The match with no last day

The fifth Test at Durban in March 1939 had no scheduled end. It was to be played to a finish, which is what timeless meant, and both sides had agreed to it because England led the series 1–0 and South Africa needed a result.

It began on a Friday.

What ten days produced

South Africa made 530. Pieter van der Bijl batted 428 minutes for 125 and Dudley Nourse 364 minutes for 103.

England replied with 316 and followed nobody, because in a timeless Test there is no hurry and no follow-on worth enforcing. South Africa batted again and made 481, Alan Melville scoring 103 and Bruce Mitchell 89.

England needed 696 to win in the fourth innings, which no side had ever made.

They went after it. Paul Gibb batted 451 minutes for 120 and hit two fours in all that time. Bill Edrich made 219 in 460 minutes. Wally Hammond made 140. Eddie Paynter made 75.

On the tenth day England were 654 for five.

Full scorecard: South Africa v England, 5th Test, Durban, 3–14 March 1939 →

Forty-two runs

They needed 42 more with five wickets standing.

It rained. The players came off. And the England team had a train to catch that evening to Cape Town, in order to board the mailship home, and the ship was not going to wait.

The captains agreed to abandon the match. It is recorded as a draw.

The arithmetic of the thing

Twelve calendar days. Nine of play, two rest days, one washout on the eighth.

1,981 runs. Five thousand four hundred and forty-seven balls, bowled in eight-ball overs. Five South African bowlers and four English ones conceded a hundred or more.

Hedley Verity bowled 95.6 overs in the match. Norman Gordon bowled 92.2 and took one wicket for 256 runs across the two England innings.

And no result.

The two innings nobody quotes

Paul Gibb made 120. He faced bowling for seven and a half hours and hit two boundaries.

Two. In four hundred and fifty-one minutes.

It is possibly the slowest hundred ever made in a Test and nobody has ever written a paragraph about it, because the match it belongs to swallowed everything smaller than itself.

What the format was for

The timeless Test existed to guarantee an answer. If a match could not be finished in the allotted days, the argument went, then extend the days until somebody won.

Durban is the demonstration that the logic does not close. A pitch prepared to last five days will last ten if you ask it to, and two sides who both bat well enough will simply keep batting. The format could not produce a result because the thing preventing a result was never the clock.

No timeless Test has been played since. The experiment ended here, on the grounds that if ten days is not enough then no number is.

The other thing that ended

The Second World War began in September, six months later. Hedley Verity, who bowled ninety- six overs in this match, died of wounds in Italy in 1943.

Several men on that card never played a Test again for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket, which makes the ten days read differently than they did at the time.

What nobody wrote down

Whether England would have got the 42.

They had five wickets and a set batsman in Les Ames. The pitch had taken 1,981 runs and was not obviously deteriorating. Every account written since assumes England were going to win, and no account written at the time says so, because the people there had spent ten days learning not to predict anything about that match.

The card says match drawn, and the phrase does the same work it does for a rained- off Tuesday at Old Trafford. It is the only category available, and it is the wrong shape for what happened.

••••••

No. 2 in Unrepeatable, a series of 22.

NextThe man at the other end