Australia v England 1st Test

A match with no name yet

Two touring English elevens had already played various Australian combinations through the 1870s, but the match that began at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 15 March 1877 was different in one respect: for the first time, a full-strength England team, captained by James Lillywhite, met a full-strength Australian eleven, captained by Dave Gregory, on level terms. Nobody called it a Test match at the time; that word would only attach itself to fixtures like this one years later, once people started counting backwards to work out where the whole thing had begun. It is now recognised as the first Test match ever played.

Gregory won the toss and chose to bat. Every one of the twenty-two cricketers on the field, eleven English professionals and eleven Australians drawn mostly from Victoria and New South Wales, was playing what is now regarded as his first Test. Alfred Shaw opened the England bowling to Charles Bannerman, and with the very first delivery of the match faced in this new form of the game, the contest that would eventually be given a name of its own was under way.

Bannerman's innings

It began badly for Australia. Nat Thomson was out for 1 with the score on 2, and although Tom Horan added 38 with Bannerman for the second wicket, Australia had lost three men by 41. From there Bannerman batted almost alone. He put on 77 with Bransby Cooper for the fourth wicket, then 24 with Billy Midwinter, then 54 with the wicketkeeper Jack Blackham for the seventh, farming the strike and playing every kind of shot the ground had to offer while partners came and went around him.

He reached three figures, the first century scored in a Test match, and kept going. On 165, with 18 fours to his name, he was struck on the hand by a ball from George Ulyett that split a finger open, and he had to retire; he did not bat again in the match. His 165 was more than two thirds of Australia's eventual total, and remained by some distance the highest individual score in Test cricket for years afterwards. Tom Garrett added an unbeaten 18 at the tail, and Australia were all out for 245, nine wickets down with Bannerman retired hurt and Garrett unbeaten, Alfred Shaw and James Southerton sharing six of the nine wickets to fall.

England's reply

England's innings had none of the same shape. Harry Jupp anchored one end for a patient 63 before he was given lbw, and the last man in, Allen Hill, played the most fluent innings of the reply, an unbeaten 35 that came at close to a run a ball by the standards of the day. In between, though, England lost wickets steadily to the Australian bowling. Billy Midwinter, a cricketer who would go on to play for both countries in the years that followed, bowled 54 four-ball overs in the innings and finished with 5 for 78, the best figures of the innings, while Tom Garrett and Tom Kendall picked up two and one respectively.

England were bowled out for 196, a deficit of 49, and the match that had begun with one long individual innings now turned into a contest between bat and ball in which no batter on either side could truly settle.

The collapse

Australia's second innings fell apart almost as completely as their first had flourished. Bannerman, unable to grip the bat properly after his injury, made only 4 before he was bowled, and by the time the score reached 35 Australia had lost five wickets. Billy Midwinter dug in for 17, and last man John Hodges made a defiant 8, but Australia were all out for just 104. Alfred Shaw took 5 for 38 in the innings, George Ulyett 3 for 39, and what had looked in the first innings like a match Australia would dominate now looked like one they might lose. Their overall lead, 245 plus 104 against England's 196, stood at 153. England needed 154 to win the first Test match ever played.

Kendall finishes it

It should have been gettable. Instead England's second innings began in disarray. Allen Hill, so fluent with the bat in the first innings, was caught for 0 without a run on the board, Andrew Greenwood followed for 5, and Harry Jupp, England's most reliable batter all match, was out lbw for 4. England were 3 for 20, then 4 for 22, chasing a target that had briefly looked routine. John Selby top-scored with 38 and George Ulyett made 24, but the middle and lower order could not build a partnership of any substance against Tom Kendall, the Australian left-armer who bowled unchanged through long spells and finished with 7 for 55. England were all out for 108. Australia had won the first Test match by 45 runs, a margin that has been recalculated and re-quoted in every history of the game written since.

What nobody knew yet

Nobody at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877 went home thinking they had watched history. It was simply an England touring team beaten by a good Australian eleven in a match that took four playing days. The label Test match, and the retrospective numbering that makes this fixture the first of more than two thousand five hundred played since, came only with hindsight, as the format proved durable enough to be repeated, first sporadically and then, from the 1880s onward, as a settled fixture between the two countries. Charles Bannerman's 165 retired hurt stood as the highest score in Test cricket for years, Tom Kendall's second-innings bowling remains the performance that won the match, and both England and Australia would return to the same ground and the same rivalry many times over the century and a half that followed.

The full scorecard on this page carries every dismissal, partnership and bowling figure from all four innings. You can read more about the sides that met that week on the Australia and England team pages, and in The Follow-On you can pick either eleven and try to do what Kendall and Bannerman did in Melbourne in 1877.

Sources

• CricArcade Test archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and partnerships on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: Australia v England, 1st Test 1876/77, Melbourne, full scorecard
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the first Test match, Melbourne 1877