The Ashes inspiration, overpreparation and bold tactics: a history of Australia v England two-day Tests | Geoff Lemon

"To put in context the surprise that greeted the two-day Boxing Day Test just gone, consider the rarity by arithmetic. The match in Melbourne was Test number 2,615, and was two-day Test number 27. You don't need a calculator to see that's roughly 1%. And yet we've had two such matches in the current Ashes series, plus another in Australia three years earlier. We've had half a dozen two-day Tests worldwide since 2021. What gives?"

"Nine two-day Tests fully 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 the South African team was little stronger when ripped up by Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O'Reilly in 1936."

"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 other few were in extreme conditions: India thumping England in Ahmedabad with a pink ball that plunged through the soil from the first over."

Two-day Test matches are extremely uncommon, totaling 27 of 2,615 Tests (about 1%). Nine occurred in the 1800s when pitches could become swamps or shooting galleries. Several early two-day matches involved weak, newly developing teams; examples include tri-series matches against South Africa in 1912, Australia's routs of new West Indies in 1932 and New Zealand in 1946, and South Africa's heavy defeat in 1936. No two-day Tests occurred from just after the second world war until the 2000s. A few reappeared in 2000 and 2002, and more recently involving Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and extreme pitch failures in Ahmedabad, Brisbane and Cape Town. Two recent Ashes Tests were two-day matches.

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