Bold tactics and dodgy wickets: a history of two-day Ashes Tests

England and Australia have met in eight of the 27 Tests to finish so quickly - here is the story of the first six

- Geoff Lemon

A historical Common Picture-St. Kilda team, whose members then enjoyed the moniker 'Reds'.

To put in context the surprise that greeted the two-day Boxing Day Test, consider the rarity by arithmetic.

The match in Melbourne was Test No 2,615 and the 27th to finish inside two days. You probably don’t need a calculator to see that is roughly 1%.

Yet we have had two such matches in this Ashes series, plus another in Australia three years ago. We’ve had half a dozen two-day Tests since 2021. What gives?

Nine two-day Tests - one-third of the total - happened in the 1800s, when pitches could become swamps or shooting galleries.

The next few mostly involved weak teams in their early years of development. Australia and England each dished one out to South Africa in the tri-series of 1912 and South Africa was little stronger when ripped up by Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O’Reilly in 1936. Australia also bashed up a West Indies team new to Test cricket in 1932 and New Zealand in 1946.

But that was it, from just after the second world war until the new millennium there was not a single two-day match. In 2000, England demolished a ghostlike West Indies at Leeds to signal the start of the Caribbean’s terminal cricket demise and Australia’s golden era team took apart Pakistan in Sharjah in 2002. Then we were back to weak emerging teams, with five two-dayers involving Zimbabwe, Afghanistan or both.

The others were in extreme conditions: India thumping England in Ahmedabad with a pink ball that plunged through the soil from the first over, South Africa greeted with a disastrously underprepared pitch at Brisbane, then offering India something similar in Cape Town. The recent Ashes pitches were the best of the lot.