The Test that turned into something else

There is a scorecard for a Test match at Melbourne in which nobody batted, nobody bowled and nobody was dismissed.

It has a toss on it. Ray Illingworth called correctly on the last day of 1970 and put Australia in, and the rain arrived while the players were walking out.

Five days of nothing

The rain arrived as the players were walking out. Day one: no play. Day two: no play. On the third morning the match was abandoned. The Sunday was the scheduled rest day, and the fourth and fifth days were cancelled outright.

What remains on the scorecard is a toss, two full elevens and a completely blank match. Bill Lawry and Illingworth are listed as captains of teams that never took the field against each other.

The meeting

With three days of a Melbourne holiday fixture gone and a paying public with nothing to watch, the Australian Board of Control, the MCC tour manager and two MCC officials sat down together.

They agreed to abandon the Test, add a replacement Test to the schedule later in January, and put on a limited-overs game on 5 January to fill the empty day.

Forty overs a side. Eight balls to the over, which is how Australia played then. No fielding restrictions, no coloured clothing, no rules about bouncers or wides that anybody had thought about, because none of it had happened before.

The Test that was abandoned: Australia v England, 3rd Test, Melbourne, 31 December 1970 →

What forty-six thousand people turned up for

The gate was 46,006 and the scorers wrote the takings on the card: $33,894.60.

England made 190. John Edrich batted 119 balls for 82 and was named player of the match. Keith Stackpole and Ashley Mallett took three each with occasional bowling nobody would have trusted in a Test.

Australia knocked it off for the loss of five wickets with 42 balls to spare, which is five overs and two balls when the overs are eight balls long. Ian Chappell made 60. Illingworth took three for 50 and was the most expensive of England's bowlers.

Every one of the twenty-two men who played is recorded as making his one-day international debut, because there had not previously been such a thing to debut in.

The match that replaced it: Australia v England, Melbourne, 5 January 1971 →

The number on the card

The abandoned Test is catalogued as Test number 000675a.

Not 675. Not 676. A number with a letter stuck on the end, because the Australian Board of Control recognised the match as an official Test and, as the scorecard puts it, nearly all statisticians around the world do not.

So it half exists. It occupies a slot in the sequence without being counted in it, permanently, in a way no other Test does.

Nobody was inventing anything

This is the part worth sitting with. The one-day international now pays for most of the professional game. It funded the World Cup, then the Champions Trophy, then everything that grew out of both, and eventually the shorter format that replaced it as the sport’s commercial engine.

It exists because four administrators needed to give a Melbourne crowd something to watch on a Tuesday, and the quickest available answer was a shortened game between two teams who were already in the city with nothing to do.

Nobody in that room wrote down what was said. There is no minute, no memorandum, no statement of intent. Whether anyone present thought the fixture would be repeated, let alone that it would reorganise the finances of the sport within a decade, is not recorded and cannot now be recovered.

What the two cards hold between them

One says abandoned, with a toss, two teams and no cricket. The other says ODI number 1, with a crowd figure, a gate receipt and twenty-two debutants.

They were played four days and one rest day apart, at the same ground, by more or less the same men, and the second only happened because the first did not.

Lou Rowan and Tom Brooks stood in both. Rowan had been the other umpire at the 1963 Brisbane Test while a colleague at square leg ended a bowler’s career, and here he was again, umpiring the first match of a format nobody had a name for yet.

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No. 1 in The Rain Rule, a series of 9.

NextThe number everybody remembers