South Africa v England 5th Test

A match with no clock

For most of the first sixty years of Test cricket, a match was played to a finish. If five days were not enough, the teams kept going: six, seven, as many as it took for one side to force a result or for both to agree there was no time left to find one. South Africa had used the rule for years at home, reasoning that only a match played to a finish could truly settle a series. In March 1939, at Kingsmead in Durban, that idea met its limit.

The fifth and final Test of England's tour arrived with England 1-0 up in the series, having won earlier in the tour with the other three Tests drawn, and South Africa needed to win to level it. Alan Melville won the toss for the home side and chose to bat first on a pitch that would barely wear in the days that followed. Nobody involved could have known that they were about to play what remains the longest first-class match ever staged, and that it would still, in the end, be a draw.

South Africa bat, twice over

South Africa's first innings was built on two big stands. Pieter van der Bijl and Alan Melville put on 131 for the first wicket, Melville making 78 before he trod on his own stumps, and van der Bijl went on to 125. Lower down, Dudley Nourse made 103 and Ronnie Grieveson, the wicketkeeper, played the innings of his life, 75, out bowled at the end of a modest tail. South Africa were bowled out for 530, Reg Perks taking 5 for 100 for England.

England replied with 316, Eddie Paynter making 62 and Les Ames 84, but South Africa's bowlers, led by Eric Dalton's 4 for 59, kept the deficit to 214. Batting again, South Africa piled on another 481, all out a second time rather than declared. Van der Bijl made 97 this time, Melville a second century, 103, and Ken Viljoen 74, with Bruce Mitchell opening with 89. England were left needing 696 runs to win the match, a number that had never been chased down in the history of the game and never has been since.

Edrich and the mountain of runs

England had a week left, and they went after the total. Paul Gibb and Leonard Hutton put on 78 for the first wicket, and then Bill Edrich, who had struggled for runs all tour, found the innings that saved his Test career. He batted for hours, driving and cutting on an unresponsive pitch, and reached 219, the highest score of the match. Edrich and Gibb added 280 together for the second wicket, still one of the biggest stands in the long history of England versus South Africa, before Gibb fell for 120. Wally Hammond, the England captain, then made 140, though his own stand with Edrich was a much shorter 89 for the third wicket before Edrich himself was out.

Hutton had made 55 and Eddie Paynter 75 lower down, and by the close of the ninth day England had reached 654 for 5, only 42 runs short of an outcome that would have been the biggest successful run chase in Test history to that point. Les Ames and Bryan Valentine were still there, unbeaten, with the game apparently there to be won.

Hammond sets off after 696

What made the chase possible was the timeless rule itself. No side, before or since, had needed to survive quite this long to force a result, and Hammond knew his batters had the time to build the innings the way they wanted, without needing to force the pace against the clock. South Africa's bowling was steady rather than dangerous, and the pitch at Kingsmead, prepared for a match with no fixed length, simply refused to deteriorate. Ten days into the Test, England were still batting, still hunting a target that would have been unthinkable on any normal pitch in any normal match.

Rain and a shrinking timetable

The match had already been given two rest days along the way, and the ninth day itself was lost to rain, eating into the time England had left. Even a timeless Test was not entirely without a limit: England's ship home, the Athlone Castle, was due to sail from Cape Town, and the players had booked passage on it. The tour selectors and the South African board had set 14 March as the last possible day of play, reckoning that any later start would leave no way for the England party to reach the docks in time.

Play resumed on the tenth day with England 654 for 5, still 42 short, still with early wickets in hand. But the tenth day was the last one available, whatever the position when the clock, for once in a timeless Test, finally ran out.

The boat that decided it

There was no thrilling finish, no last-wicket stand, no diving catch to settle it. Play simply had to stop. With England 654 for 5, 42 runs short of the target and with early rain having already cost playing time, the umpires and both captains agreed the match would be abandoned as a draw so that the England party could catch their train to Cape Town and their boat home. The scorecard shows the match ending mid-innings, an ordinary declaration of a very unusual kind: not a captain's decision, but a travel timetable.

England, needing only to avoid defeat to hold their series lead, got exactly that: the match finished drawn, like three of the four before it, and England won the rubber one match to nil. It was an anticlimactic way to settle a five-Test series, but it was also, in its own way, fitting: a format built to guarantee a result had finally produced a match that no schedule on earth could finish.

The last of its kind

The Durban Test remains the longest first-class match ever played, ten days of cricket spread across twelve calendar days, and it produced 1,981 runs for the loss of 35 wickets. It was also close to the last of its kind. The Second World War stopped Test cricket for seven years, and when it resumed, timeless Tests were gone; every board had agreed that a match should be played to a fixed number of days, whatever the result. No Test has been scheduled without a set length since.

The full scorecard, with every one of the ten innings totals across four completed innings and the fall of wickets along the way, is on this page. You can see how both sides were built on the South Africa and England team pages, and in The Follow-On you can pick either XI and bat out a Test of your own, on a fixed clock this time.

Sources

• CricArcade Test archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and partnerships on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: England in South Africa 1938/39, fifth Test scorecard and report
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1940: the tour of South Africa