The summer tour of 1953 saw England venture to far off lands of South America but in their first match they experienced a monsoon! Torrential rain forced the referee to end proceedings in the 25th minute after the pitch became unplayable.

The England officials tried desperately to rearrange the game, asking if they could replay it in the next three days. Unfortunately, their Argentine counterparts would not agree, stating that the pitch 'would not be ready for at least five days'. So, England moved on to Chile.

For two England debutants, Tommy Taylor and Johnny Berry, it had certainly been a memorable first game but, for all the wrong reasons!
  

The pitch became waterlogged following a cloudburst and British referee Arthur Ellis, up to his ankles in water, had no alternative but to abandon the game. Three days earlier an Argentinean X1 had beaten an FA X1 3-1 in an unofficial international watched by a crowd of 120,000 including Juan Peron and his wife, Eva. The selectors had to wait to see if the new left wing partnership of Manchester United team-mates Tommy Taylor and Johnny Berry would work at international level. Referee Arthur Ellis, later to make a name for himself in television's 'It's A Knockout', was quite a joker. As he signalled for the teams to return to the dressing-rooms, he said to Billy Wright, "If we stay out any longer we'll need lifeboats!" The pitch just disappeared under a lake of water, and England's kit was so wet that the players needed help from the training staff to strip off.
   

Source Notes

TheFA.com
Original newspaper reports
Rothman's Yearbooks
Mike Payne's England: The Complete Post-War Record (Breedon Books Publishing Company, Derby, U.K., 1993)
Norman Giller, Football Author
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CG