If you use the past perfect you are always relating the event to some later temporal focus. This temporal focus may be explicit or implicit; it may be another event you are talking about, or a time that you want to look back from, but there is some later time.
If you say "The match had been cancelled", you are looking back at the cancellation from some later time - perhaps the end of the school day, or maybe in the evening. This is perfectly grammatical, and meaningful; but if there is no context which suggests when the time is that you are choosing to look back from, and why you are making that choice, then the hearer/reader may be puzzled as to why you made that choice.