Melbourne 1971: How a Washed-Out Ashes Test Gave Cricket Its First One-Day International

The first One-Day International was not planned. It was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Tuesday 5 January 1971, on what should have been the last day of the third Test of England's Ashes tour, because rain had made that Test impossible. Australia beat England by five wickets. The match was arranged in a hurry, treated lightly by some of the players who took part, and watched by 46,006 people. This piece looks at how it came about, what happened on the day, and why an improvised fixture turned out to matter.

A Test that never started

The third Test was scheduled for 31 December 1970 and 1, 2, 4 and 5 January 1971. England captain Ray Illingworth won the toss and chose to field, but rain arrived before a ball could be bowled. There was no play on the first two scheduled days, and on the third the match was abandoned altogether.

The washout left two problems. Spectators had been denied their New Year cricket, and the authorities faced a heavy financial loss. After a meeting between the Australian Board and the touring MCC management, the English and Australian authorities agreed two things: an extra Test would be added to the tour, and the final scheduled day of the lost Test would be used for a one-day match between the two sides. Illingworth later recalled that the manager had "a chat with Don Bradman" about the idea.

The format: 40 overs of eight balls

Each side was allowed 40 overs, and the overs were of eight balls. That detail is easy to overlook. Forty eight-ball overs is 320 legal deliveries per innings, which is 20 more than a modern 50-over innings of six-ball overs. Measured in balls, the first ODI was slightly longer than the format it eventually settled into, even though it carried a smaller over count.

Every player on both sides was making his ODI debut, for the obvious reason that no such match had existed before.

The match

Australia won the toss and chose to field. England were bowled out for 190 in 39.4 overs, two balls short of their allocation. The innings rested heavily on John Edrich, who made 82, the first half-century in ODI cricket. Edrich also hit four of the seven fours in England's whole innings, a figure that says a good deal about how hard boundaries were to come by. Geoffrey Boycott, by contrast, scored 8 from 37 balls before he was out.

Spin did much of the damage: six of the ten English wickets fell to Australia’s slow bowlers. Without a second big contribution to support Edrich, England’s total looked modest even by the standards of the day.

Australia’s reply was steered by Ian Chappell, who top-scored with 60. They passed England’s total for the loss of five wickets with 42 of their 320 balls still unused, which in the eight-ball overs of the day was a little over five overs to spare. Edrich, despite finishing on the losing side, received the match award, the first in ODI history.

The crowd that changed minds

The most striking number from the day is not a score. The attendance was 46,006, at the same ground where Test cricket itself had begun 94 years earlier. For an event put together in a hurry, after rain had already wiped out the scheduled Test days, that was a remarkable turnout.

Not everyone in the middle saw it as a landmark. Illingworth said England “didn’t take the game particularly seriously”, and the Australian off-spinner Ashley Mallett later recalled that his side thought the game “a bit of a joke”. The writer E. W. Swanton took a different view, observing that there was “clearly a great future for this sort of thing”.

Why it mattered

What Melbourne showed was that a limited-overs match could work between national teams and could draw a big paying crowd on its own terms, not merely as a stopgap. The match was an answer to a financial and public-relations problem, and the size of the crowd suggested to administrators that the answer might be worth repeating.

The follow-up came quickly. When Australia toured England in 1972, the itinerary included one-day internationals alongside the Tests. In 1975 the first men’s World Cup was played, and West Indies won it by beating Australia in the final. Within four and a half years, a fixture invented to rescue a rained-off Test had grown into a global tournament.

What the first ODI tells us

Looking back, several features of 5 January 1971 read as early signs of what one-day cricket would become. The format was shaped by commercial need as much as by sporting design. The crowd, rather than the players, was the first to embrace it. And the cricket itself looked like a shortened Test: a top-order anchor in Edrich, few boundaries, and spinners taking the majority of the wickets. The hitting, fielding restrictions and coloured clothing that define the modern game came later, after boards had been persuaded that the audience was there.

That persuasion began on a damp Tuesday in Melbourne, with a match nobody had planned, two teams who were not sure it counted for much, and 46,006 people who evidently thought it did.