Headingley '81 — Cricket's Most Improbable Comeback

At lunch on the fourth day of the third Test at Headingley in 1981, a bookmaker put England's odds of winning at 500-1. Two Australian players thought that was funny enough to bet on it themselves.

How bad it actually was

Australia had posted 401-9 in their first innings. England were bowled out for 174 and made to follow on — batting again, still 227 runs behind, with a genuine chance of an innings defeat. This was before England's spectacular comeback even started; at that point, the match wasn't close to competitive.

Dennis Lillee and Rodney Marsh, two of the best players Australia had, put a combined fifteen pounds on England to win. Not because they thought it would happen. Because 500-1 was too absurd to pass up as a joke bet between teammates.

The innings that changed the odds

Ian Botham didn't score cautiously. He came in with England still deep in trouble and played what's remembered as one of the great counter-attacking Test innings — 149 not out, with 27 fours and one six, refusing to play the situation safely even as the target for a respectable score kept moving. He put on 117 for the eighth wicket, then 67 for the ninth, then 37 for the tenth, dragging England to a total that gave Australia something to chase: 130 to win.

The bowling spell that finished it

That should still have been an easy target. Bob Willis made sure it wasn't. He took 8 wickets for 43 runs, bowling Australia out for 111 and handing England an 18-run win — only the second time in Test history a team had won a match after following on.

England went on to win that Ashes series 3-1. Lillee and Marsh, for the record, never collected on their bet — Ladbrokes reportedly refused to pay out on the grounds that players betting on their own match created an obvious conflict of interest. They'd correctly predicted the shape of the story, just not in the way either of them wanted to be right.