A hundred and forty-nine, before the dark

Adam Gilchrist made 149 in the 2007 World Cup final. It is the highest score anybody has made in one, and the match it was made in is remembered for something else entirely.

Rain had cut the final to 38 overs a side before a ball was bowled. Ricky Ponting won the toss and batted. Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden walked out at the Kensington Oval with a third of the usual innings taken away from them and did not appear to notice.

The first hour

Fifty came up in the eleventh over, Gilchrist with 35 of it and Hayden with 15. The hundred came in the seventeenth, off 102 balls, with the split now 74 to 22. At the drinks break after nineteen overs Australia were 135 without loss and Gilchrist was on 95.

His own fifty had taken 43 balls, with five fours and two sixes. His hundred took 72, with eight fours and six sixes. The second fifty of the innings, in other words, came off 29 deliveries and contained four sixes.

Hayden was the other man for 172 of those runs and made 38 of them. He was caught off Lasith Malinga in the twenty-third over. The card records the opening stand as the platform for the total, and the opening stand was one man.

The rest of it

Gilchrist went on to 149 from 104 balls, in 129 minutes, with thirteen fours and eight sixes. He was caught by Chamara Silva off Dilhara Fernando in the thirty-first over with the score on 224. He had added 52 with Ponting by then, and Ponting’s share of it was 19.

Australia finished on 281 for four from their 38 overs. Nobody else passed 40. Fernando’s eight overs cost 74. Malinga took two for 49 and was the one bowler who could claim to have kept anybody quiet.

Sri Lanka’s target became 269 from 36 after more rain, and they finished on 215 for eight. Australia won by 53 runs on Duckworth-Lewis. Gilchrist was named player of the match for the 149 and two catches.

Full scorecard: Australia v Sri Lanka, World Cup final, Bridgetown, 28 April 2007 →

What it beat

The previous highest score in a World Cup final was 140, by Ponting, in the 2003 final. Gilchrist passed it with Ponting at the other end. The two highest scores ever made in a World Cup final belong to the same side, four years apart, and the second was made in front of the man who held the first.

Eight sixes in a final. Thirteen fours. A strike rate of 143 in a fifty-over match that had been cut to thirty-eight, against an attack containing Chaminda Vaas, Malinga and Muttiah Muralidaran.

The glove

Gilchrist batted with a squash ball inside one of his gloves. It became a small controversy afterwards. The MCC said that nothing in the Laws restricts what a batter puts inside a glove, and that he had broken neither the Laws nor the spirit of them. The card has no column for it either way.

Why it is filed under something else

Because of what happened after it. Sri Lanka accepted an offer of bad light at 206 for seven with the match already decided, the officials misread the playing conditions, and three overs were bowled in darkness to finish a game that was finished. That is the final’s story now, and this site tells it in its own piece.

The 149 sits underneath it. It was made in daylight, in front of 20,108 people, in a rain-shortened match where a batting side has fewer balls to build from. None of that is in dispute and none of it is what anybody mentions first.

What the card holds

Every milestone. Fifty off 43, a hundred off 72, 149 off 104. The stand of 172 and the 38 that was the other half of it. Eight sixes.

What it does not hold is the order in which the day is now remembered. The card puts the innings first, because it came first. Everything written since has put it second.

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No. 8 in The Other Guy, a series of 24.

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