No play on the fifth day

The Headingley card of August 1975 has four days of cricket and a fifth line that reads No Play. Under match flow it carries a sentence that no other Test card carries: the match was abandoned as a draw after vandals, campaigning for the release from prison of a convicted criminal, sabotaged the Rugby Ground end of the pitch with knives and oil.

Four days

England chose to bat and made 288, David Steele 73, John Edrich 62, Gary Gilmour six for 85. Australia were bowled out for 135, Phil Edmonds five for 28 on debut, John Snow three for 22. England made 291 the second time, Steele 92, and set Australia 445. At the close of the fourth day Australia were 220 for three, McCosker 95 not out, Doug Walters 25 not out, 225 needed with seven wickets in hand.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 3rd Test, Headingley, 14–19 August 1975 →

The bowling that set it up

Australia’s 135 took 76.5 overs at 1.75 an over. Edmonds, in his first Test, bowled 20 overs, seven maidens, five for 28, and Underwood 19 overs, twelve maidens, one for 22. Gilmour’s six for 85 in the first innings came from 31.2 overs. The card’s first-innings extras for England were 39, eleven of them wides, which was more than four of the eleven batters made.

The fifth day

The card has three close-of-play lines for the first three days and a fourth for Australia’s 220 for three. The fifth reads: No Play. There is no weather note beside it, because the weather was not the reason. The pitch had been dug up at one end during the night and oil poured into the holes, and the umpires, Arthur Fagg and David Constant, found it unfit.

The people who did it were campaigning for George Davis, then in prison for a robbery they said he had not committed. None of that is on the card, beyond the sentence about knives and oil and a convicted criminal, which is as close as a scorecard has ever come to reporting news.

What was lost

The card can say what the match had reached and not what it would have reached. McCosker was five short of a first Test hundred.

Australia needed 225 in a day on a pitch that had produced 135 and 291. The record has it that heavy rain fell that afternoon, so that the day would probably have been lost anyway, and the card has no way of saying that either. The result line reads Match drawn, which is true and not the whole truth.

Why it is a ghost

Most abandoned Tests are abandoned before they begin, or in their first hour. This one was abandoned with four days played, a result in reach for both sides, and a batter not out in the nineties who would stay there. The card is complete in every column except the last day, and the last day is where the match was.

Edmonds’ five wickets on debut are noted. So is Derek Underwood becoming the fourth bowler to two hundred wickets for England. The series line reads Australia led the four-match series 1-0, and the fourth Test would be drawn too, so that the vandalised night at Headingley was the last chance England had of squaring it. It is Test number 762.

What the card holds

A 95 not out that stayed a 95 not out. A five-for on debut. A target of 445 and a chase at 220 for three. A day marked No Play with no rain against it. And a sentence about knives and oil, written by a scorer, in the place where a card normally records a change of ends.

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

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