Eight thousand two hundred and fifty-nine

The World XI at Sydney in October 2005 was Graeme Smith, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Brian Lara, Jacques Kallis, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Andrew Flintoff, Mark Boucher, Daniel Vettori, Steve Harmison and Muttiah Muralidaran.

They made 190 and 144.

What the ICC was trying to do

Australia had been the best team in the world for a decade and the argument was that nobody could test them. So the governing body assembled the best available eleven from everywhere else, played them at the SCG over six scheduled days, and awarded the match full Test status.

It is Test number 1768. Every run and wicket in it counts towards career records.

Four days

Matthew Hayden made 111 and 77. Adam Gilchrist made 94 from 111 balls. Australia made 345 and 199.

Shane Warne took three for 23 and three for 48. Stuart MacGill took four for 39 and five for 43, nine for 82 in the match, against a batting order containing four of the best players of the era.

Australia won by 210 runs with two days to spare.

Full scorecard: Australia v ICC World XI, Sydney, 14–17 October 2005 →

The attendance column

Day one: 21,832. Day two: 27,756. Day three: 23,377.

Day four: 8,259.

The match notes record all four. It is the only Test scorecard in this blog where the crowd figure tells the story better than the bowling figures.

The six days that were four

It was scheduled as a six-day Test, an extra day added on the assumption that two sides of that quality would need one.

They needed four. The World XI were bowled out for 190 in 47.1 overs and 144 in 50, and neither innings lasted a full day.

Brian Lara made 5 and 36. Rahul Dravid made 0 and 23. Inzamam-ul-Haq made 1 and 0. Between them those three would finish with more than thirty thousand Test runs.

Why it did not work

The obvious answer is that the World XI had never played together and had no reason to. They met, were introduced, wore a kit none of them had worn before, and were asked to be a team against a side that had been one for ten years.

Cricinfo’s own coverage of it is filed under the headline It’s official - it was a Super Farce.

The deeper answer is that nobody knew who to support. A Test match is a proxy for something, and a team assembled by a committee from six countries is a proxy for nothing at all.

The question it left

Whether the status should have been granted.

The ICC has never repeated it and has never formally addressed whether it was a mistake. Test number 1768 sits in the sequence between two ordinary matches, and the men who played in it carry an extra Test in their career totals for a game against opponents who did not represent a country.

Muralidaran’s five wickets in that match count towards his 800. Lara’s 41 runs count towards his 11,953. Neither man was playing for or against anybody.

Who was in the box

Rudi Koertzen and Simon Taufel stood. The television umpire was Darrell Hair, ten years after Melbourne, watching Muralidaran bowl 54 overs in a match nobody came to.

It is the third appearance Hair makes on this blog, which says less about him than about how few officials the sport used at its highest level and how often they were present when something went wrong.

••••••

No. 3 in Ghost Games, a series of 9.

NextTen balls