The caps that were taken back

South Africa’s tour of England in 1970 was cancelled because of apartheid. A Rest of the World side was assembled to replace it, five matches were arranged, and the MCC awarded them Test status.

In 1972 the International Cricket Conference took it away again.

Who was in the side

Eddie Barlow, Barry Richards, Rohan Kanhai, Graeme Pollock, Mushtaq Mohammad, Garry Sobers as captain, Clive Lloyd, Mike Procter, Deryck Murray, Intikhab Alam, Graham McKenzie.

That is not a scratch team. It is one of the strongest elevens ever put on a field, and England played it five times in a summer.

What happened at the Oval

England made 294. Peter Lever then took seven for 83, which was better than anything he took in an official Test.

Graeme Pollock made 114 and Sobers 79. Boycott made 157 in the second innings. Kanhai made 100 in the fourth. The Rest of the World won by four wickets, chasing 284.

John Snow bowled 55 overs across the match for six wickets. Clive Lloyd, who was not a bowler, took three for 34.

Full scorecard: England v Rest of the World XI, The Oval, 13–18 August 1970 →

The line that is not on the card

Every Test scorecard carries a field reading Match number: Test no. followed by a figure. It is how the sport counts itself.

This card does not have one.

It has a ground, a toss, five days, a rest day, two umpires, close of play for each evening and four complete innings. It looks exactly like a Test match in every particular except the one that would make it a Test match.

The ledger of what was removed

Boycott’s 157 was a Test century for two years and then was not.

Lever’s seven for 83 was a Test seven-for and then was not. Sobers made 588 runs and took 21 wickets across the five matches, all of it a Test record and then none of it.

Alan Knott, Ray Illingworth, Colin Cowdrey and the rest played Tests in the summer of 1970 and then had played none.

No performance was expunged from the world. The runs were scored, the wickets were taken and the scorecards still exist. What changed is the column they are added into, and for a professional cricketer of that era the column was the career.

What the summer was actually for

England had been due to host South Africa. That tour was cancelled in May after months of protest, government pressure and a threatened boycott of the Commonwealth Games.

The Rest of the World matches were arranged in weeks to fill an empty international summer and to keep the money coming in. Four of the eleven who played at the Oval were South African, which was the point and was not stated as the point.

Barry Richards played four official Tests in his life, and Mike Procter seven. This summer is where most of the evidence for how good they were actually sits.

Why it was reversed

The reasoning was that a Test match is between two countries, and the Rest of the World is not a country. That is a defensible position and it was applied consistently afterwards.

What is harder to defend is the two-year gap. The matches were played, publicised and recorded as Tests. Players were selected for them, dropped from them and paid for them on that basis. The status was withdrawn afterwards, from men who had no say in it and had already done the work.

The other match that half exists

Four months later at Melbourne, a washed-out Test was abandoned without a ball and given the number 000675a, because the Australian Board counted it and nobody else does.

Two different mechanisms in the same eight months for the same problem: a match that is a Test in one ledger and not in another. Neither has ever been resolved, and both are still exactly where they were left.

••••••

No. 2 in Ghost Games, a series of 9.

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