Australia Vs England Only Odi

A Test that never started

The 1970/71 Ashes tour was meant to produce the third Test of the series at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the first days of January 1971, after Brisbane and Perth had each already staged one Test. Rain got there first. Not a shower that delayed a session, but days of it, enough to make the outfield unplayable and the pitch unusable for the entire five days that had been set aside. The match was abandoned without a ball bowled, a dead loss for the Australian board, the English tourists and a Melbourne public that had bought tickets expecting Test cricket over the new year.

The two boards needed to salvage something from the wreckage, both financially and for the crowd that had already committed to a day out. What they agreed to try, on 5 January 1971, was a single limited-overs match: 40 eight-ball overs a side, a result guaranteed inside a single day. It was billed as a one-off exhibition, not the start of anything. Ray Illingworth captained England, Bill Lawry led Australia, and the sides that walked out were essentially the Test XIs, changed only by the odd enforced swap.

An experiment nobody expected to repeat

Limited-overs cricket already existed domestically. England had run the Gillette Cup since 1963 and the John Player League since 1969, both one-innings, fixed-over competitions built for county crowds and television schedules. Nobody in Melbourne that January morning thought they were watching the birth of a new international format; they thought they were watching a consolation fixture, played to fill an empty week and empty pockets. The Melbourne Cricket Ground still drew a crowd of close to 46,000, evidence that spectators liked the idea of a cricket match with a certain result by teatime even if administrators had not planned around it.

Australia won the toss and chose to field, a decision that looks unusual by later one-day convention but was unremarkable in an era before the format had developed its own tactical grammar. There was no fielding restriction, no powerplay, no coloured clothing, no white ball. Both sides wore their Test whites and used a traditional red ball across the same eight-ball over that Australian first-class cricket used at the time.

Edrich carries England

England batted first and struggled to build any real momentum against tight Australian bowling. John Edrich was the exception. He top-scored with 82 from 119 balls before he was caught late in the innings, an innings built on watchfulness rather than the aggression later ODI cricket would demand from an opener. Around him, England's middle order kept losing wickets in ones and twos: Geoff Boycott made just 8, Basil D'Oliveira ran himself out for 17, and only Alan Knott, with 24 down the order, offered Edrich any lasting support. England were bowled out for 190, Ashley Mallett and Keith Stackpole sharing three wickets each for Australia.

It was a modest total by any standard, closer to a club afternoon than a modern one-day innings, but scoring conventions were still shaped entirely by first-class cricket. Nobody in that England XI had ever batted in a format that rewarded calculated risk-taking over the accumulation that had built Test careers; the shot selection on show belonged to a different game to the one that eventually grew out of it.

Australia chase it down

Australia's reply was built on a string of useful contributions rather than one dominant innings. Ian Chappell made 60, Doug Walters 41 and Bill Lawry, opening in the position he had occupied throughout the Test series, 27. England's bowlers could not find the breakthroughs that might have made a match of it: Ray Illingworth took 3 for 50 but nobody else managed more than a single wicket. Greg Chappell and Rod Marsh were both unbeaten at the close, seeing Australia home for the loss of five wickets with 42 balls to spare. The match finished inside a single day, exactly as planned, and the result read simply: Australia won by 5 wickets.

John Edrich, despite finishing on the losing side, was named man of the match for his 82, the only substantial score of the day on either side. It was a modest honour for what was, at the time, considered a modest fixture, arranged for practical reasons and expected to be forgotten once the Ashes series resumed at the SCG.

Why it looked nothing like modern ODIs

Watching the scorecard today, almost nothing about the match resembles the one-day game that followed it. The 8-ball over, standard in Australian domestic cricket into the 1970s, meant the 40-over match packed in 320 balls rather than the 300 a 50-over game would later allow with six-ball overs. There was no restriction on where fielders could stand in the opening overs, no distinction between a powerplay and the rest of the innings, and both captains set fields as they would have in a Test match. The scoring rate on both sides, well under four an over, would be considered painfully slow by any later ODI standard, let alone a modern one.

What the match did establish, almost by accident, was that a cricket result inside a single day drew a crowd and held their attention. The administrators who had arranged it as an improvised replacement noticed that too.

The format that would not go away

The International Cricket Conference, as it was then known, did not immediately commit to a new format off the back of one experimental afternoon. But the idea did not disappear either. Within four years the first World Cup had been staged in England in 1975, played in the same 60-over, one-innings shape, and the one-day international became a fixture of every touring itinerary rather than a rain-day improvisation. The Melbourne match is now recognised as ODI number one, the starting point the sport's statisticians measure every one-day record against, from Viv Richards' unbeaten century in the 1979 World Cup final to the ties and Duckworth-Lewis calculations of later decades.

The full scorecard from that first afternoon, ball counts and all, is on this page, and you can see howEngland and Australia built their squads for the tour on the team pages. In The Chase you can put either of those XIs out in a one-day match yourself, forty overs and all, and see how differently a modern chase reads against a game that had no idea yet what it was inventing.

Sources

• CricArcade World Cup archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and partnerships on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: England in Australia 1970/71, the only ODI scorecard and report
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1972: the tour of Australia