Handled the ball, 133

Graham Gooch’s line in England’s second innings at Old Trafford in June 1993 reads: handled the ball, 133, 247 balls, 21 fours, 2 sixes. There is no bowler’s name against it, because the dismissal does not belong to a bowler.

England were chasing 512 and were not going to get them. Gooch, the captain, had batted for 309 minutes and was the fourth wicket to fall, at 223. A ball he had played came back towards his stumps and he knocked it away with his hand, and the appeal was upheld.

Seven men

Seven batters were dismissed handled the ball in the whole history of Test cricket. Russell Endean in 1957, Andrew Hilditch in 1979, Mohsin Khan in 1982, Desmond Haynes in 1983, Gooch in 1993, Steve Waugh and Michael Vaughan in 2001. Gooch is the only one of the seven who had made a hundred first.

The list stops in 2001 because the dismissal stopped. In 2017 the MCC removed handled the ball from the Laws altogether and folded it into obstructing the field, with effect from the first of October that year. A batter who does the same thing now is out obstructing the field, and the card says so.

That makes Gooch’s 133 a line that cannot be written again. Not because nobody will handle the ball, but because the words the scorer would use no longer exist.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 1st Test, Old Trafford, 3–7 June 1993 →

The other line on the card

The match is remembered for something else, and it is on the card too, three lines above Gooch in the first innings. Mike Gatting, bowled Warne, 4, from 12 balls.

It was Shane Warne’s first ball against England, on the second day of his first Ashes Test. The card cannot show that it was his first ball. It shows a batter bowled for 4, and a bowler with four for 51 in the innings and four for 86 in the second, and the player-of-the-match award. Everything else about the delivery lives in the footage and in the phrase people attached to it.

The rest of the match

Mark Taylor made 124 in Australia’s first innings of 289. Peter Such took six for 67 on debut, and Allan Border was stumped by Alec Stewart off him. England made 210. Australia declared their second innings at 432 for five, Ian Healy 102 not out, and England made 332, Gooch’s 133 the bulk of it. Australia won by 179 runs.

Four men made their Test debuts in the match: Michael Slater and Brendon Julian for Australia, Andy Caddick and Such for England. Dickie Bird and Ken Palmer were the umpires. It is Test number 1223.

Two kinds of unrepeatable

Warne’s ball to Gatting is unrepeatable in the ordinary sense: nobody has bowled one like it since. Gooch’s dismissal is unrepeatable in the strict sense. The Laws have removed the category. There will be other captains who knock a ball away from their stumps with a hand, and their cards will say something else.

So the same scorecard holds the most replayed delivery of its decade, recorded as a routine bowled, and a dismissal that has since ceased to exist, recorded in the plain words that were current at the time. The record kept the words. The Laws kept moving.

What the card holds

Bowled Warne, 4. Handled the ball, 133. A debutant off-spinner with six wickets in the first innings and a wicketkeeper with a hundred in the third. Neither of the two famous lines has a bowler’s figures that explain it, because one was a single ball inside a spell and the other was a batter’s own hand.

••••••

No. 6 in Unrepeatable, a series of 22.

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