The number everybody remembers

Brian McMillan pushed the last ball of the 1992 World Cup semi-final to midwicket and ran a single. The crowd at the SCG was already leaving.

The scoreboard behind him said South Africa needed 22.

How they got there

South Africa won the toss and fielded. England made 252 for six, Graeme Hick scoring 83 and Dermot Reeve 25 not out from 14 balls at the end.

England batted 45 overs, not 50. Their innings was cut because South Africa had not bowled their overs by 6:10pm, the rescheduled close of the innings. Five overs were removed from the side that was batting, as a penalty on the side that was bowling.

South Africa then chased 253 in 45 and were going well. Andrew Hudson made 46, Jonty Rhodes 43 from 38, Adrian Kuiper 36. With 13 balls left they needed 22, which in 1992 was steep and not impossible.

Rain fell for twelve minutes.

Full scorecard: England v South Africa, 2nd semi-final, Sydney, 22 March 1992 →

The arithmetic that was applied

Under the rule then in force, overs lost to rain were deducted from the chasing side and the target was reduced by the runs scored in the bowling side’s least productive overs. England had bowled two maidens. Two overs came off South Africa’s allocation and one run came off the target.

Twenty-two from thirteen balls became twenty-two from one.

That is the number. It is on posters, in documentaries, in the title of essays about injustice in sport, and Cricinfo’s own archive still files a piece under The time South Africa needed 22 off one ball.

Except it was twenty-one

The scorecard’s match notes record it plainly. The SCG scoreboard and the television coverage both displayed 22 off 7 balls, and then 22 off 1. The actual requirement to win was 21.

Nobody corrected it at the time. The players did not know. The commentators did not know. Thirty-four years of retelling have been built on a number that was wrong on the night, by one, in the direction that made it sound worse.

It changes nothing about the outcome. Twenty-one off one ball is not more gettable than twenty-two. It changes something about how carefully the story has been handled by people who have repeated it for three decades.

The rule that came afterwards

The Duckworth-Lewis method was built in the years after this match, and Sydney 1992 is the case always cited as the reason it had to exist.

The same scorecard carries the calculation. Under the rules as they stood in 2006, Duckworth-Lewis would first have set South Africa 273 from 45 overs, and then reduced that to 257 from 43.

They finished on 232.

The method invented to correct the injustice done to South Africa at Sydney would have required them to score five more runs than the rule that actually did it.

What was actually taken from them

Not the target. The balls.

A rain rule can reduce the runs required or it can reduce the deliveries available, and the 1992 formula did almost all of the second and almost none of the first. Two overs vanished and one run came off. Duckworth-Lewis takes both sides of that seriously, which is why its number is higher and its shape is fairer.

South Africa also bowled slowly enough to cost England five overs, and were then chasing in a shortened innings partly of their own making. That part is on the card too and is almost never mentioned.

Three days later

The final was at the MCG, and Brian Aldridge, who had stood at Sydney, stood in that too. It is the match where Wasim Akram bowled two deliveries that are remembered better than anything else in the tournament.

Those two balls and this one ball are the whole of the 1992 World Cup in most people’s memory. One of them was a piece of bowling. The other was a piece of arithmetic that the scoreboard got wrong.

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No. 2 in The Rain Rule, a series of 9.

NextA hundred overs to ten