Along the ground

Bruce Edgar was at the non-striker’s end on 102 not out.

He had batted through the whole New Zealand innings, 141 balls for a hundred in a run chase, and he was twenty-two yards away with no say in what happened next.

The last over

Fifteen were needed from six balls. Trevor Chappell was bowling.

Richard Hadlee hit the first for four, then was leg before to the second. Ian Smith took two off the third and two off the fourth, and was bowled by the fifth.

Brian McKechnie walked out with seven required to win and six to tie, off one delivery.

Greg Chappell, the Australian captain, told his brother to bowl it underarm along the ground.

Full scorecard: Australia v New Zealand, 3rd final, MCG, 1 February 1981 →

It was legal

That is the part people forget. Underarm bowling was permitted under the Laws in 1981, provided the batsman was informed, and the umpires were told. Donald Weser and Peter Cronin signalled it to McKechnie, who took guard and blocked a ball rolling along the turf, and then threw his bat away.

Australia won by six runs. They led the best-of-five finals 2–1.

The New Zealand prime minister called it an act of cowardice. The Australian prime minister called it contrary to the traditions of the game. It was raised in both parliaments.

Within days the Law was amended. Underarm bowling is now prohibited in every form of the game unless both sides agree beforehand, which nobody does.

The ledger nobody reads

Greg Chappell made 90 with the bat and took three for 43 with it. He was, by a distance, the best player on the field that day and he is remembered for six inches of grass.

Trevor Chappell’s figures read ten overs, no maidens, 57 runs, two wickets. Both wickets came in the final over, and he took them while the game was still a contest.

Edgar’s 102 not out is the highest score in the match and is not mentioned in any account of it that runs shorter than a thousand words.

Why it happened

This is the part that has never been settled.

Chappell has said since that he was exhausted, that he had been playing continuously for months, that he had asked to be rested and been refused, and that he was not thinking clearly. He has also said, repeatedly, that it was wrong and that he regrets it.

What he has never done is explain the decision as a decision. There is no account in which he weighed the options and chose this one. Every version he has given describes it as something that happened to him rather than something he did, which is not the same as an explanation and has never satisfied anybody, including him.

What the card cannot separate

The last delivery is recorded as a dot ball.

No run, no wicket, no extra. In the columns it is indistinguishable from the thousands of other dot balls bowled in one-day international number 113, and from every dot ball bowled before or since.

The scorecard has categories for wides, no-balls, byes and leg byes. It has no category for a delivery that was legal, decisive, and the reason the Law had to be rewritten.

Eleven years later

The same ground staged the World Cup final in which Wasim Akram bowled two deliveries that are remembered for the opposite reason.

Two balls at the MCG that everybody can describe, a decade apart. One of them is the finest piece of fast bowling in the history of one-day cricket. The other did not leave the ground.

••••••

No. 5 in Unrepeatable, a series of 22.

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