0-113... then Warnie’s text: What happened to forgotten Aussie at centre of craziest ODI in history

Having been blasted all over the Wanderers by Herschelle Gibbs and co. on his way to an unwanted slice of history, only a text from an Australian cricket legend could lift Mick Lewis’ spirits.

With South Africa having motored down Australia’s world record total of 4/434 with one wicket and one ball to spare in front of a euphoric Johannesburg crowd, Lewis dared to check his phone once back in the safety of a shell-shocked visitors dressing room.

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Arguably the greatest ODI match ever played wrapped up in the early hours of the morning Australian time, meaning that the Victorian quick’s phone was yet to blow up with texts and calls from back home.

In what turned out to be his final outing in Australian gold, Lewis conceded 113 runs, without a wicket, from his ten overs.

It was the record at the time for the worst figures in ODI history and Lewis knew he would be a man in demand.

But one of Lewis’ state teammates concocted the perfect escape plan from the spotlight that was about to shine on him.

“I remember ‘Warnie’ texted me. He was at the hotel because he was over there for the Test match,” Lewis recalled to foxsports.com.au.

“He texted me ‘how are you feeling?’. I said I’d had better days. So, he replied, ‘when you get back to the hotel, come up to my room and let’s have a beer’.”

So, that is exactly what Lewis, and the King of Spin did.

They sat back in Warne’s Johannesburg hotel room, knocked back a few cold ones and chewed the fat to take Lewis’ mind off the day that was.

Warne was only four days away from playing the first Test of the 2006 series – which Australia would win 3-0 after winning 2-0 on home soil a couple of months earlier - in Cape Town.

While Lewis would be flying home to Melbourne in a few days’ time.

It was a situation Warne knew all too well.

Three years earlier the leg spinning icon had left South Africa shattered after a positive test for a banned substance ruled out of the 2003 World Cup as he was suspended for a year.

There would not be the same level of scrutiny of Lewis, but he knew the questions were coming with reporters waiting outside international arrivals at Sydney Airport.

“I got off the plane, and the bloke asked me and I said ‘look, I just had a bad day at the office. Everyone has them and we move on. That’s life’,” Lewis recalled to foxsports.com.au.

With a Test series to crack on with, the spotlight on Lewis vanished quickly.

The late bloomer from country Victoria, who debuted for his state at age 25 having only moved to Melbourne to play premier cricket a few years earlier, was 31 years old at the time but did not have a lot of cricket left him in.

Having played seven ODIs and two T20Is, Lewis never played for Australia again and lost his Cricket Australia contract shortly after Johannesburg.

An injury plagued home summer followed, and Lewis’ Victorian career came to an end in 2007.

Aside from a brief comeback in the Big Bash with Western Australia – when the T20 competition was state-based rather than city-based – Lewis faded into relative obscurity.

After his playing days, he became Victoria’s bowling coach and is currently an assistant with English county side Yorkshire.

Lewis’ off broadway status meant that his involvement in the world record game was largely confined the annals of cricket history.

“I never really thought about the game until people started asking me questions five, ten years later,” he said.

“It was an amazing game. I think the famous quote was Jacques Kallis walked off and said, ‘they’re 20 short’. I think he proved to be right in the end.

“At the time, it was chaos everywhere. It was a great game to be a part of.”

South Africa’s world record no longer stands.

In fact, it only lasted a little less than four months.

But at least, it lasted longer than a little less than four hours like Australia’s did.

After winning the toss and electing to bat, Australian captain Ricky Ponting set out to recreate his heroics from the World Cup final on the same ground three years earlier.

Having put India to the sword with a match-winning unbeaten 140, Ponting brought up a new personal best in ODIs with a breathtaking knock of 164 off 105 balls.

He blasted nine sixes and smacked 13 fours as Michael Hussey (81 off 51), Simon Katich (79 off 90) and Adam Gilchrist (55 off 44) chipped in with half-centuries.

The Australian innings felt like it was being played in overdrive as the tourists smashed the previous world record score by 36 runs.

In doing so, Ponting’s men became the first side to surpass 400 in an ODI.

You could not blame them for thinking they were home and hosed halfway through the series finale.

“It was a five-game series, and we lost the first two, but then we won in Durban and Port Elizabeth, so we were pretty confident,” Lewis recalled.

“But then we knew with what we were doing and the conditions at the Bullring that it was a pretty good wicket. We thought if we could take early wickets we could put them under pressure.

“Maybe we were slightly overconfident because maybe we thought we’d just go out there, they’re going to have to come hard at us, we’ll get some early wickets and it’ll be okay.

“They came hard all right and they kept coming harder and harder.”

As Lewis mentioned earlier, a conversation that happened in the South African dressing room after the first innings became the stuff of legend.

Old teammates of Jacques Kallis say that the champion all-rounder was typically a quite reserved character, but his quip about the Australians being “20 short” lit a fire under Graeme Smith’s men.

The South African skipper got his side off to a flyer with a rapid innings of 90 off 55 deliveries.

But Smith’s exploits were overshadowed by No.3 Herschelle Gibbs’ mind-blowing knock.

The dashing right-hander smashed 175 off 111, including 21 fours and seven sixes.

It came out later that Gibbs woke up a little dusty that morning after a night in the hotel bar.

He had scored two half-centuries in his last 12 ODI innings and played with freedom to devastating effect.

“The thing with that ground is, because of the high altitude, as soon as you hit it, it’s just keeps going,” Lewis said.

“I think he was on his last legs in that side, so he went out there and he had nothing to lose. He played with no fear, and I think if he didn’t get runs that game he was going to be dropped.

“It’s a dangerous person when they’ve got no fear to come out and play like that.”

Gibbs’ destruction could have been limited, however.

“There were a few half chances there. Nathan Bracken dropped Herschelle Gibbs off me when he was on 103,” Lewis recalled.

“He takes that and it could be a whole different ball game.”

Gibbs also could have piled on even more pain.

He fell to Andrew Symonds with 18.1 overs remaining in the innings.

No man had scored an ODI double hundred at that point in time, Gibbs had a score of 250+.

South Africa still needed 136 runs to win when Gibbs departed.

Wicketkeeper Mark Boucher (50* off 43) and all-rounder Johan van der Wath (35 off 18) played key hands to get their side over the line.

Lewis, who had spent time in England with Durham and Glamorgan, had harnessed a reputation as a fine bowler in both county cricket and for Victoria.

He bowled three of the last seven overs of South Africa’s innings, conceding 42 runs from those 18 balls.

Van der Wath launched him high into the stands on several occasions, and Lewis believed it exposed an issue that would come to bite Australia multiple times in the coming years.

“I think that’s where Australia was a little bit behind with T20 because we didn’t embrace it early like other nations,” Lewis said.

“In the UK, they’d been playing it for a few years, and I think a lot of South Africans, as overseas professionals, had played a lot of T20.

“Whereas I think it took Australia a while to embrace the T20 game and we just thought it was a bit of fun, mickey mouse.

“Obviously, you fast forward 20 years and it’s quite a lucrative industry.”

Brett Lee bowled the final over but was unable to salvage Australia when South Africa needed seven runs to win, or six to tie from the last six balls.

Lee looked like he might do the unthinkable when Andrew Hall was caught by Michael Clarke at mid on.

Hall had hit the previous delivery for four, and South Africa were left needing two to win from three balls with No.11 Makhaya Ntini arriving at the crease.

Ntini managed to run his first ball down to third man for a single to level the scores before Boucher sent the fifth ball of the final over, over mid on’s head for four to clinch the most unlikely of victories.

There were scenes of jubilation in Johannesburg and the locals enjoyed letting the Australians know that they had somehow been on the losing end of one cricket’s most incredible matches.

“I remember walking through the tunnel as you go up to the changing rooms,” Lewis recalled.

“They have that Perspex glass over the top of it. They were banging on it so loud; you couldn’t hear your spikes on the concrete.”

Twenty years on from that day that ended with a few hotel room drinks with Warne, Lewis puts his unwanted record into perspective.

It is no longer his record.

Adam Zampa matched when the South Africans smashed him to all parts of Centurion in 2023.

Both Zampa and Lewis then had Glenn Maxwell to thank for giving the record to the Netherland’s Bas de Leede a little more than a month later.

Maxwell smashed a 40-ball ton – the fastest in World Cup history – and took 28 off de Leede’s final over to reach his century and give the Dutchman the unwanted record.

He conceded 115 runs from his ten overs, but he did at least grab two wickets.

At the Wanderers, Bracken was the only other Australian to bowl their full allotment of ten overs - the left-armer took a very respectable 5/67.

Lee sent down 7.5 overs, while Stuart Clark, who made his Test debut four days later, only bowled six overs.

A small caveat for Lewis was that he did not have the worst economy rate that day.

“If you look at the context of the game, Jacques Kallis bowled six overs that game and none for 70,” he said.

“Brett Lee didn’t bowl his full quota.

“That was my job in the side. At the time, pretty disappointing but you move on pretty quickly.”

Even if the record is no longer his, it is something that will always stick with Lewis.

Not that being an answer to a question at cricket club trivia nights bothers him.

“Someone’s got to have it,” Lewis said.

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