Three overs after the end

Australia were in a huddle on the outfield at the Kensington Oval when Aleem Dar walked into the middle of it and told them the match was not over.

It was almost dark. Sri Lanka had accepted an offer of bad light. Everybody in the ground believed the World Cup had been won.

What had happened up to that point

Rain had already cut the final to 38 overs a side before a ball was bowled. Adam Gilchrist then made 149 from 104 balls with thirteen fours and eight sixes, which is still the highest score made in a World Cup final. Australia finished on 281 for four.

Sri Lanka went after it. Sanath Jayasuriya made 63 and Kumar Sangakkara 54, and at 149 for three in the twenty-fifth over they were not out of it.

More rain. Two overs came off and the target was revised to 269 from 36.

By the thirty-third over Sri Lanka were 206 for seven and needed 63 from 18 balls in light that had gone. They accepted the offer to come off. Australia began celebrating.

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

The ledger, as the officials read it

The playing conditions said a result required a minimum number of overs. Sri Lanka had passed that mark long before. The match was decided and Duckworth-Lewis said so.

What the officials believed, and what turned out to be wrong, was that the remaining overs had to be bowled for the result to stand, and that if they were not bowled that evening the teams would have to return the following day to complete them.

Neither side wanted a World Cup final resuming on a Sunday morning in front of an empty ground. So both captains agreed to finish it, and three overs of a World Cup final were bowled in effective darkness with the batsmen unable to see the ball and the fielders standing where they guessed the ball might go.

Sri Lanka added nine runs and lost one wicket. Australia won by 53 on Duckworth-Lewis, the result unchanged by any of it.

What it cost, item by item

Nothing in the result. Australia had won the match at the point the players first walked off and had still won it an hour later.

The 20,108 people in the ground watched the closing overs of a World Cup final without being able to see the players. The broadcast pictures show a dark field, the pavilion lights and camera flashes.

The ICC subsequently sanctioned the match officials. Aleem Dar and Steve Bucknor were standing, Rudi Koertzen was the television umpire, Billy Bowden was the reserve and Jeff Crowe was the referee. Five of the most experienced officials in the sport, in the biggest match it stages, jointly misread the rule they were there to apply.

The thing this arc keeps arriving at

Rain does not decide cricket matches. Rules about rain decide them, and rules about rain are written by people, applied by people under time pressure, and read off pieces of paper in bad light.

At Melbourne in 1971 four administrators in a room turned a washed-out Test into a new format. At Sydney in 1992 a formula removed twelve balls and one run, and the scoreboard then displayed the wrong figure to a batsman who could do nothing about either. At Colombo in 2002 a final was attempted twice and abandoned twice. At Durban in 2003 a host nation went out of its own World Cup because of a number on a printed sheet.

And at Bridgetown, five officials with a combined four hundred international matches between them sent two teams back out into the night to play cricket that had already been settled.

What the card says

It says Australia 281 for four, Sri Lanka 215 for eight, Australia won by 53 runs by the D/L method. It gives Gilchrist the match award and Glenn McGrath the tournament.

It records the attendance. It records that Lasith Malinga, who a month earlier had taken four wickets in four balls in the same tournament, bowled eight overs for 49 and took two.

There is no line for the fact that the last three overs of it were played after everyone had gone home in their heads. That is not a category the format has, and it never has been.

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No. 5 in The Rain Rule, a series of 9.

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