A hundred overs to ten

Sri Lanka batted a hundred overs in the 2002 Champions Trophy final. India faced ten and four balls.

Nobody won.

Sunday

Sanath Jayasuriya won the toss at the R Premadasa Stadium and batted. He made 74 from 89. Kumar Sangakkara made 54, Marvan Atapattu 34, and Sri Lanka finished on 244 for five. Harbhajan Singh bowled ten overs for 27.

India came out. Dinesh Mongia and Virender Sehwag faced two overs, made 14 without loss, and the rain came down.

It did not stop. The match was declared no result and moved to the reserve day.

The first final: Sri Lanka v India, Colombo, 29 September 2002 →

Monday

Everything reset. Not the position, not the score, not Sri Lanka’s 244. The whole match, from the toss.

Jayasuriya won it again and batted again. This time he was bowled by Zaheer Khan off the first ball of the innings.

Mahela Jayawardene made 77 and Russel Arnold 56 not out, and Sri Lanka reached 222 for seven. Zaheer took three.

India came out for the second time in two days. Mongia was caught off Chaminda Vaas for nought. Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar took the score to 38 for one in 8.4 overs.

Then it rained again, at almost exactly the same point in the innings, and it did not stop.

The second final: Sri Lanka v India, Colombo, 30 September 2002 →

What the record does with that

Two scorecards. Two tosses, both won by Sri Lanka, both elected to bat. Two Sri Lankan innings of fifty overs. Two Indian innings that never got past the ninth. Two entries reading No result.

They carry consecutive numbers: ODI 1888 and ODI 1889. A single final occupies two slots in the sequence of every one-day international ever played, and neither of them was decided.

The trophy was shared. There was no man of the match on either day. The scorecard also records, without comment, that no man of the series award was made at all.

The part that is genuinely strange

Sri Lanka scored 466 runs across the two finals. India scored 52.

Twelve Sri Lankan batsmen were dismissed over the two days. One Indian was. Sri Lanka bowled 10.4 overs in the entire competition’s final and India bowled a hundred.

By any reading of the cricket that was actually played, one side did far more of it than the other, and the tournament ended with both captains holding the same trophy at the same time.

Which is not an injustice. A team that has not batted has not lost. The rule is correct and the outcome is correct and the two scorecards still describe something that does not feel like a final.

Why it could not be finished

A one-day international needs twenty-five overs a side to produce a result under the rules of the time. India reached two, and then eight and four.

Both reserve options had been used. There was no third day. The tournament had a flight schedule, a broadcast window and a stadium booked for something else, and those are the actual constraints that decide what cricket is possible.

What is missing

An answer. Not a controversial one, an ordinary one: who was better.

India had beaten South Africa in the semi-final. Sri Lanka had beaten Australia. Both sides were near the top of the game and this was the fixture arranged to separate them, and it was attempted twice and abandoned twice at the same point in the second innings.

Clive Lloyd was the match referee, as he had been at Eden Gardens six years earlier when another subcontinental knockout ended without being played out. Two of the biggest matches of that decade in that part of the world were signed off by the same man, and neither produced the thing a final exists to produce.

The card records 244 for five, 14 for none, 222 for seven and 38 for one. Four innings, two days, no result, and a trophy with two names on it.

••••••

No. 3 in The Rain Rule, a series of 9.

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