Australia vs Pakistan
2017-01-03
Azhar Ali was run out in the most bizarre fashion after assuming the ball was dead and wandering out of his crease for a chat, only for Australia to whip off the bails.
Australia vs India
6 January 2008
Harbhajan Singh was accused of racially abusing Andrew Symonds during the Sydney Test, leading to India threatening to abandon the tour and one of the ugliest diplomatic incidents in cricket history.
Australia vs India
6 January 2008
Andrew Symonds accused Harbhajan Singh of calling him a 'monkey' during the infamous Sydney Test, triggering one of cricket's biggest racial controversies.
Australia vs India
2008-01-06
Steve Bucknor's string of poor decisions in the infamous 2008 Sydney Test became so comically one-sided that even neutral fans were laughing in disbelief.
Australia vs West Indies
1993-01-05
On January 5, 1993, a 23-year-old Brian Lara made his maiden Test hundred at the SCG — and turned it into 277 off 372 balls before being run out. The innings, his fifth Test, announced the arrival of the most exciting batter of the 1990s.
Australia v England
1947-02-28
Wally Hammond, England captain on the 1946-47 Ashes tour, was struck down by fibrositis at Adelaide and could not take the field for the fifth Test at Sydney from 28 February 1947. Norman Yardley led England in his place. Hammond never played another Test. The series — Bradman's first post-war — ended 3-0 to Australia, and the greatest English batsman of the inter-war years left Test cricket without a farewell innings, soon emigrating to South Africa.
Australia v England
1933-02-23
In the fifth Test at Sydney in February 1933, Harold Larwood broke two bones in his left foot bowling Bodyline at top pace — and Douglas Jardine kept him on the field, refusing to let him leave until Don Bradman was dismissed. Hobbling, Larwood went out to bat at No. 4 and made 98. He never played another Test. The Bodyline tour's spearhead was effectively retired by the captain who had unleashed him.
Australia v England
1932-12-02
On 2 December 1932 the Nawab of Pataudi Sr scored 102 on his Ashes debut at Sydney, the first Indian-born cricketer to make a hundred on Ashes debut. He played one more Test of the series and never another for England, his innings now a footnote inside the larger story of Bodyline.
Australia v England
1932-12-03
In the first Test of the Bodyline series, with Bradman absent through illness and Australia 3 for 82, the 22-year-old Stan McCabe took on Larwood and Voce's leg-theory and counter-attacked his way to 187 not out off 233 balls. The innings included 25 fours and a string of hooks against the line of fire that briefly forced Jardine to drop the Bodyline field. Australia still lost the Test by ten wickets, but McCabe's century stands as one of the great acts of physical and moral courage in Test cricket.
New South Wales v Victoria
1929-01-11
Two months after his disappointing Test debut at Brisbane, Don Bradman made 340 not out for New South Wales against Victoria at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 1929 — at the time the highest individual score made at the SCG, and a single innings that doubled his Test team's confidence in him.
Australia v England
1925-02-27
On Test debut at the SCG in February 1925, the 33-year-old leg-spinner Clarrie Grimmett took 5 for 45 and 6 for 37 against Hobbs, Sutcliffe and Hendren. The 11 for 82 was, and remains, one of the great Test debut performances by a wrist-spinner — a late beginning to a career that would yield 216 Test wickets.
Australia
1912-02-03
On 3 February 1912 Clem Hill, Australia's captain in the 1911-12 Ashes, and his fellow selector Peter McAlister came to blows in Bull's Chambers in Sydney during a stormy selection meeting. The 20-minute fistfight was one of the most extraordinary administrative incidents in cricket history and a direct precursor of the Big Six dispute.
Australia, England
1907-12-13
Charlie Macartney, picked as a left-arm spinner with handy lower-order batting, made his Test debut at Sydney in December 1907. Kent's KL Hutchings, observing Macartney's confident demeanour at the wicket, dubbed him 'The Governor-General' — a name meant ironically (Macartney was barely 21) but one that stuck for the rest of his career.
England, Australia
1903-12-11
Reginald Erskine 'Tip' Foster scored 287 on Test debut at Sydney in December 1903, then the highest individual score in Test cricket. It remained a world record until 1930 and is still the highest score by any Test debutant. Foster's epic dragged England, captained by Plum Warner, from 73 for 3 to a first innings of 577 and the platform for an Ashes-winning campaign.
Australia, England
1903-12-17
Chasing 577 in the fourth innings after R.E. Foster's 287 had taken England to a giant total, Australia were 173 for 5 with the Test seemingly lost when Victor Trumper, on 0, was joined by Clem Hill. Trumper went on to 185 not out — his hundred coming in 94 minutes — but it was not enough: Australia, all out 485, lost the match by five wickets. The innings is often ranked alongside Trumper's Old Trafford 104.
Australia v England
1898-03-04
On 4 March 1898, in the dead-rubber Fifth Test at Sydney, Australia's South Australian opener Joe Darling reached his Test hundred in 91 minutes — at the time the fastest Test century in cricket. He went on to 160 in 165 minutes with 30 boundaries. By the end of the series Darling had become the first player to score 500 runs in an Ashes series and the first to score three hundreds in any series. Within fifteen months he was Australia's captain.
Australia v England
1897-12-13
Ranjitsinhji arrived in Sydney for the First Test of the 1897-98 Ashes with quinsy, lost 12 pounds in three days, and was excused from the field for the start of the match by rain. When he batted, weakened and at number seven, he made 175 in 223 minutes — then the highest Test score by an England batsman in Australia. England won the Test by nine wickets. Australia would win the rubber 4-1, but Ranji's Sydney innings is often cited as his greatest.
Australia v England
1894-12-20
On 20 December 1894, with Australia 113 for 2 chasing 177 and the match seemingly won, overnight rain and a hot Sydney sun turned the SCG into a sticky. Bobby Peel — pulled from a hangover by his captain Andrew Stoddart — took 6 for 67 and England won by 10 runs. It was the first time in Test history a side had won after following on, after Australia's first-innings 586 had piled up against an England 325. Wisden called it 'probably the most sensational match ever played either in Australia or in England.'
Australia v England
1888-02-10
On a Sydney pitch reduced to a glue-pot by rain, George Lohmann and Bobby Peel bowled Australia out for 42 in the second innings of the only Test of the 1887-88 tour — Lohmann 5 for 17, Peel 5 for 18, the pair unchanged through the innings. The match also produced Charlie Turner's 7/43 at the other end of the same wet stage and a 126-run England win.
New South Wales v England
1879-02-08
On 8 February 1879 — strictly outside the 1880s but the curtain-raiser to the decade — about 2,000 Sydney spectators invaded the pitch after Australian batsman Billy Murdoch was given run out by the English-engaged Victorian umpire George Coulthard. Lord Harris, the English captain, was struck with a stick; AN Hornby's shirt was torn off; play was suspended. The riot poisoned Anglo-Australian cricket relations for years and explains why no Test was scheduled in England before September 1880.
Albert Cricket Club, Sydney; later New South Wales
1862-04-01
When the H.H. Stephenson tour of 1861-62 ended in March 1862, the Surrey-Middlesex left-armer Charles Lawrence stayed behind in Sydney rather than sail home. Engaged by the Albert Cricket Club at Redfern at £300 a year, he became the first paid professional cricket coach in Australian history, captained New South Wales, opened a sports goods shop in George Street, and laid the structural foundations on which the colonial game grew toward Test status.
Sydney cricket clubs
1845-01-01
Cricket in New South Wales in the 1840s was a more organised and commercially vigorous affair than its Victorian counterpart, reflecting Sydney's longer colonial history. The Australian Cricket Club and its successors played regularly at Hyde Park and the Domain, staging matches between military garrison sides and civilian clubs that drew substantial crowds long before the gold rush brought tens of thousands of new immigrants to Victoria.
Officers vs Civilians
1804-01-08
On 8 January 1804 the Sydney Gazette — the first newspaper printed in Australia — reported a cricket match played in Hyde Park, Sydney, between officers of the colony and a side of civilians. It is the earliest documented cricket match in Australia and the founding event of Australian cricket history. The fixture predates the formal Australian colonial competition by more than half a century.