Largely forgotten match saw both teams score at more than seven an over, something which is now more commonplace

When England successfully chased a target of 359 to win the third ODI against Pakistan at Bristol last month it was the third time in five days that both teams in an unabbreviated ODI had scored at seven or more runs an over. Never in the history of cricket had it happened thrice in a single week but increasingly high-scoring has come to seem commonplace, assisted by powerplays, fielding restrictions, multiple new balls and countless technical and physical improvements and innovations.

In 1,322 ODI innings in the 20 years following the first ODI in January 1971, despite many of them lasting 60 or 55 overs, the score of 300 was reached only 22 times (that is once every 60 innings); by the time the sun set on 11 May, and despite none of them lasting more than 50 overs, there had been 24 scores of 300-plus in 2019 at a rate of one in five.

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The transformation of the one-day game has been long and meandering but the search for the first ODI of the recognisably modern style, the very first game in which runs were scored at the kind of rate that was once considered superhuman and is now considered almost quotidian, is not impossible. The surprise is that even in a sport as obsessed with precedent and history as cricket, the game that best fits the bill has been practically forgotten.

Even at the time nobody took much notice. It must have seemed like a wild anomaly, the last fixture of Sri Lanka’s 1986-87 tour of India and so perhaps explicable as a few demob-happy sportsmen getting out of hand at Mumbai. When India Today published a summary of the tour at the end of January 1987 its final game was not even mentioned, the entire series dismissed as an experience that “could at best be regarded as batting and bowling practice for the Indians”.

When Reuters, in its report on the match, sought an adjective to describe Sri Lanka’s run chase the best it could come up with was “gallant”, while Wisden went with “brave”. This was after the team became the third in the history of ODI cricket, after West Indies’ wild thrashing of India in Jamshedpur in 1983 and the Indians themselves that very morning, to score at seven-an-over-or-above across an innings lasting more than 30 overs, and the first to do it batting second (something that next happened in 1997, and then again in 2006).

India would have to wait another nine years before they first scored 300 or more off 50 overs; that day they scored 299 off 40. In the four previous ODIs in the series 1,357 runs had been scored at 4.40 an over; in the final fixture 588 runs were scored at 7.35, with Sri Lanka making 289 for seven off their 40.

This was the first game in the history of ODI cricket in which two teams batted their full allocation of overs while scoring a run a ball or more. At that point the only vaguely comparable matches were India’s in Lahore on New Year’s Eve 1982, which was rained off after the 27th over of India’s innings, Pakistan’s against New Zealand in Faisalabad in November 1984, which was turned into the first Twenty20 international because of a morning downpour, and England’s against India in January 1985, the first international cricket match in Chandigarh and a game that would probably have been cancelled due to an overnight thunderstorm were it not for the fact that – in the words of the Guardian’s Matthew Engel – “a total abandonment in conditions that had improved into bright sunshine would probably have caused a riot, and the teams knew what was good for them”.

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They got 15 overs each and “the game that resulted was inevitably one of slogs, snicks and leg-byes, with little dignity and less art; cricket for people who do not like cricket much”.

With Indian attention turning to the imminent visit by Pakistan, whose first ODI was 10 days away, everyone seemed too busy to notice that history was being played out in front of them. They saw a first one-day century from the 23-year-old Mohammad Azharuddin (like his second and his third, he got 108). It was the second time an Indian had scored a century at more than a run a ball, after Kapil Dev’s unbeaten 175 against Zimbabwe at the 1983 World Cup, when India were on their way to the trophy and Zimbabwe, having beaten Australia in their first game, were engaged in what amounted to little more than an extended victory lap.

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Kris Srikkanth’s 27-ball 46 was the first innings by an Indian opener at a strike rate above 150 (the next eight entries on the list are all Sachin Tendulkar). Sri Lanka’s Roshan Mahanama was 20 years old, 12 games into a 213-match ODI career and had never scored more than 26 runs, or any total at more than a run a ball; by the time he was run out at Mumbai he had smashed 98 off 91 (though India won, Mahanama was the man of the match).

Asanka Gurusinha was 21, playing the 14th of this 147 ODIs, and hit 52 off 34 balls at a strike rate of 152.94, an innings without equal in his career (he averaged a strike rate of 60.88, rising to 73.62 when he scored 50 or more). Kapil Dev, bowling off a shortened run-up and at reduced pace with his thigh strapped, went at 7.55 an over, the fourth-worst figures of his 225-game ODI career (in terms of economy it was also Madan Lal’s second-worst display, Ashantha de Mel’s second-worst and Ravi Ratnayeke’s fourth-worst; the spinner Shivlal Yadav, nine days before his 30th birthday, went at 7.40 an over and never played another ODI; such was the chaos that the Sri Lanka spinner Don Anurasiri never bowled at all).

With Sri Lanka 34 runs from victory and on course to achieve it, De Mel was bowled by Kapil, bringing Ravi Ratnayeke out to partner the unrelated Rumesh Ratnayake, and Ravi’s puzzlingly pedestrian contribution of five runs off 11 balls proved decisive. The tourists ran out of time still 11 runs from victory. Despite Ravi’s efforts this was the only time in the 20th century that both teams in a match of 40 or more overs had ended their innings with a run rate above seven (by contrast, it happened four times in England matches between the start of 2019 and the start of the World Cup). The game’s place in history was secure, even if its place in memory, it seems, was not.

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