The 20 'Meaningless' ODIs: It Wasn't the Cricket That Lost — It Was the Calendar

Sydney, January 2026. Australia were 38 for 6 chasing 172, Paul Reiffel walked out to join Michael Bevan, and the match ended with a four off the last ball. Bevan finished 78 not out. Reiffel took 4 for 29 in the same game. No highlight reel has replayed either innings in thirty years, because it was the third ODI of a bilateral series and nobody remembers which one.

Last week I read Ahmer Naqvi's list, "Ranked: The 20 Best Meaningless ODIs of All Time." Twenty matches, one filter: none of them took place in an ICC event. Dead rubbers, ordinary bilaterals, obscure sponsored tournaments. The cricket is elite in every entry; only the context has been devalued. The author calls the list "very personal and definitely incomplete."

I read it three times — once for the cricket, once for the numbers, once for the word sitting in the title. "Meaningless" is not a description of a match. It is a description of the calendar that produced it, and the market that stopped selling it.

Bilateral ODI cricket in the 1990s and 2000s was a different organism. Sponsors named the series, not boards. The Rajkot 2026 game was played under the "KFC Presents Bank Al Falah Trophy" — India 414 for 7, Sri Lanka 411 for 8, a three-run margin. A side that made 414 won by three runs, and the match survives in any list only because it did not matter. That is where the logic of this entire conversation flips: a match with nothing at stake grants players the licence to take risks they would otherwise suppress — and the greatest one-day cricket is born from exactly that licence.

Naqvi's list is an archive of that licence, and it holds two completely different scoring regimes side by side. On one side the 400-run era — Rajkot 2026, and Auckland 2026, where New Zealand made 339 for 5 and England stopped at 335 for 9. On the other, the low-scoring scrapes — Sydney 2026's 173 against 172, and Manchester 2026's 208 for 9 against 205. Same format, same fifty overs, two different sports. That is the ODI's real strength and its real weakness: it is so elastic it never acquired a single identity.

Now the actual cricket. The most repeated element in this list is not a team but a phase: the death overs. Entry seventeen was won off the last ball. Entry sixteen was won with nine balls left. Entry nineteen was tied off the last ball. To anyone declaring the fifty-over format obsolete: which other format produces three different teams, across three different decades, dragging matches to the final delivery? T20 produces last-ball drama every week, which makes it scheduling rather than drama. In ODIs it remains rare, which is why it still registers as drama.

The list's biggest tactical lesson is not how many runs a batter makes, but how long a lower order survives. Bevan's 78 not out came from 38 for 6. Marcus Stoinis's 146 not out came from 67 for 6, and his team lost by six runs. Two endings to the same story: one lower order reached the win, the other did not. Stoinis's 146 not out is what the game calls a losing-cause stat line — it flatters the individual and hides the result. The list romanticises it, and that is where I part company. 146 not out is not evidence of Stoinis's greatness; it is evidence of an Australian collapse that one man carried alone and could not finish.

Death bowling does the same work from the other end — Moeen Ali's 4 for 46 at Manchester 2026, Reiffel's 4 for 29 at Sydney 2026. This is the part no ranking is built on, because spells fade and finishes are remembered. That is the selection bias of cricket writing, and it is worth naming.

Ross Taylor's 181 not out at Dunedin 2026, batted through injury after reaching his century, is filed under heroism. I would file it elsewhere: batting through injury in a low-stakes bilateral is the cleanest possible failure of load management, and rewarding it as courage rewards the same instinct that has sixteen-year-olds bowling flat out at eighteen. Seventeen years of watching has shown me the pattern — where results are ranked above technique, the technical soil dries first.

Jos Buttler is the most-rewarded name on the list, with two entries: 110 not out at Manchester 2026 and 93 at Trent Bridge 2026. That is not coincidence. England's post-2026 white-ball reset made the finisher the most valuable role in the side, and the clearest marker of that reset is two Buttler innings landing in a list stretching from 2026 to 2026.

One thing the list does not say. Every winning entry belongs to the host nation — Rajkot, Auckland, Sydney, Manchester, Dunedin, Georgetown. Home advantage is the quietest character in this entire ranking. We never count hosting when we tell ODI classics, yet pitch, outfield, dew and crowd together decide whether a match reaches the last ball at all.

And one entry was decided by a crowd, not by cricket. Georgetown 2026, West Indies against Pakistan, a series clawed back from 2-0 to 2-2. Spectators invaded the field and the match referee was compelled to declare the game a tie. There was no Super Over then, so the tie was a regulatory artefact rather than a choice. That "classic" cannot be recreated under modern playing conditions and stadium security — which makes part of this list a governance relic, not a cricket one.

Here is my plainest objection. "Meaningless" is a privilege, and it was granted only to the men's game. No women's ODI was ever allowed to be meaningless, because it was never scheduled often enough to accumulate twenty dead rubbers. The number of bilateral matches that carried India's women to the 2026 World Cup final is smaller than one men's season. When you do not have twenty meaningless games, what exactly is your nostalgia supposed to be built on? A sport that was permitted to be boring that many times was, in effect, permitted to be shown that many times.

There is a pattern the author did not write down: entries cluster between 2026 and 2026 — fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen. That may be a genuine white-ball golden age, and it may be the author's own viewing prime. Both can be true. But a retrospective list that fills its largest share from the last decade should hesitate before calling itself all-time.

Then the part that stings. If these twenty matches were that good, why were they not preserved? In 2026 I called a league final off a laggy 480p stream in a Banjara Hills co-working room, twelve seconds of delay, no spotter, and a colour commentator who had never watched a women's match. I misidentified two midfielders and invented a formation that did not exist. It took me three weeks of cold-calling to work out whether the error was mine or the feed's, the feed nobody had paid to improve. A game you show at 480p is a game you price at 480p. Bilateral ODI cricket was not shown badly; it was shown less, and then declared to have no audience.

In 2026 a national digital outlet hired me for sixty-four World Cup watch-alongs. That same week I pitched those same editors a women's football vertical. The reply was one line: "the audience doesn't exist yet." I kept that email in my notes app for six years. "Meaningless" and "the audience doesn't exist" come from the same economics. Neither sentence is about the sport; both are about the investment around it.

So I read this list as a eulogy. A format whose most devoted admirers love it by calling it meaningless is already searching for a place to stand. This is audience-loss anxiety, and anxiety always accompanies a declining product.

And still, Bevan's four off the last ball at Sydney in 2026 exists. Nobody archived it, nobody re-uploaded it, no broadcaster holds a 4K copy. It lives in a scorecard and in the memory of whoever saw it live. Nobody archives the games nobody thought to broadcast.

What comes next? The 2026 home World Cup is the women's game's 2026 moment — except this time the cameras are already in place. The question is not which twenty meaningless matches were the best. It is which sport the next list gets built from, and whether its twenty matches are ones we actually watched, in full pixels rather than a frozen stream, without anyone needing to call them meaningless at all.