Two debuts at the Wanderers

Three men made their England debuts at the Wanderers in November 1999. Inside three overs on the first day, England were 2 for four.

The first hour

South Africa put England in. Allan Donald bowled Mike Atherton in the first over. Shaun Pollock had Nasser Hussain caught at short leg in the second. Donald had Mark Butcher caught behind, and one ball later Alec Stewart leg before.

Four wickets, two runs, seventeen deliveries.

Michael Vaughan, on debut, walked in at number four with the score on 2 and made 33. Chris Adams, on debut, made 16. Andrew Flintoff made 38.

Gavin Hamilton, on debut, came in at eight and was caught by Pollock off Donald for nought from six balls. England were all out for 122.

Full scorecard: South Africa v England, 1st Test, Johannesburg, 25–28 November 1999 →

The rest of it

South Africa made 403 for nine declared. Daryll Cullinan scored 108, Herschelle Gibbs 85, Lance Klusener 72 from 85 balls. Darren Gough took five.

Hamilton bowled fifteen overs for 63 and took none.

England batted again and did better. Stewart made 86, Andy Caddick 48, Butcher 32 across 138 balls. Hamilton came in at eight for the second time, faced three balls, and was caught by Pollock off Donald for nought.

A pair, on debut, in a match England lost by an innings.

The two lines

Hamilton was never picked for England again. His Test career is one match, nought and nought, fifteen overs and no wicket.

Vaughan, who walked out on the same morning to the same attack, played 82 Tests, scored 5,719 runs, and captained England to the Ashes in 2005.

Nothing on that first scorecard separates them. Vaughan made 33 and 5. Hamilton made 0 and 0. Both were picked on county form, both were in their mid-twenties, and one of them faced nine balls in the match.

Where he had come from

Hamilton was the best cricketer Scotland had produced in a generation. He had played for Scotland at the World Cup earlier that year, and qualified for England through Yorkshire.

After the Tests he went back and played for Scotland again, for another decade, and captained them. He is one of a small number of men to have represented two international sides, and the only one whose England career is contained entirely in the worst month of it.

What is not in the record

The word that follows Hamilton around is a technical one about a batsman’s confidence, and everyone who writes about him uses it and nobody who was in the dressing room has ever set out what they saw.

What the card shows is a man dismissed twice by Allan Donald, who took eleven wickets in the match and was, in November 1999, the fastest bowler in the world.

Four of England’s top five made single figures in the first innings. Two of them had played fifty Tests. The failure was general and one man carried it.

What happened to that tour

England lost this Test by an innings and drew the next three. The fifth, at Centurion, was the one where both captains forfeited an innings to manufacture a result, and where the reason Hansie Cronje did it came out some months afterwards.

Srinivas Venkataraghavan was umpiring at the Wanderers, as he had at Lord’s in 1975 when he captained India in the match Sunil Gavaskar spent sixty overs on.

Two of the strangest England scorecards of the era belong to the same five-match tour, and the man who kept the record straight for one of them was the captain in another.

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No. 5 in One Cap, a series of 6.

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