One Day International

One Day International (ODI) is a format of cricket played between two teams with international status in which each team faces a fixed number of fifty overs, with games lasting up to 7 hours. The World Cup, generally held every four years, is played in this format. They are major matches and considered the highest standard of List A limited-overs competition.

The international one-day game is a late-twentieth-century development. The first ODI was played on 5 January 1971 between Australia and England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. When the first three days of the third Test were washed out, officials decided to abandon the match and instead play a one-off one day game consisting of 40 eight-ball overs per side. Australia won the game by 5 wickets. ODIs were played in white-coloured kits with a red-coloured ball.

In the late 1970s, Kerry Packer established the rival World Series Cricket competition, which introduced many of the features of One Day International cricket that are now commonplace, including coloured uniforms, matches played at night under floodlights with a white ball and dark sight screens, and for television broadcasts, multiple camera angles, effects microphones to capture sounds from the players on the pitch, and on-screen graphics. The first of the matches with coloured uniforms was the WSC Australians in wattle gold versus WSC West Indians in coral pink, played at VFL Park in Melbourne on 17 January 1979.