are credited with a Test appearance in which they neither batted nor bowled: the six England players below Thorpe in the order, and all eleven West Indians. Nine of the eleven did not bowl, and none of them faced a ball. For Ian Bishop, Jimmy Adams and the rest, the match exists in their records as a cap and nothing else.

The card’s series line reads level, nought all, which was true and would have been true if the match had never started. The difference between a Test that was abandoned and a Test that was never played is entirely in the paperwork, and the paperwork here is complete.

What the card holds

Seventeen for three. Fifty-six minutes. Three catches, two of them off Walsh. A debutant who took the field and did nothing on it. A quotation from the man who decided it would count, saying that it probably would. And a number, 1396, in the sequence of every Test ever played, for a morning that ended before lunch.

••••••

No. 6 in Ghost Games, a series of 9.

NextFred Tate’s four