356 incidents documented
Australia vs Pakistan
11 June 2024
Mohammad Rizwan and Australian captain Mitchell Marsh exchanged heated words during the T20 World Cup 2024, adding spice to the Australia-Pakistan rivalry.
Australia Women
1 February 2023
Australian captain Meg Lanning took an indefinite break from cricket for undisclosed personal reasons, fuelling widespread speculation and raising questions about privacy in women's sport.
England vs Australia
28 June - 2 July 2023
Alex Carey stumped Jonny Bairstow after he wandered out of his crease assuming the ball was dead. The dismissal at Lord's caused a furious reaction from the MCC members.
India vs Australia
19 November 2023
Several contentious DRS decisions during the 2023 World Cup Final added to India's frustration as they lost to Australia despite being unbeaten throughout the tournament.
India vs Australia
7-11 June 2023
India were penalized for a slow over rate during the WTC Final, continuing a pattern of teams being docked championship points for failing to meet the required overs per day.
England vs Australia
31 July 2023
Stuart Broad, in his final Test, cheekily counted down to Steve Smith's supposedly final Test innings, winding up the Australian.
England vs Australia
2 July 2023
Alex Carey stumped Jonny Bairstow as he wandered out of his crease assuming the ball was dead, sparking a massive 'Spirit of Cricket' controversy.
Australia vs India
9 June 2023
Travis Head and Mohammed Siraj had a heated exchange during the WTC Final at The Oval, with aggressive celebrations and verbal jousting.
Australia Women vs England Women
20 January 2022
The multi-format Women's Ashes points system was criticised for effectively allowing Australia to retain the Ashes before the Test match, making the flagship Test feel meaningless.
Australia Women vs India Women
8 March 2020
Shafali Verma's stumping off Alyssa Healy's gloves in the T20 World Cup Final was controversial, with questions about whether the ball had been gathered cleanly before the bails were removed.
England vs Australia
1-5 August 2019
Multiple decisions in the 2019 Ashes were upheld as 'umpire's call' despite ball tracking showing the ball hitting the stumps, reigniting the debate about the DRS threshold.
England vs Australia
14-18 August 2019
Marnus Labuschagne replaced Steve Smith as cricket's first concussion substitute after Smith was hit by a Jofra Archer bouncer. England questioned whether it was a like-for-like replacement.
England vs Australia
22-25 August 2019
During Ben Stokes' miraculous Headingley chase, Jack Leach survived an LBW appeal that was given 'umpire's call' on review, allowing the legendary partnership to continue.
England vs Australia
25 August 2019
Nathan Lyon dropped a simple chance to run out Ben Stokes at Headingley, and earlier Tim Paine missed a stumping chance that would have ended England's miraculous chase.
England vs Australia
4 August 2019
Nathan Lyon dropped the ball next to the stumps near a grounded Jonny Bairstow, widely seen as an attempt to goad the batsman into a stumping dismissal.
England vs Australia
17 August 2019
Jofra Archer's fierce bouncer struck Steve Smith on the neck, felling him and forcing him out of the next Test with delayed concussion symptoms.
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera using sandpaper to tamper with the ball during the Cape Town Test, leading to bans for Bancroft, captain Steve Smith, and vice-captain David Warner in the most damaging scandal in Australian cricket history.
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
David Warner had to be physically restrained after charging at Quinton de Kock in a staircase at Kingsmead, reportedly after de Kock made comments about Warner's wife Candice.
Australia vs India
14 December 2018
Kohli and Paine had a running battle throughout the 2018-19 series, including a shoulder bump at Perth and Paine calling Kohli the most immature captain.
Australia vs India
29 December 2018
Tim Paine sledged Rishabh Pant behind the stumps by offering to babysit Pant's kids so he could come play for the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash.
Australia vs South Africa
3 March 2018
The Warner-de Kock feud set the toxic tone for the entire 2018 Australia-South Africa series that culminated in the Sandpapergate scandal.
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera using sandpaper to tamper with the ball during the third Test at Cape Town, in a plan hatched by David Warner and known to captain Steve Smith, leading to unprecedented bans.
Pakistan U19 vs Australia U19
31 January 2018
Pakistan U19 were controversially eliminated from the 2018 U19 World Cup when rain and the DLS method conspired to give Australia a win in the quarter-final under circumstances many felt were deeply unfair.
Australia vs England
November-December 2017
Stuart Broad was again at the centre of a caught-behind controversy in the Ashes, this time in Australia, with DRS technology at the heart of the debate.
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 Pakistan
25 March 2016
Mitchell Starc engaged in an intense staring contest with Mohammad Amir during the World T20 match, creating one of the tournament's most dramatic moments.
South Africa vs Australia
19 November 2016
South African captain Faf du Plessis was found guilty of ball tampering for applying mint-laden saliva to the ball during the Hobart Test against Australia.
South Africa vs Australia
2016-11-12
A cricket ball got stuck in the grille of a batsman's helmet, creating complete confusion as nobody knew what the rules were for such an unprecedented situation.
Australia vs New Zealand (first), Various
27 November 2015
The introduction of day-night Test cricket with a pink ball was hailed as an innovation to save Test cricket but faced resistance from players concerned about visibility, ball behavior, and safety under lights.
Australia vs New Zealand
29 March 2015
Brad Haddin claimed a catch off a bottom edge in the 2015 World Cup Final that was reviewed and given out, with New Zealand questioning whether the ball had carried.
Pakistan vs Australia
20 March 2015
Wahab Riaz bowled a fearsome spell of fast bowling to Shane Watson in the World Cup quarter-final, hitting him multiple times and sledging aggressively.
England vs Australia
2015-09-13
Ben Stokes was given out for 'obstructing the field' after raising his hand to protect himself from a throw, becoming only the 7th player in ODI history to be dismissed that way.
Pakistan vs Australia
2015-03-20
Wahab Riaz bowled a ferocious spell at Shane Watson in the 2015 World Cup quarter-final, complete with death stares, near-misses, and theatrical confrontations that became compulsive viewing.
India, Australia, England vs Rest of Cricket World
8 February 2014
India, Australia, and England pushed through a radical ICC restructuring that gave them a vastly disproportionate share of revenue and governance power, undermining smaller cricketing nations.
Australia vs West Indies
1 February 2014
Mitchell Starc threw the ball at Kieron Pollard in frustration after Pollard obstructed him during a run, leading to an ugly exchange.
South Africa vs Australia
19 February 2014
South African fast bowler Vernon Philander was found guilty of ball tampering during the second Test against Australia at Port Elizabeth and fined 75% of his match fee.
England vs Australia
10-14 July 2013
Stuart Broad edged a ball clearly to slip but was given not out. He refused to walk, and Australia had no DRS reviews left.
Australia vs England
12 June 2013
David Warner punched Joe Root in a bar altercation during the Champions Trophy, leading to a suspension that set the tone for a hostile 2013 Ashes series.
England vs Australia
July-August 2013
The Hot Spot infrared technology was shown to be unreliable during the 2013 Ashes, failing to detect clear edges and undermining confidence in DRS.
Australia vs England (off-field)
13 June 2013
David Warner punched Joe Root in the face at a bar in Birmingham during the ICC Champions Trophy, leading to Warner's suspension.
Australia vs England
24 November 2013
Mitchell Johnson bowled one of the most intimidating spells in Ashes history, terrifying England's batsmen with extreme pace and aggression across the entire 5-0 whitewash.
Australia vs England
6 December 2013
Brad Haddin engaged in sustained verbal abuse of James Anderson throughout the 2013-14 Ashes, reducing Anderson to tears according to some reports.
Australia vs England
12 August 2013
Australian coach Darren Lehmann urged Australian fans to give Stuart Broad such a hard time during the return Ashes that he'd 'want to go home and cry.'
England vs Australia
12 July 2013
Stuart Broad stood his ground after a massive edge was caught at slip, refusing to walk. The umpire gave him not out, infuriating Australia.
Australia vs England
2013-12-08
James Anderson, cricket's most lethal number 11 batsman, produced various comedy batting moments throughout his career, including frustrated bat throws and bizarre dismissals.
England vs Australia
2013-07-10
Stuart Broad edged massively to slip but stood his ground and was given not out by the umpire, brazenly refusing to walk in one of the Ashes' most shameless moments.
West Indies vs Australia
2012
Kieron Pollard was given out hit wicket in a controversial decision where it was unclear whether his bat or body dislodged the bails.
Australia U19
20 August 2012
Australia's U19 team was criticised for excessive sledging and aggressive behaviour during the 2012 U19 World Cup, raising concerns about the culture being instilled in youth cricket.
England vs Australia
21-25 July 2011
Ian Bell was run out in bizarre circumstances when he assumed the ball was dead at the tea break, only for India to appeal and the umpires to give him out. MS Dhoni later withdrew the appeal.
Australia vs Pakistan
1 February 2010
Shahid Afridi was caught on camera biting the cricket ball in an apparent attempt at ball tampering during an ODI against Australia.
Pakistan vs Australia
1 February 2010
Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi was caught on camera biting the ball during an ODI against Australia, one of the most bizarre ball-tampering incidents in cricket history.
Australia vs Pakistan
2010-02-01
Shahid Afridi was caught on camera biting the cricket ball in an apparent ball-tampering attempt, leading to a ban and worldwide ridicule.
Australia vs England
2010-11-28
Graeme Swann's 'Sprinkler' dance became England's signature celebration during the 2010-11 Ashes, infuriating Australians and delighting England fans.
Australia vs England
2010-12-26
England's Barmy Army mercilessly mocked Mitchell Johnson's moustache and bowling with a song that became one of cricket's most famous terrace chants.
Australia vs England
2010-11-25
Peter Siddle took an Ashes hat-trick on his birthday, but the story that captured everyone's imagination was that the vegan fast bowler celebrated with bananas instead of beer.
England vs Australia
8-12 July 2009
England survived the final session with last pair James Anderson and Monty Panesar at the crease. Australia were convinced they had Anderson LBW but the appeal was turned down.
Australia (internal incident)
7 January 2009
Simon Katich grabbed Michael Clarke by the throat in the Australian dressing room after Clarke wanted to leave before the team victory song.
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
2-6 January 2008
One of the most controversial Tests ever — terrible umpiring decisions, racial abuse allegations, and India threatening to abandon the tour.
Australia vs India
17 January 2008
A young Ishant Sharma bowled a magical spell to Ricky Ponting at Perth, laughing at the Australian captain after beating him repeatedly.
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
2008-03-27
Andrew Symonds flattened a streaker who ran onto the field during an ODI, shoulder-charging him with the force of a rugby player and sending him sprawling.
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 South Africa
25 April 2007
South Africa's World Cup semi-final against Australia was affected by rain and bad light, with DLS calculations and umpiring decisions combining to produce a controversial result.
South Africa vs Australia
2006-03-12
South Africa chased 434 off 50 overs to beat Australia 438-9 vs 434-4 at Johannesburg on 12 March 2006 — the highest successful ODI run chase ever. Australia thought a 434 total was unassailable; South Africa proved otherwise with 4 balls to spare.
Australia vs Various
2006-01-01
Matthew Hayden's increasingly large bats prompted rival teams to joke about their size and eventually led to ICC regulations on bat dimensions.
Australia vs England
2006-12-16
Adam Gilchrist revealed after his match-winning 57-ball century in the Adelaide Ashes Test that he'd been batting with a squash ball in his glove to improve his grip.
Bangladesh vs Australia
2006-04-10
Australian fast bowler Jason Gillespie, sent in as nightwatchman, refused to get out and scored 201* — the only double century by a nightwatchman in Test history.
England vs Australia
4 August 2005
Ricky Ponting was furious after being run out by England substitute fielder Gary Pratt during the 2005 Ashes, accusing England of abusing the substitute fielder rule to gain an unfair tactical advantage.
England vs Australia
4-7 August 2005
Michael Kasprowicz was given out caught behind in one of the closest Ashes matches ever, but replays suggested his glove was off the bat handle when the ball hit it.
New Zealand vs Australia
13 February 2005
The first-ever T20 International featured debates about the width of the wide line in the shorter format, setting the stage for years of inconsistency in T20 umpiring.
England vs Australia
4 August 2005
Andrew Flintoff engaged in relentless verbal and physical intimidation of Ricky Ponting throughout the iconic 2005 Ashes series.
England vs Australia
25 August 2005
Brett Lee and Andrew Flintoff engaged in an intense physical battle throughout the 2005 Ashes, with both players targeting each other with short-pitched bowling.
England vs Australia
2005-08-25
Unknown substitute fielder Gary Pratt ran out Ricky Ponting with a direct hit, triggering an epic tantrum from Ponting who ranted at the England dressing room as he walked off.
Australia vs Various
2005-09-12
Ricky Ponting's volcanic temper produced some of cricket's most entertaining meltdowns, from umpire confrontations to dressing room blow-ups.
England vs Australia
2005-08-04
Glenn McGrath missed the pivotal Edgbaston Ashes Test after stepping on a cricket ball during the warm-up, changing the course of the 2005 Ashes.
India vs Australia
20 January 2004
Indian batsman Rahul Dravid was caught on camera applying what appeared to be a lozenge or cough sweet to the ball during the Adelaide Test against Australia.
Australia vs India
23 March 2003
Ricky Ponting survived a caught-behind appeal early in his innings during the 2003 World Cup Final. He went on to score 140 as Australia demolished India.
West Indies vs Australia
25 April 2003
McGrath sledged Sarwan about his personal life. Sarwan reportedly responded with a comment about McGrath's wife Jane, who was battling cancer at the time.
Australia vs Various
2 January 2003
Ricky Ponting was frequently involved in heated arguments with umpires throughout his career, often pointing his finger and showing visible dissent.
Australia
11 February 2003
Shane Warne was sent home from the 2003 World Cup after testing positive for a banned diuretic, receiving a one-year ban from cricket.
India vs Australia
11-15 March 2001
Several contentious LBW decisions went both ways during India's historic follow-on victory against Australia in Kolkata 2001, one of the greatest Tests ever played.
Zimbabwe vs Australia
5 June 2001
Shane Warne was left seething after Zimbabwe's Dougie Marillier repeatedly scooped him over the keeper's head for boundaries, winning the match for Zimbabwe.
Australia vs Pakistan
1999-11-22
On November 22, 1999 in only his second Test, Adam Gilchrist made an unbeaten 149 to chase down 369 against Pakistan at Bellerive Oval. He and Justin Langer added an unbroken 238 for the sixth wicket — Australia won by 4 wickets and Gilchrist's wicketkeeper-batter revolution was launched.
West Indies vs Australia
1999-03-04
In February 1999 Mark Taylor retired and Steve Waugh became Australia's Test captain. His first series — the Caribbean tour — was a 2-2 dramatic draw featuring Brian Lara's 213 and 153 not out. From there Waugh built the most dominant Test team in cricket history, including a record 16 consecutive Test wins.
Australia vs South Africa
17 June 1999
South Africa's Lance Klusener hit two fours off successive balls to bring the scores level, but a catastrophic run out of Allan Donald off the last ball sent Australia through on net run rate in one of cricket's greatest ever finishes.
Australia vs South Africa
17 June 1999
Allan Donald was run out in the most dramatic fashion in the 1999 World Cup semi-final, but South Africa argued the initial call by the square leg umpire was premature.
West Indies vs Australia
1999-03-29
Brian Lara and Jimmy Adams were involved in one of cricket's most comically bad run-out mix-ups, with both batsmen ending up at the same end while the fielders watched in amusement.
Pakistan vs Australia
1998-10-16
On October 16, 1998, Australian captain Mark Taylor finished day two of the Peshawar Test on 334 not out — equalling Don Bradman's highest Australian Test score. The next morning he declared without batting on, choosing the team's chances of victory over the chance to break Bradman's record alone.
Australia
1998-12-08
On December 8, 1998, the Australian Cricket Board revealed that Mark Waugh and Shane Warne had been fined in 1995 for accepting cash from an Indian bookmaker named 'John' (later identified as Mukesh Gupta) in exchange for pitch and weather information. The ACB had concealed the fines for three years. The cover-up became a bigger scandal than the original incident.
India vs Australia
22 April 1998
In the first of the two Sharjah finals, Sachin Tendulkar was given out LBW to a ball that appeared to be heading down leg. The decision denied fans a potentially historic innings.
India vs Australia
6-10 March 1998
Michael Slater claimed a low catch to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar, but replays suggested the ball had bounced before reaching his hands. The on-field decision was out.
Sri Lanka vs Australia / West Indies
1996-02-17
After a Tamil Tigers truck bomb killed 91 people at Colombo's Central Bank on January 31, 1996, both Australia and West Indies refused to travel to Sri Lanka for their 1996 World Cup group matches. The ICC awarded Sri Lanka both games on forfeit — a decision that propelled the eventual champions into the knockouts unbeaten on points.
Australia vs Sri Lanka
1996-03-17
On March 17, 1996 at Gaddafi Stadium, Aravinda de Silva made an unbeaten 107 (and took 3 for 42) as Sri Lanka beat Australia by 7 wickets to win their first World Cup. He was Player of the Match and Player of the Tournament; Sri Lanka became the first host country to win a World Cup.
West Indies vs Australia
1995-05-03
On May 3, 1995, Australia beat the West Indies by an innings and 53 runs at Sabina Park to take the four-Test series 2-1 — and end West Indian dominance of Test cricket after 15 years and 29 unbeaten series. Steve Waugh's 200 and a 231 stand with twin Mark anchored the win.
Australia vs Sri Lanka
26 December 1995
Umpire Darrell Hair no-balled Muttiah Muralitharan seven times for a suspect bowling action during the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, sparking a massive controversy.
West Indies vs Australia
28 April 1995
Curtly Ambrose got in Steve Waugh's face after being told to go back to his mark. Richie Richardson had to pull Ambrose away. Ambrose then bowled a devastating spell.
Australia vs Sri Lanka
26 December 1995
Umpire Darrell Hair called Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing seven times during the Boxing Day Test, igniting one of cricket's longest-running controversies.
Australia vs Various
9 December 1998
Australian stars Shane Warne and Mark Waugh admitted to accepting money from an Indian bookmaker known as 'John' in exchange for pitch and weather information during the 1994 tour to Sri Lanka.
Australia vs Sri Lanka
26 December 1995
Australian umpire Darrell Hair no-balled Muttiah Muralitharan seven times for throwing during the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, igniting one of cricket's longest-running controversies.
India vs Australia
1994-09-09
After 78 ODI innings without a hundred, Sachin Tendulkar finally got his first one-day century — 110 off 130 balls against Australia at the R Premadasa Stadium during the 1994 Singer World Series. Wisden later called it 'an innings that changed ODI cricket forever.'
Pakistan vs Australia
1994-10-11
On the eve of the Karachi Test in October 1994, Pakistan captain Salim Malik allegedly approached Shane Warne, Mark Waugh and Tim May with bribes of around US$200,000 each to underperform. Australia lost the Test by one wicket. Malik denied everything for years; Justice Qayyum's 2000 report found him guilty and banned him for life.
England vs Australia
1993-06-04
Shane Warne's first ball in Ashes cricket — 4 June 1993, Old Trafford — turned from outside leg stump and clipped the top of Gatting's off stump. The delivery became universally known as the Ball of the Century. Gatting's expression said everything.
Australia vs West Indies
1993-01-30
On January 30, 1993, Curtly Ambrose produced one of the great fast-bowling spells of the modern era — 7 for 1 in 32 balls — to demolish Australia from 85 for 2 to 119 all out in the Perth Test. He finished with 7 for 25; West Indies won by an innings and 25 runs to seal the Frank Worrell Trophy 2-1.
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 vs New Zealand
1993-11-12
Glenn McGrath made his Test debut for Australia at Perth on November 12, 1993, replacing the injured Merv Hughes. He took 3 for 142 in the match — modest figures, but the start of a 124-Test, 563-wicket career that would form the spine of Australian cricket for the next 14 years.
Australia vs West Indies
1993-01-26
On January 26, 1993, West Indies beat Australia by one run at Adelaide — the narrowest victory by runs in Test history. Australia, chasing 186, were 102 for 8 when Tim May (42 not out) and Craig McDermott (18) added 40 for the ninth wicket and then 42 for the tenth before McDermott was given out caught behind off a Courtney Walsh bouncer with two runs needed.
England vs Australia
4 June 1993
While not a controversial decision itself, Mike Gatting's utter disbelief at being bowled by Shane Warne's first ball in Ashes cricket highlighted how umpires and batsmen alike were unprepared for extreme spin.
Australia vs Various
1993-01-01
Merv Hughes, the moustachioed Australian fast bowler, was famous for his creative and hilarious sledging that often left batsmen and teammates in stitches.
Australia vs India
1992-02-03
On the fastest pitch in the world, an 18-year-old Sachin Tendulkar made 114 off 161 balls against Craig McDermott, Merv Hughes and Mike Whitney while teammates wilted. India lost the Test by 300 runs but Tendulkar's innings became a generational reference point — he himself rates it among his very best.
Australia vs Various
28 December 1991
Merv Hughes was legendary for his creative and often hilarious sledging, engaging in memorable verbal battles with Javed Miandad, Viv Richards, and many others.
England, Australia
1989-06-08
After 26 Tests without a hundred, Steve Waugh made an unbeaten 177 at Headingley in the first Ashes Test of 1989, kicking off a series in which he averaged 126.50 and announcing himself as the next great Australian batsman.
Australia
1989-05-01
David Boon allegedly consumed 52 cans of beer on the flight from Australia to England for the 1989 Ashes series, setting a legendary drinking record.
England, Australia
1987-11-08
Cruising at 135 for 2 chasing 254 in the 1987 World Cup final, Mike Gatting attempted a reverse sweep off Allan Border's first ball, gloved it to wicketkeeper Greg Dyer, and triggered the collapse that lost England the World Cup.
India vs Australia
18-22 September 1986
The second-ever tied Test in history featured several close umpiring decisions that could have changed the outcome either way.
Australia, New Zealand
1985-11-08
Richard Hadlee took 9 for 52 in Australia's first innings at the Gabba in November 1985, the best single-innings figures by any fast bowler in the 20th century, and followed it with 6 for 71 in the second innings to set up an innings win.
Australia
1984-12-15
Allan Border inherited a broken Australian Test side from Kim Hughes in 1984 and, by the end of the decade, had rebuilt it into the team that would win the 1989 Ashes 4-0 and dominate world cricket for the next twenty years.
South Africa vs England/Sri Lanka/West Indies/Australia rebel XIs
6 March 1982
Multiple international teams sent unofficial rebel squads to play in apartheid-era South Africa, leading to lengthy bans for participating players and deepening cricket's political fault lines.
Australia vs Pakistan
27 March 1982
Beyond the famous kicking incident, Miandad and Lillee had a vicious running feud spanning years, filled with verbal abuse and mutual loathing.
England, Australia
1981-07-21
Forced to follow on and at one stage 500-1 against by the Ladbrokes board, England were rescued by Ian Botham's 149 not out and Bob Willis's 8 for 43 to win a Test no team has ever logically come back from.
England, Australia
1981-07-30
Set just 151 to win, Australia were cruising at 105 for 4 when Mike Brearley persuaded a reluctant Ian Botham to bowl. Twenty-eight balls and one run later Botham had taken 5 for 1 and Australia had collapsed to 121 all out.
England, Australia
1981-08-15
After Headingley and Edgbaston, Ian Botham completed his 1981 trilogy with 118 at Old Trafford — six sixes off Dennis Lillee and Terry Alderman, and a hundred from 86 balls that many called the greatest Ashes innings ever played.
England, Australia
1981-07-07
After making a pair at Lord's and presiding over a 12-Test winless captaincy run, Ian Botham resigned the England captaincy minutes before the selectors were going to sack him.
Australia
1981-12-12
Australian captain Greg Chappell, the most prolific batsman in the country, made four ducks in a row across Tests and ODIs during the 1981-82 home summer — and seven ducks across the season — earning the temporary nickname 'Chappello'.
Australia vs New Zealand
1 February 1981
Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl the last ball underarm along the ground to prevent New Zealand from hitting a six to tie the match.
Australia vs India
7 February 1981
Sunil Gavaskar was given out LBW to Dennis Lillee off a ball that clearly hit his bat first. He was so furious he tried to take his batting partner Chetan Chauhan off the field with him.
Australia vs Pakistan
22 November 1981
Dennis Lillee kicked Javed Miandad on the field, prompting Miandad to raise his bat as if to strike Lillee. Umpire Tony Crafter intervened to separate them.
Australia vs India
7 February 1981
Sunil Gavaskar was so furious with an LBW decision that he tried to take his batting partner Chetan Chauhan off the field with him in protest.
Australia vs New Zealand
1981-02-01
Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl the last ball underarm along the ground to prevent New Zealand from hitting a six to tie, sparking outrage and eternal mockery.
Australia vs England
15 December 1979
Dennis Lillee used an aluminium bat that damaged the ball. England captain Mike Brearley complained, leading to a 10-minute standoff as Lillee refused to change bats.
Australia vs England
1979-12-15
Dennis Lillee walked out to bat with an aluminium 'Combat' bat, sparking a 10-minute standoff when England captain Mike Brearley complained it was damaging the ball.
Australia vs England
12-17 March 1977
The Centenary Test at the MCG in March 1977 commemorated 100 years since the first Test match at the same venue. Australia won by 45 runs — exactly the same margin as the 1877 result. Dennis Lillee took 6/26 and 5/139 across the two innings; Derek Randall made 174 in England's second-innings chase of 463; over 200 surviving Australian and English Test cricketers attended a celebration that became part of cricket's institutional memory.
West Indies (vs Australia, India, England)
January-December 1976
Vivian Richards scored 1,710 runs in eleven Tests in 1976 at an average of 90.00, with seven centuries — a record that stood for thirty years until Mohammad Yousuf's 1,788 in 2006. The aggregate included 556 in Australia, 384 in the Caribbean against India, and 829 against England in four Tests, capped by 291 at the Oval. Richards missed the Lord's Test of the English summer with glandular fever; the seven centuries broke Garry Sobers' previous record of six in a calendar year.
Australia vs West Indies
31 January - 5 February 1976
Lance Gibbs took his 309th Test wicket — Gary Gilmour caught Fredericks — in the sixth Test of the 1975-76 series at the MCG, passing Fred Trueman's previous record of 307 and becoming the first spinner to lead the all-time Test wicket-takers' list. The wicket was his last in international cricket. He retired at the end of the tour, holding the record until Dennis Lillee passed him in December 1981.
West Indies vs Australia
21 June 1975
The first Cricket World Cup — the Prudential World Cup of 1975 — culminated in a 60-overs-a-side final at Lord's on 21 June, in which West Indies beat Australia by 17 runs. Clive Lloyd's 102 from 85 balls anchored West Indies' 291/8; Vivian Richards ran out three Australian batters, including the Chappell brothers; Australia were dismissed for 274 in 58.4 overs. The match finished after 8.43 pm under summer twilight and crowned West Indies as the inaugural one-day champions.
England vs Australia
4 August 1975
On 4 August 1975, during the second Ashes Test at Lord's, a 24-year-old merchant seaman from Liverpool named Michael Angelow leapt the boundary fence wearing only socks and trainers, hurdled both sets of stumps to the amusement of the players, and was wrestled to the ground by police. He had taken a £20 bet from his shipmates. He was fined £20 in court the next morning, and the BBC commentary by John Arlott — "we have got a freaker, not very shapely, and it is masculine — and I would think it has seen the last of its cricket for the day" — became one of the most replayed pieces of cricket commentary of the decade.
Australia vs West Indies
12-16 December 1975
Roy Fredericks made 169 from 145 balls at the WACA in December 1975, opening the West Indian innings against Lillee and Thomson at their fastest. He hooked the second ball of the innings, from Lillee, for six. His hundred came in 71 balls and remains, alongside Adam Gilchrist's 57-ball century at the same ground in 2006, among the fastest in WACA Test history. Lindsay Hassett, broadcasting on the ABC, called it "the greatest innings I have seen in Australia". West Indies won by an innings and 87 runs.
Australia vs England
November 1974 - February 1975
Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson together took 58 wickets in the 1974-75 Ashes, intimidating Mike Denness's England side into a 4-1 series defeat. Thomson's slingshot action — peaked at speeds estimated above 95 mph in primitive on-field measurements — and Lillee's mature pace and cut produced one of the most one-sided fast-bowling assaults in Ashes history. Five England batters were forced to retire hurt across the series; Denness dropped himself for the fourth Test.
Australia vs New Zealand
1-6 March 1974
At the Basin Reserve in March 1974, Greg Chappell made 247 not out and 133, and his elder brother Ian Chappell made 145 and 121 — the only instance in Test history of two brothers each scoring a hundred in both innings of the same match. Greg's 380 runs in the Test stood as the world record for runs by a player in one Test until Graham Gooch's 333 and 123 against India at Lord's in July 1990.
England vs Australia
22-26 June 1972
Western Australian seam bowler Bob Massie took 16 wickets for 137 runs on Test debut at Lord's in June 1972 — 8/84 in the first innings and 8/53 in the second — bowling Australia to an eight-wicket win in the second Ashes Test. The figures are the second-best match haul in Test history (Jim Laker's 19/90 remains the standard) and remain unsurpassed for a debutant.
Australia vs England
5 January 1971
The first one-day international in cricket history was played at the MCG on 5 January 1971 as a hastily arranged consolation after the third Ashes Test was washed out for the first three days. Played over 40 eight-ball overs a side, Australia won by five wickets, John Edrich top-scored with 82 for England, and an estimated crowd of more than 46,000 watched a fixture neither board had originally planned to stage.
Australia vs England
12-17 February 1971
England regained the Ashes after twelve years on 17 February 1971 at Sydney, winning the seventh Test by 62 runs to take the series 2-0. John Snow's 7/40 in the second innings was the defining performance, but the Test was equally remembered for the bouncer that felled Terry Jenner, the bottle-throwing crowd disturbance, and Ray Illingworth leading his team off the field — and for the Test debut, in the previous Adelaide match, of a 21-year-old Dennis Lillee who took 5/84.
Australia vs England
11-16 December 1970
Greg Chappell scored 108 on Test debut at the WACA in December 1970, in the first Test ever played at the Perth ground, becoming the sixth Australian to make a hundred in his first Test innings. Coming in at 5/107 against John Snow and Peter Lever, he added 219 with Ian Redpath for the sixth wicket and converted what had been an under-pressure innings into a position of safety on a debut day later judged the foundation of his Test career.
England vs Australia
1968-08-22
A thunderstorm drenched The Oval on the final afternoon of the last Ashes Test of 1968, leaving England needing 352 to win — or, in practice, to survive to a draw on an unplayable wet surface. Groundstaff worked desperately to mop up the outfield, and England supporters helped dry the covers. When play resumed with 75 minutes left, Derek Underwood bowled Australia out for 125 to win the match by 226 runs and level the series 1-1.
Australia cricket
1968-01-12
Bill Lawry of Victoria succeeded Bob Simpson as Australia's captain for the 1967-68 series against India, beginning a three-year leadership that produced consistent results but was criticised for excessive caution. His personal batting was as effective as ever — he scored 7,614 Test runs at 47.15 — but his captaincy was eventually ended by the Australian board in controversial circumstances during the 1970-71 Ashes.
England vs Australia
1968-06-01
John Snow of Sussex emerged in the 1968 Ashes as England's most genuinely fast bowler since Trueman's peak — a right-arm quick with a classical side-on action, real hostility and the ability to move the ball off the seam. He took 17 wickets in the 1968 series and 31 wickets in the 1970-71 Ashes, England's most famous series win in Australia in a generation.
England vs Australia
1968-08-23
Recalled at the last minute when Roger Prideaux withdrew with pleurisy, Basil D'Oliveira made 158 against Australia at the Oval on 23 August 1968 in the fifth Test. England won by 226 runs to draw the series 1-1 and retain the Ashes. The innings would, within weeks, force the MCC selectors into the decision that triggered the D'Oliveira Affair and South Africa's expulsion from international cricket.
Australia vs England
1966-02-11
On 11-12 February 1966 Victoria's Bob Cowper batted for twelve hours and seven minutes to score 307 against England at the MCG — then the highest score ever made by an Australian at home, and still the longest innings in Australian Test history. England's attack, containing Snow, Brown and Allen, bowled 138 overs at Cowper before he was finally out. Australia declared at 543 for 8 and the match was drawn.
West Indies vs Australia
1965-03-03
When Bob Simpson's Australia arrived in the Caribbean in early 1965, Garfield Sobers led West Indies into a Test for the first time as full-time captain. He inherited the job from the retired Frank Worrell and within five Tests had won the Frank Worrell Trophy 2-1 on home soil — the first time West Indies had ever held it.
Australia vs England
1965-12-10
Doug Walters made 155 on his Test debut against England at the Gabba on 10 December 1965 — the tenth Australian to score a debut century against the old enemy. He followed it with 115 in his second Test at Melbourne and another in the third at Sydney, becoming the first batsman in history to score centuries in his first three Ashes innings. He was 19 years old.
England vs Australia
1964-08-15
On 15 August 1964, at The Oval, Fred Trueman caught Neil Hawke at slip off his own bowling to become the first man in cricket history to take 300 Test wickets. The milestone had been expected for several matches; the moment itself was characteristically Trueman — a slip catch taken with ease off a delivery bowled in anger. His celebrated remark, that 'whoever gets the next lot'll be bloody tired', has echoed in cricket ever since.
England vs Australia
1964-06-04
Geoffrey Boycott of Yorkshire made his Test debut at Trent Bridge in June 1964, opening the batting against Neil Hawke and Graham McKenzie and scoring 48 — cautious, correct and utterly determined. It was the beginning of a Test career of 108 matches and 8,114 runs, the most polarising batting career England has produced.
England vs Australia
1964-07-23
On 23-25 July 1964 at Old Trafford, Australian captain Bob Simpson made 311 against England — his first Test century, in his 30th Test. He batted for 762 minutes (just under 13 hours), faced 743 balls, and helped Australia retain the Ashes by ensuring there could be no defeat in the fourth Test. Only Don Bradman, among Australians, had previously scored a Test triple century in England.
Australia vs South Africa
1963-12-06
On 6 December 1963 at the Gabba, in his first over of the first Test against South Africa, Australian left-arm fast bowler Ian Meckiff was no-balled four times by umpire Col Egar — for throwing. Captain Richie Benaud removed him after the over and never bowled him again. Meckiff retired from all cricket at the end of the match. He was 28.
Australia vs England
1962-11-30
England's 1962–63 Ashes tour produced a 1–1 drawn series — a satisfactory result for the tourists, who retained the urn they had won in 1961 in Australia under the captaincy of Ted Dexter. The series was noted for Ken Barrington's grinding run accumulation, Fred Titmus's off-spin and David Allen's partnership with Trueman in the bowling. Australia, between the Benaud era and the Simpson-Lawry era, were in modest transition.
Australia vs West Indies
1961-01-28
Lance Gibbs of British Guiana became the first West Indian to take a Test hat-trick when he dismissed Kline, Misson and Mackay in consecutive deliveries in the fourth Test against Australia at Adelaide in January 1961. He took 5 for 66 in the innings; West Indies won the match — part of the famous series that had already produced the first Tied Test at Brisbane.
England vs Australia
1961-08-01
Chasing 256 to level the series, England were 150 for 1 and coasting — Dexter had made 76, May was settled — when Richie Benaud switched to bowling round the wicket into the footmarks outside off stump. In 25 balls he took 5 for 12, England collapsed to 201 all out, and Australia retained the Ashes by 54 runs. It was one of the most celebrated tactical switches in cricket history.
Australia vs West Indies
1960-12-14
On 14 December 1960 at the Gabba, Australia and West Indies produced the first tied Test in the 83-year history of the format, with West Indies' Joe Solomon running out Ian Meckiff from side-on with the scores level and one ball remaining. Wes Hall bowled the final eight-ball over with Australia needing six and three wickets in hand; the over produced two run-outs, a single, a missed catch and a tie. The result revived a flagging Test format and gave the world a template for how the game could be played.
Australia vs West Indies
1961-02-17
Midway through the 1960-61 series — and impressed by the spirit Worrell's tourists had brought to Australia after the Tied Test — Sir Donald Bradman and the Australian Cricket Board commissioned a perpetual trophy from former Test fast bowler turned silversmith Ernie McCormick. They named it the Frank Worrell Trophy. It was the first major Test trophy named for a West Indian and remains the prize for every Australia v West Indies series.
England vs Australia
1956-07-31
On 31 July 1956 at Old Trafford, Jim Laker took 10 for 53 in Australia's second innings to finish with 19 for 90 in the match — figures that stand alone in Test history. His 9 for 37 in the first innings was followed by all ten in the second. England won by an innings and 170 runs. Laker's match analysis remains the best in any first-class match anywhere; only Anil Kumble has since matched the ten-wicket innings.
Australia vs England
1955-01-05
On the morning of 5 January 1955 at the MCG, Frank Tyson took 6 for 16 in 6.3 eight-ball overs to finish with 7 for 27 and bowl England to a 128-run win over Australia. The 50,000-strong crowd witnessed the fastest spell of the decade. Tyson, nicknamed 'Typhoon' on tour after his vicious pace, ended the third Test with a haul that turned the 1954-55 Ashes and remains the best by an England bowler in Australia since George Lohmann in 1886-87.
England vs Australia
1953-08-19
On 19 August 1953, England regained the Ashes for the first time since the 1932-33 Bodyline series by beating Australia by 8 wickets at The Oval. The Coronation summer of Queen Elizabeth II ended with Denis Compton sweeping Arthur Morris to the boundary at 5.53pm and Brian Johnston shouting 'It's the Ashes!' on BBC radio. The match closed twenty years of Australian dominance and crowned Len Hutton's first full year as captain.
England vs Australia
1953-06-30
Chasing 343 in the fourth innings at Lord's against Australia, England were 12 for 3 overnight on the fifth day. Trevor Bailey (71 in 257 minutes) and Willie Watson (109 in 346 minutes) batted nearly five and a half hours together to save the match. The stand of 163 on the final day kept the series level and laid the platform for England's eventual Ashes win at The Oval.
England v Australia
1948-08-14
On 14 August 1948 at The Oval, Don Bradman walked out to bat in his final Test innings needing only four runs to retire with a Test average of exactly 100. Eric Hollies bowled him a leg-break first ball, which Bradman defended; the second was a googly that he failed to read; it slipped between bat and pad and clipped middle and off. The Don had made a duck. The crowd rose to him; the average settled forever at 99.94, the most famous number in cricket.
England v Australia
1948-07-27
On the final day of the Headingley Test of 1948, Australia were set 404 in 345 minutes on a worn fifth-day pitch — a target no side in the history of Test cricket had ever chased. Bradman (173 not out) and Arthur Morris (182) put on 301 in 217 minutes, often against three England spinners and two erratic part-timers used because Yardley wanted a result. Australia won by seven wickets with 12 minutes to spare. It remained the highest successful fourth-innings chase in Test cricket for 28 years and was Bradman's last Test century.
England v Australia
1948-08-14
On the first day of the final 1948 Ashes Test, Ray Lindwall produced what Don Bradman called 'the most devastating and one of the fastest spells I ever saw in Test cricket'. Lindwall took 6/20 in 16.1 overs, including a post-lunch burst of 5/8 in 8.1 overs, as England were dismissed for 52 — at the time their lowest Test total at home since 1888. Hutton's 30 was the only score above 6. The collapse set up Bradman's farewell duck and the series clean sweep.
Australia v India
1948-01-23
Against an Australian total of 674 — built on Bradman 201 and Hassett 198 not out — Vijay Hazare made 116 and 145 in successive innings to become the first Indian to score twin centuries in a Test. He did so against Lindwall and Miller at their fastest, watching wickets fall constantly at the other end (six teammates failed to score across his second-innings 145), and earned an oft-quoted compliment from Bradman about his batting. India still lost by an innings and 16, but Hazare's innings remain a touchstone of Indian batsmanship.
Australia v India
1948-01-23
On 23-24 January 1948 at the Adelaide Oval, Don Bradman made 201 against India — his last Test double hundred and his final Test innings on Australian soil over fifty. Coming after his 100th first-class hundred at Sydney in November 1947, the innings cemented the post-war Bradman as a different kind of batsman: less feverishly fast-scoring, more patient, but no less ruthless against attacks short of front-line bowlers.
India v Australia
1948-02-06
Vinoo Mankad's first overseas tour was a masterclass of all-round cricket. On the 1947-48 tour of Australia he scored 583 Test runs at 44.84 (centuries in the third and fifth Tests at Melbourne, 116 and 111), took 17 Test wickets with his slow left-arm, ran out Bill Brown twice for backing up too far at the non-striker's end — coining the now-famous term 'Mankading' — and finished with over 1,400 first-class runs and 50 wickets across the trip.
Australia v England
1948-08-18
Donald Tallon, the silent Queenslander, kept wicket throughout the 1948 Invincibles tour of England with a precision Don Bradman called 'the finest I have seen'. His most celebrated moment came at The Oval in August 1948, when he dived left-handed down the leg side to glove a Hutton glance off Lindwall and end England's 52 all out — Wisden's 'great finish to Australia's splendid performance'. Tallon was named one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Year for 1949.
Australia v England
1948-07-09
On 9 July 1948 at Old Trafford, the Australian opener Sid Barnes — fielding in his usual position barely five yards from the bat at short leg — was struck a fearful blow in the ribs by a full-blooded pull from Dick Pollard off Ian Johnson. Frank Chester, the umpire, said the ball hit him 'like a bullet'. Barnes 'dropped like a fallen tree' (Fingleton) and had to be carried from the field by four policemen. Ten days in Manchester Royal Infirmary followed; the injury effectively ended his tour as a major contributor.
An Australian XI v India
1947-11-15
On 15 November 1947 at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Don Bradman became the first Australian — and the first non-Englishman — to make 100 first-class centuries. He reached the milestone with a single off the off-spin of Gogumal Kishenchand, a player Lala Amarnath had brought on for that very over despite Kishenchand having bowled barely an over all tour. Bradman went on to 172 in 177 minutes; he would finish his first-class career with 117 hundreds, a figure no Australian has approached since.
India v Australia
1947-11-28
Lala Amarnath became Independent India's first Test captain when he led the tour party to Australia in November 1947, only weeks after Partition. Vijay Merchant's withdrawal had thrown the captaincy open; Amarnath was confirmed by the new Indian Cricket Board ahead of departure. India lost the series 0-4, but Amarnath's personal contributions — 228 not out v Victoria and 172 not out v Queensland — and his courteous handling of Bradman's century moment at Sydney made him a popular figure on tour.
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 vs India
13-17 December 1947
Vinoo Mankad ran out Bill Brown at the non-striker's end during India's tour of Australia, creating a dismissal type that would bear his name for decades.
Australia v England
1946-11-29
On the first day of the 1946-47 Ashes, Don Bradman — making his Test return after eight years and visibly out of touch on 28 — chopped a ball from Bill Voce that flew chest-high to Jack Ikin at second slip. England appealed for the catch; umpire George Borwick gave it not out, ruling the ball had bumped from the ground. Bradman did not walk. He went on to make 187, England were beaten by an innings and 332, and Hammond's relationship with the Australian captain never recovered. The wicket-that-never-was framed the entire series.
Australia v England
1946-12-04
Australia's first Test match after the war, at the Gabba in late November 1946, ended in an innings-and-332-run hammering of England — the largest defeat in Ashes history. A pre-monsoon thunderstorm on the third evening turned the wicket into a glue-pot, and Keith Miller (7 for 60) and Ernie Toshack (6 for 82) made it unplayable for an England side already wrung out from chasing Bradman's 187 and Hassett's 128 in a total of 645. The match is also remembered for the bump-ball decision that kept Bradman in on 28 — itself filed under a separate iconic-moment entry — and for Miller's emergence as a Test cricketer of the highest class.
Australia v England
1946-12-17
On 17 December 1946 at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Sid Barnes and Don Bradman put together 405 for the fifth wicket against England — and were both out for exactly 234, an identical-score coincidence Barnes later admitted was deliberate. The stand remains the world Test record for the fifth wicket, was at the time the highest partnership for any wicket in Ashes cricket, and helped Australia to an innings win that effectively decided the post-war series.
Australia v New Zealand
1946-03-29
Ray Lindwall — recently demobilised from the Australian Army's New Guinea campaign — took the new ball in his Test debut at the Basin Reserve, Wellington, on 29 March 1946. He took 1/13 and 1/16 in a match completed in two days as New Zealand were dismissed for 42 and 54. Decades later the ICC retrospectively granted the fixture full Test status (March 1948 ratification), confirming Lindwall's first cap in the same match in which Bill O'Reilly bowled the last over of his Test career.
England v Australian Services XI
1945-05-19
Less than two weeks after VE Day, England and an Australian Services XI began a five-match Victory Test series at Lord's that ended 2-2 with one drawn after a final-day finish at Old Trafford on 22 August 1945. Played as celebration cricket and watched by 367,000 people across three grounds, the series re-introduced first-class cricket to a war-weary Britain, launched Keith Miller and confirmed Lindsay Hassett's quality as a captain. Although first-class only — neither board would grant Test status to Services teams — the series functioned as a public reopening of cricket and is the foundation of the modern English summer calendar.
Australian Services XI v England
1945-05-19
Lindsay Hassett, the only experienced Test cricketer in the Australian Services side, captained the team that brought first-class cricket back to England in the summer of 1945. With Stan Sismey, Cec Pepper, Keith Miller, Graham Williams and Lindsay Hassett himself doing most of the cricketing work, the Services drew the five-Test 'Victory' series 2-2 against an England side led by Walter Hammond. Hassett, who had refused an officer's commission and toured on warrant officer's pay of 12 shillings a day, was praised in Wisden as 'a cricketer-captain in the Bradman mould but with rather more humour'.
Victoria / Australia (cricket); RAF 215 Squadron (military)
1942-06-10
Pilot Officer Ross Gregory of the Royal Australian Air Force, attached to RAF 215 Squadron, was killed on 10 June 1942 when the Wellington bomber on which he was the observer exploded in mid-air near Gafargaon in the Mymensingh district of Bengal. Gregory had played two Tests for Australia in 1937 and was widely tipped to be a long-term replacement for Bradman in the middle order. He is the only Test cricketer to die in active service in Asia, and his death — alongside those of Farnes, Verity and Turnbull — became part of the running ledger of cricketers lost to the war.
Royal Australian Air Force / Australian Imperial Force (Bradman)
1941-06-30
Don Bradman, Australia's captain and the world's most famous cricketer, was invalided out of military service on 30 June 1941 with chronic fibrositis. He had enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in June 1940, transferred to the Army School of Physical Training at Frankston, and within months was so debilitated by muscular pain in his back and right arm that he could not shave himself or comb his hair. The discharge — barely reported at the time under wartime censorship — kept him out of cricket for almost five years and shaped the legend of his post-war return.
England v Australia
1938-06-26
Captaining England in his first Ashes home Test in charge, Wally Hammond made 240 at Lord's in June 1938 — at the time the highest score by an England captain against Australia and an innings widely rated alongside his 336* at Auckland and his 251 at Sydney as the finest of his career.
England v Australia
1938-08-23
Across 13 hours and 20 minutes at The Oval in August 1938, the 22-year-old Yorkshire opener Len Hutton scored 364 — surpassing Bradman's 334 as the highest individual Test score and remaining the record for almost 20 years. England declared on 903 for 7; Australia, with Bradman injured and unable to bat, lost by an innings and 579 runs, the largest defeat in Test cricket. Hutton's mark is still the England record 87 years on.
England v Australia
1938-06-11
Following on 247 behind at Trent Bridge in June 1938, Stan McCabe played what Don Bradman would call the greatest innings he ever saw. With wickets falling at the other end, McCabe scored 232 in 235 minutes, the last 72 of those runs in just 28 minutes; he reached his double-hundred from 220 balls. Bradman called his team mates onto the pavilion balcony with the words, 'Come and look at this, you'll never see the like of it again.'
England v Australia
1938-08-20
The fifth and timeless Test of the 1938 Ashes at The Oval saw England score 903 for 7 declared — then the highest total in Test cricket — including Len Hutton's 364, the new world Test record. Australia, with Bradman injured and McCabe absent, replied with 201 and 123 to lose by an innings and 579 runs, the largest Test margin ever. The series finished 1-1 with two draws; Australia retained the Ashes by virtue of the previous series result.
Australia v England
1937-01-01
On a wet New Year's Day pitch at the MCG in 1937, with Australia 0-2 down in the series, Don Bradman batted himself at No. 7, sent his tail in first to absorb the sticky, and then made 270 over almost eight hours. It is the highest score made on a sticky wicket in Test cricket, the innings that turned the 1936-37 Ashes, and the one Wisden in 2001 voted the greatest Test innings of the 20th century.
Australia v England
1936-12-04
Don Bradman's first series as Australia's captain, in 1936-37 against Gubby Allen's England, began with two heavy defeats and a press chorus calling for his replacement. Bradman responded with 270 at the MCG, 212 at Adelaide and 169 at the MCG again, and Australia won the next three Tests to take the Ashes 3-2 — the only time in Test history a side has lost the first two Tests of a five-Test series and recovered to win it. The captaincy that English critics had questioned was suddenly the captaincy of a man who would lead Australia for the next 12 years.
Australia
1936-03-06
Clarrie Grimmett was the first bowler in Test history to take 200 Test wickets — reaching the milestone in March 1936 against South Africa, in his last Test innings before being controversially dropped. He finished with 216 wickets in 37 Tests at 24.21, all of them taken between the ages of 33 and 44, and held the world Test wicket record until Alec Bedser broke it in 1953.
Australia
1934-09-25
Days after the 1934 Oval Test, Bradman fell seriously ill with appendicitis that progressed to peritonitis. With antibiotics not yet available, he was given little chance of survival; his wife Jessie left Adelaide on a sea voyage to England prepared for the worst. He recovered after weeks of intensive nursing in a London nursing home and returned to first-class cricket the following Australian summer.
England v Australia
1934-08-25
Recalled at the age of 47 for England's final Ashes Test in 1934 after a six-year Test absence, Frank Woolley made 4 and 0 and was bypassed for the squads that followed. The Oval Test marked the end of one of cricket's most graceful and prolific careers — 64 Tests, 58,969 first-class runs, all of them lit by what John Arlott later called 'a cool, almost insolent grace'.
England v Australia
1934-06-25
On the third and final day at Lord's in June 1934, Hedley Verity took 14 Australian wickets for 80 runs — the most by any bowler in a single day's Test cricket. Match figures of 15 for 104 gave England an innings victory, their only Lord's Ashes win of the entire 20th century. Bradman fell to him twice. The pitch had been rained on overnight; Verity's slow left-arm did the rest.
England v Australia
1934-07-21
Four years after his 334 on the same ground, Don Bradman returned to Headingley in July 1934 and made another triple — 304 in 430 minutes, sharing a then world-record fourth-wicket stand of 388 with Bill Ponsford. The Test was drawn, but the partnership was the high mark of the 1934 Ashes and proof that Yorkshire's Test wicket could be Bradman's personal property.
England v Australia
1934-08-18
Bill Ponsford's last Test innings was 266 at The Oval in August 1934, in a 451-run second-wicket stand with Don Bradman that won the Ashes for Australia and broke a world record that stood for 57 years. He walked off, raised his bat to a packed Oval, and retired from international cricket at 34.
Australia v England
1933-02-14
With the fate of the Bodyline series in the balance and England 216 for 6 chasing 340, Eddie Paynter checked himself out of a Brisbane hospital where he was being treated for acute tonsillitis, taxied to the Gabba in pyjamas and a dressing gown, and batted for nearly four hours to score 83. England drew level on first innings, won the Test by six wickets and the series 4-1.
Australia v England
1933-01-14
On 14 January 1933 a Larwood bouncer felled Australian captain Bill Woodfull over the heart, the crowd nearly came over the fence, and that evening MCC manager Pelham Warner walked into the home dressing room to be told, 'There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not.' The exchange leaked, the Adelaide Test became the diplomatic flashpoint of Bodyline, and the most famous sentence in Anglo-Australian cricket entered the language.
Australia v England
1933-01-16
Two days after Woodfull was struck over the heart, Australian wicketkeeper-batsman Bert Oldfield top-edged a Harold Larwood lifter into his own temple at Adelaide. The blow fractured his skull. Crucially, the field was conventional — not the leg-theory cordon — but the crowd did not know that. Mounted police lined the boundary as Oldfield was carried off; the Adelaide Test came within a single Australian Board decision of being abandoned.
Australia v England
1933-01-18
On 18 January 1933, two days after Bert Oldfield's skull was fractured in Adelaide, the Australian Board of Control cabled Lord's accusing England of 'unsportsmanlike' play. The MCC's reply offered to cancel the tour outright. Two more cables, the intervention of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and a quiet retraction of the offending word were needed to keep the series alive. It is the most consequential cable exchange in cricket history.
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
1933-02-28
Across the five Tests of the Bodyline series in 1932-33, Harold Larwood took 33 wickets at 19.51 — still the highest haul by an English fast bowler in an Ashes series in Australia. Including his unlikely 98 with the bat in his last Test, Larwood's tour was statistically the most dominant by a touring fast bowler since SF Barnes a quarter-century earlier.
Australia v England
1933-01-02
On 30 December 1932 at the MCG, Yorkshire's tall fast-medium bowler Bill Bowes, picked for England's Bodyline tour as Larwood's lieutenant, bowled Don Bradman first ball — a long hop that Bradman dragged on attempting to pull. Bowes finished with 1/50 in the innings; the first-ball duck is one of only seven in Bradman's Test career and has been retold in every history of the 1930s ever since.
Australia vs England
2 December 1932
The 1932-33 Bodyline series: England captain Douglas Jardine directed Harold Larwood to bowl short-pitched leg-theory at batsmen's bodies to stop Don Bradman. Nearly caused a diplomatic rupture between England and Australia; England won 4-1.
New South Wales v South Australia
1932-02-04
On 4 February 1932 Tim Wall took 10 for 36 in 12.4 overs against New South Wales at the SCG, one of only a handful of first-class instances of all ten wickets in Australia and the only one in the history of the Sheffield Shield. The figures, achieved on a damaged pitch, remain a record in the competition.
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.
Australia
1932-02-19
Bill O'Reilly debuted for Australia in February 1932 and was, until World War II ended his Test career, the most feared bowler in the world. A leg-spinner who bowled at near-medium pace with sharp turn and bounce, he took 144 wickets in 27 Tests at 22.59, was named Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1935, and stood at the centre of the Bradman-O'Reilly rivalry that would mark Australian dressing rooms across the decade.
England v Australia
1930-07-11
On 11 July 1930 a 21-year-old Don Bradman walked in at 1 for 1 and by stumps had scored an unbeaten 309 — still the only triple-century in a single day's Test play. He went on to 334 the next morning, then the highest individual score in Test cricket, surpassing Andy Sandham's 325. The match drew, but the innings catapulted Bradman from prodigy to phenomenon and underwrote his world-record series tally of 974 runs.
England v Australia
1930-06-27
Two weeks before his Headingley triple, Bradman walked out at Lord's and produced what he would call, decades later, the finest innings of his life: 254 from 376 balls, 25 fours, almost every stroke struck in the meat of the bat. Australia made 729 for 6 declared, levelled the series, and put English bowling on notice that the 1930 tour would be unlike anything previous.
England v Australia
1930-08-16
With the series locked at 1-1 and the Ashes on the line, Bradman walked out at The Oval and made 232 across two days. Australia won by an innings and 39 runs, regained the urn, and finished a series in which Bradman had averaged 139.14. It was the innings during which Douglas Jardine, watching from the pavilion, began thinking seriously about leg theory.
Australia v England
1929-03-08
In the 1928-29 Ashes Wally Hammond scored 905 runs in five Tests at an average of 113.12 — at the time, and for the next 60 years, the most by any batsman in any Test series. England won the series 4-1 under Percy Chapman.
Australia v England
1929-03-08
Percy Chapman's England side, led by Hammond's record 905 runs and supported by the new-ball pair of Larwood and George Geary, won the 1928-29 Ashes 4-1 — the first English Ashes win in Australia for 17 years and the series in which a 20-year-old Don Bradman made his Test debut.
Australia v England
1928-11-30
On 30 November 1928 the 20-year-old Don Bradman made his Test debut against England at the Exhibition Ground in Brisbane. He scored 18 and 1 as Australia were beaten by 675 runs — the largest defeat in Test history at the time — and was dropped for the next Test before returning to begin a career that would average 99.94.
England v Australia
1926-08-14
In June, July and August 1926 the 40-year-old Charlie Macartney made centuries in three successive Tests against England — 133 at Lord's, 151 at Headingley (where he reached 100 before lunch on the first morning), and 109 at Old Trafford. He was only the second man in Ashes history to score hundreds in three consecutive Tests.
England v Australia
1926-08-18
Recalled to the England side aged 48 years and 165 days, Wilfred Rhodes took 4 for 44 in Australia's second innings at the Oval in August 1926, helping to win England's first Ashes series since 1912. He remains the oldest man ever to play Test cricket.
England v Australia
1926-08-16
On the third morning of the fifth Test of 1926, after overnight thunderstorms had turned the Oval pitch into one of the most treacherous in Test history, Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe added 172 for the first wicket — Hobbs 100, Sutcliffe 161 — in an innings widely regarded as the finest piece of opening batting in cricket.
Australia and English county opposition
1926-07-15
From 1921 onward, the Sydney crowds called Charlie Macartney 'The Governor-General' for the way he batted as if owning the ground. The nickname stuck across cricket and was the source of dozens of contemporary one-liners — including his much-quoted aside to a slip fielder before destroying him for six.
Australia v England
1925-01-01
On a rain-affected New Year's Day at the MCG in 1925, Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe walked out to open and put on 283 — at the time the highest opening stand in Ashes Test history and an innings that announced one of the great opening partnerships of all cricket. England lost the match but the partnership had begun in earnest.
Australia v England
1925-03-04
Herbert Collins's Australians retained the Ashes 4-1 in the long, hot summer of 1924-25, but the central story of the series was the bowling of Maurice Tate — 38 wickets in five Tests, then a world record for any bowler in an Ashes series — and the formation, finally, of the Hobbs-Sutcliffe opening partnership.
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.
New South Wales and Australia
1925-12-30
Through 1925-26 the 28-year-old Alan Kippax of New South Wales established himself as the heir to the Trumper-Macartney tradition of Australian batting stylists, scoring 1,309 first-class runs at 65.45 and earning the first of his 22 Test caps.
Australia v England
1925-03-04
On his debut Test series, the 30-year-old Yorkshire opener Herbert Sutcliffe scored 734 runs in five Tests at an average of 81.55 — at the time the highest Test debut series aggregate by any batsman in cricket history.
Australia v England
1921-03-01
When Warwick Armstrong's Australians sealed the fifth Test on 1 March 1921, they had become the first side in cricket history to win an Ashes series 5-0. Captained from the front by the 22-stone all-rounder nicknamed 'The Big Ship', a side rebuilding from the Great War crushed Johnny Douglas's England in every match of a series that would not be matched in scale until Ricky Ponting's team in 2006-07.
England v Australia
1921-07-04
Captaining England in only his second Test, the Honourable Lionel Tennyson split his left hand fielding a Macartney drive, returned the next day to bat virtually one-handed, and made 63 and 36 against the Gregory-McDonald attack — an act of leadership remembered for a century as one of the bravest innings ever played by an England captain.
Australia v England
1921-08-15
Through the summer of 1921 Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald operated as the most feared new-ball pair the world had yet seen. Together they took 46 wickets in the five Tests as Warwick Armstrong's Australians won the series 3-0, and inspired a decade of English broadcasting and journalism that would obsess about pace until Larwood's Bodyline answer arrived ten years later.
Australians v Nottinghamshire
1921-06-25
Between lunch on a June Saturday and tea on the Monday after, Charlie Macartney made 345 against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge — for almost two decades a world record for runs scored by a batsman in a single day, and an innings that announced the man Sydneysiders called the 'Governor-General' to the wider cricket world.
Australia
1919-10-15
Roy Park, who had served as a doctor with the Australian Army Medical Corps in France, returned to club cricket in Melbourne in late 1919. Within fifteen months he would play a single Test for Australia at Melbourne, face one ball, be bowled for a duck, and never play another. The 1919 comeback is the start of one of cricket's strangest career arcs.
Australia
1917-10-31
Albert 'Tibby' Cotter, the fastest bowler Australia had produced before the war and one of the Big Six who walked out in 1912, was killed in action at the Charge of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. He was 33. He had taken 89 wickets in 21 Tests.
England, Australia services
1916-07-15
From 1915 onwards, charity and services cricket became the only first-rank cricket in England — featuring matches between Royal Navy, Army, RFC, Dominion troops and ad-hoc 'England' XIs raised from cricketers not in uniform. The proceeds went to war funds and the matches kept the game in the public eye.
Australia
1915-06-28
Victor Trumper, the most adored batsman of cricket's Golden Age and to many Australians the finest stylist the game has produced, died of Bright's disease at his Sydney home on 28 June 1915. He was 37 years old. The funeral procession through Sydney was one of the largest the city had ever seen.
Australia
1914-02-15
Charlie Macartney established himself in the 1910-1914 period as Australia's most dashing pre-war stroke-maker after Trumper — a small, neat batsman with a back-foot drive so destructive that English crowds would later nickname him 'the Governor-General' for the way he carried himself at the crease.
Australia and England
1914-07-30
Albert Trott, the only batsman ever to hit a ball over the Lord's pavilion and a Test cricketer for both Australia and England, shot himself at his Willesden Green lodgings on 30 July 1914 — five days before Britain entered the war. He was 41, ill, in debt, and had left a hand-written will on the back of a laundry bill bequeathing his wardrobe to his landlady.
Australia vs England
1912-02-09
Jack Hobbs (178) and Wilfred Rhodes (179) put on 323 for the first wicket at Melbourne, setting a Test record that stood for 22 years and remains England's highest opening partnership against Australia more than a century later.
Australia
1912-03-21
Six of Australia's most senior cricketers — Warwick Armstrong, Victor Trumper, Clem Hill, Tibby Cotter, Vernon Ransford and Hanson Carter — refused to tour England for the 1912 Triangular Tournament after the Board of Control insisted on appointing its own manager rather than the players' choice, Frank Laver.
England, Australia, South Africa
1912-08-22
The first attempt at a three-nation Test tournament — England, Australia and South Africa playing a round-robin in England in 1912 — was destroyed by the wettest summer on record, a depleted Australian side stripped of its Big Six, an outclassed South Africa, and crowds that simply didn't turn up. No comparable multilateral Test event was attempted for decades.
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.
England, Australia, South Africa
1912-08-31
The 1912 Triangular Tournament was played in the wettest English summer since records began in 1766. August 1912 was the coldest, dullest and wettest August of the entire 20th century. With pitches uncovered and Tests three days long, much of the tournament was a sodden farce.
Australia
1912-08-22
Australia's 1912 Triangular side, captained by 42-year-old Syd Gregory after the Big Six refused to tour, was the weakest Australian Test party ever sent to England. They lost the deciding Test at the Oval, finished second in the tournament and effectively lost a Test generation overnight.
Australia
1912-05-01
Syd Gregory was 42, semi-retired and on his eighth tour of England when the Australian Board recalled him to captain the depleted 1912 Triangular side. His tour was personally distinguished — he played his 58th Test, a then-record — but the team was beaten and Gregory never played another Test.
Australia vs England
1912-03-01
England's seam pair Sydney Barnes and Frank Foster shared 66 of the 95 Australian wickets to fall as Plum Warner's MCC side, captained by Johnny Douglas after Warner fell ill, lost the opening Test in Sydney and then won four in a row to take the series 4-1.
Australia vs England
1911-12-30
On the opening morning of the second Test at Melbourne, Sydney Barnes reduced Australia to 38 for four with an opening burst that took out Bardsley, Kelleway, Hill and Armstrong for a single run. Australia still won the match, but the spell entered cricket folklore.
South Africa, Australia
1910-12-15
George Aubrey Faulkner of Transvaal was — by Wisden's 1910 reckoning — 'the best all-rounder in the world'. He averaged 60.55 in the 1909-10 series at home v England, then made 732 runs at 73.20 (including 204) on the 1910-11 tour of Australia, where South Africa lost the series 4-1. A googly bowler and middle-order batsman, his career spanned 1906 to 1924.
England, Australia, South Africa
1910-06-15
The Imperial Cricket Conference, founded at Lord's in June 1909 with England, Australia and South Africa as founding members, became operationally active through 1910-1914 — the body that scheduled the 1912 Triangular and would in time become the modern ICC.
England, Australia, South Africa
15 June 1909
The Imperial Cricket Conference was founded on 15 June 1909 at Lord's, London, by England, Australia and South Africa — the three Test-playing nations. It became the ICC, first governing body of world cricket.
England, Australia, South Africa
1909-06-15
On 15 June 1909, representatives of the MCC, the Australian Cricket Board and the South African Cricket Association met at Lord's and founded the Imperial Cricket Conference, the body that became the International Cricket Council. The proposal had been pushed for two years by South African mining magnate Abe Bailey; it created the first international cricket governing structure.
South Africa, England, Australia
1909-12-01
After their breakthrough 1907 tour of England, South Africa's googly quartet — Reggie Schwarz, Bert Vogler, Aubrey Faulkner and Gordon White — anchored the side through the 1909-10 home Tests against England (won 3-2 by South Africa) and the 1910-11 tour of Australia. Vogler took 36 wickets in the 1909-10 home series; Faulkner emerged as the world's best all-rounder by 1910.
Australia, England
1909-08-31
Montague 'Monty' Noble played 42 Tests for Australia between 1898 and 1909, captaining 15 of them and winning eight. A medium-paced bowler whose 'spin-swerve' (an early form of off-cutting in-swinger) and a top-order batsman, he scored 1,997 Test runs at 30.25 and took 121 Test wickets at 25. He led Australia to the Ashes win at home in 1907-08 and the away win in 1909.
England, Australia
1909-08-11
Monty Noble's Australians won the 1909 Ashes 2-1 in England, the first Australian series win in England since 1902. Warren Bardsley scored 136 and 130 in the drawn fifth Test at The Oval (9-11 August 1909), becoming the first cricketer ever to make a century in each innings of a Test match. Australia's pace bowler Tibby Cotter and all-rounder Warwick Armstrong led the tour averages.
England, Australia
1908-02-27
Australia, captained by Monty Noble, regained the Ashes from Plum Warner's England side 4-1 in the 1907-08 series. Charlie Macartney made his Test debut as a left-arm spinner (and earned the nickname 'Governor General'); Trumper and Noble batted superbly; the series featured two thrilling close finishes at Sydney and Melbourne.
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
1905-08-21
Captaining England for the first time in 1905, Stanley Jackson won all five tosses against Joe Darling, topped both batting and bowling averages on either side (492 runs at 70.28; 13 wickets at 15.46), and led England to a 2-0 series win to retain the Ashes. He retired from Test cricket immediately afterwards, never having toured Australia.
Australia, England
1905-07-15
Albert 'Tibby' Cotter, a stocky 21-year-old fast bowler from Sydney, made his Test debut against England in 1903-04 but became famous on the 1905 Ashes tour. He bowled bouncers as a tactic when most Edwardian fast bowlers thought them ungentlemanly, set packed slip-cordons, and broke stumps. He died in October 1917 in a mounted charge at Beersheba — the only Australian Test cricketer killed in the Great War.
New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland
1905-05-06
On 6 May 1905, at Wesley College in Melbourne, the New South Wales Cricket Association and the Victorian Cricket Association founded the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket — the body that would become Cricket Australia. South Australia refused to join because the constitution gave players no representation; the dispute would eventually trigger the 1912 Big Six walkout.
Australia, England
1905-08-31
Warwick Armstrong, Australia's 26-year-old all-rounder, scored 2,002 runs and took 130 wickets in first-class matches on the 1905 tour of England — one of the great all-rounder tour returns of all time. The 'Big Ship' was Joe Darling's most consistent player; he would go on to play 50 Tests and captain Australia to a 5-0 Ashes whitewash in 1920-21.
England, Australia
1905-07-24
Reginald Herbert Spooner made his Test debut for England v Australia at Old Trafford on 24 July 1905, having been one of the most-talked-about batsmen of the unbeaten Lancashire side of 1903-04. A stylist in the Trumper mould, he played 10 Tests, made 247 v Notts in 1903 (a Lancashire record), and shared a 368-run opening stand with Archie MacLaren the same year.
Australia
1905-08-15
Joe Darling led Australia in three separate Ashes series — 1899, 1902 and 1905 — and on the 1901-02 and 1902 tours commanded the Australian touring sides at the height of the country's Edwardian cricket. A left-handed batter from South Australia, he combined a measured tactical sense with the durability of the bush cricketer and was the first Australian captain to win an Ashes series in England since 1888.
England, Australia
1904-03-05
Pelham 'Plum' Warner captained the first MCC-organised tour to Australia in 1903-04, regaining the Ashes 3-2 — England's first Ashes series win since 1896. Warner's selection was controversial (Archie MacLaren refused to tour because of it), but the campaign produced R.E. Foster's 287, Bosanquet's googly debut and Warner's own bestselling book 'How We Recovered The Ashes'.
Australia, England
1904-03-07
Hugh Trumble took 7 for 28 in his last Test innings, including a hat-trick of Bosanquet, Plum Warner and Dick Lilley, as Australia beat England by 218 runs at the MCG in March 1904. The hat-trick was Trumble's second in Tests (the first being against England at the same ground in 1902); he was the first man to take two Test hat-tricks. Australia won the dead rubber but lost the series 3-2.
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.
England, Australia
1903-12-11
On England's 1903-04 tour of Australia, Bernard Bosanquet bowled what he himself called the first googly delivered in Australia, dismissing Victor Trumper. The new delivery — a leg-break action producing an off-break — would within a decade reshape spin bowling worldwide. Bosanquet's 6 for 51 in the fourth Test at Sydney sealed the Ashes for Plum Warner's England.
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.
England, Australia
1902-07-26
The fourth Ashes Test of 1902 at Old Trafford was won by Australia by just three runs, the narrowest margin in Ashes history until 2005. Sussex bowler Fred Tate, drafted in for his only Test, dropped a key catch off Joe Darling at square leg and was last man out, bowled by Saunders for four. The match defined his life: he was forever known for 'Fred Tate's Test'.
England, Australia
1902-08-13
Set 263 to win and tottering at 48 for 5, England were rescued by Gilbert Jessop, whose 104 in 75 minutes — with his 50 in 43 minutes — remains one of the fastest and most consequential innings in Test history. George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes saw England home by one wicket, immortalising the (probably apocryphal) 'we'll get them in singles' exchange.
Australia, England
1902-07-24
On the rain-affected opening morning of the fourth Ashes Test of 1902, Victor Trumper drove, cut and pulled the England attack to ribbons, reaching 103 not out by lunch — the first century before lunch on day one of a Test match. Wisden, MacLaren and a generation of cricket writers would describe it as among the finest innings ever played.
England, Australia
1902-08-13
When Bill Lockwood was bowled at 248 for 9 in England's chase of 263 at The Oval on 13 August 1902, Wilfred Rhodes joined his Yorkshire team-mate George Hirst with 15 runs still required against Trumble, Saunders and Noble. The two professionals from Kirkheaton edged, deflected and sometimes simply blocked their way to a one-wicket win — the foundation of perhaps cricket's most famous (and most disputed) quotation, 'we'll get them in singles'.
Australia, England
1902-09-01
Jack Saunders, the left-arm spin bowler from Victoria, took 123 first-class wickets at 16.95 on the 1902 tour of England — bowling alongside Hugh Trumble in the side that won the Ashes 2-1. Saunders bowled the last ball of Fred Tate's Test at Old Trafford and was Australia's leading wicket-taker on the tour after Trumble.
England, Australia
1902-05-29
On 29 May 1902 at Edgbaston, on a damp pitch, Wilfred Rhodes (7 for 17) and George Hirst (3 for 15) bowled Australia out for 36 — for almost a century the lowest total in Test cricket. The remarkable bowling, taking 90 minutes, is part of the Edgbaston Test legend; the match was eventually drawn after a thunderstorm washed out two days.
Australia, England, South Africa
1902-08-13
South Australian left-hander Clem Hill, in 1902, scored 1,061 Test runs across the Ashes series in England and the immediately following series in South Africa — becoming the first batsman to make 1,000 Test runs in a calendar year. The record was not equalled until Don Bradman's 1948.
England, Australia
1902-05-29
Before Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst rolled Australia for 36 at Edgbaston on 29 May 1902, the day's foundation had been laid by Johnny Tyldesley's 138 in four and a half hours — an innings that took England to 376 for 9 declared. Tyldesley, the Lancashire professional, was at the height of his powers; the innings is sometimes overlooked because of what followed in the afternoon.
England, Australia
1901-12-13
Sydney Barnes, then a Lancashire League professional with seven first-class matches to his name, made his Test debut at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 13 December 1901, taking 5 for 65. He went on to take 19 wickets in his first two Tests before injury ended his tour. Barnes' career was unique: 27 Tests, 189 wickets at 16.43, but only 47 first-class County Championship matches, his preference being the better-paid Minor Counties and Lancashire League.
England, Australia
1899-06-01
Wilfred Rhodes made his Test debut at Trent Bridge in June 1899 — the same match that proved to be W.G. Grace's last Test. Rhodes' Test career would span 30 years 313 days, the longest in history; he would also be the oldest Test player ever (52 years 165 days). Through the 1900s he was first England's slow left-arm spinner and then, by 1909, an opening batsman.
England v Australia
1899-06-15
On 15-17 June 1899, in only his second Test match, the 21-year-old Victor Trumper played a 135 not out at Lord's that announced him as the most original batsman in cricket. Coming in at 59 for 3, he batted across two days, drove and cut Bobby Peel's spiritual heir Wilfred Rhodes through every gap, and helped Australia to an innings victory and a 1-0 Ashes lead they would not surrender. Within a year he was Australia's most-photographed sportsman.
England v Australia
1899-06-01
On 1-3 June 1899, in the first Test ever played at Trent Bridge, the 50-year-old W.G. Grace captained England against Australia. He made 28 and 1, dropped catches at point, and was barracked by the Nottingham crowd over his fielding. Three days after the match he resigned the captaincy and his place. The same Test marked the debuts of Wilfred Rhodes (21) and Victor Trumper (21) — Rhodes would play with Bradman in his last Test; Trumper would become Australia's first cricketing icon.
England v Australia
1899-06-01
On 1 June 1899, the 21-year-old Yorkshire left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes opened England's bowling against Australia at Trent Bridge and took 4 for 58 in 35.1 overs on debut. The same Test marked W.G. Grace's last appearance. Rhodes would play another 57 Tests across the next 31 years, finishing with the longest Test career in cricket history — the only man to play with both W.G. Grace and Don Bradman.
Australia
1899-04-15
When Australia's selectors announced the squad for the 1899 tour of England, the inclusion of 21-year-old Sydney clerk Victor Trumper — who had played only one full Sheffield Shield season — caused a national row. Joe Darling, the new captain, had insisted on his selection over established state players. Trumper had to be lent the £200 tour fee to accept. Within ten weeks he was making 135* at Lord's. The selection is one of the great calls in Australian cricket history.
MCC v Australians
1899-07-31
On 31 July 1899, in a tour match between MCC and the touring Australians at Lord's, Middlesex's Australian-born all-rounder Albert Trott — playing for MCC — hit Monty Noble for what is still the only six ever struck clean over the Lord's pavilion. The ball glanced a chimney stack and landed in pavilion attendant Philip Need's garden behind the building. The blow has not been matched in 125 years of cricket at Lord's.
England v Australia
1899-06-29
On 29 June 1899, in the first Test ever played at Headingley, Middlesex's medium-pacer Jack Hearne took the wickets of Clem Hill, Syd Gregory and Monty Noble in three consecutive balls — England's first hat-trick against Australia in Test cricket. Australia were dismissed for 172. The match was drawn after Johnny Briggs collapsed in an epileptic fit overnight (see entry); the hat-trick lit one of the bleakest days in English cricket.
England v Australia
1899-06-30
On the night of 29-30 June 1899, after the first day of England's first Test at Headingley, Lancashire's left-arm spinner Johnny Briggs — already a 33-Test veteran with 118 wickets — suffered a violent epileptic fit at the team hotel. He was admitted to Cheadle Royal Hospital. He played one more season of county cricket in 1900 before relapses forced him to a sanatorium. He died in 1902 aged 39 — the first Test cricketer known to have died of an epilepsy-related illness.
England v Australia
1899-08-15
The 1899 Ashes was the first Test series in England to consist of five matches rather than three. Australia, captained by Joe Darling on his first tour as skipper, won the only match decided — the second Test at Lord's by 10 wickets — and drew the other four to take the series 1-0. It was Australia's first Ashes win on English soil since 1882, and the launch series for Victor Trumper, Monty Noble, Hugh Trumble at his peak and Ernie Jones.
Australia v England
1898-01-01
On 1 January 1898 at the MCG, umpire Jim Phillips called Australia's Ernie Jones for throwing — the first bowler ever no-balled for a suspect action in a Test match. Jones, the South Australian fast bowler famous for sending a ball through W.G. Grace's beard the previous summer, had been called once before the Test by Phillips in a tour match. The Melbourne call set off a 'chucking question' that would consume English county cricket through 1900-01 and end Arthur Mold's career.
Australia v England
1898-01-01
On 1-3 January 1898, the 20-year-old Adelaide left-hander Clem Hill came in at 6 for 58 and made 188 — his maiden Test century, and still the highest Ashes Test score by a player under 21. Australia recovered to 520 and won by an innings. The innings established Hill as the central figure of Australian batting between Trumper and Bradman; he would average 39 across 49 Tests until 1912.
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
1898-01-01
On 1 January 1898 at the MCG, Montague Alfred Noble — a 24-year-old New South Wales medium-pacer and middle-order batsman — made his Test debut against Stoddart's England. He took 6 for 49 in England's second innings as Australia won by an innings and 55 runs. It was the start of a 42-Test career, fifteen as captain, that would produce 121 Test wickets at 25.00 and a reputation as Australia's most complete all-rounder before Keith Miller.
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.
England v Australia
1896-07-18
On 18 July 1896 K.S. Ranjitsinhji, 23, a Cambridge graduate from Nawanagar, walked out at Old Trafford for his Test debut and made 62 in the first innings and an unbeaten 154 in the second — including 113 between the start of the third morning and lunch, becoming the first batsman to score a century before lunch in Test cricket. The MCC selectors had refused him for the First Test on grounds that were widely understood to be racial; Lancashire's local committee picked him for Manchester. Australia won the Test, but the leg-glanced 154* changed cricket's conversation about who could play it.
England v Australia
1896-07-16
In the same Old Trafford Test that produced Ranjitsinhji's debut 154*, England's fast bowler Tom Richardson took 7 for 168 and 6 for 76 — match figures of 13 for 244 from 110 overs of fast bowling. He bowled unchanged for three hours on the final afternoon as Australia scrabbled to 125 for 7 chasing 125 to win. Australia held on by three wickets. Richardson's spell is one of the great lost-cause performances in Test history.
England v Australia
1896-08-10
On a damp Oval pitch in August 1896, Australia's off-spinner Hugh Trumble took 6 for 59 and 6 for 30 — match figures of 12 for 89 — yet finished on the losing side. Australia, set 111 to win, collapsed to 19 for 8 and were all out for 44, England winning the third Test and the series 2-1. Wisden called Trumble 'on all wickets distinctly the best bowler on the side'; the match remains one of cricket's most celebrated bowling efforts in defeat.
England v Australia
1896-06-22
In June 1896, despite Ranjitsinhji topping the English first-class averages, Lord Harris — president of MCC and effectively the selector for the Lord's Test — refused to pick him for the first Test against Australia, arguing only 'native-born' Englishmen should represent the side. England lost. The Lancashire selectors who chose the Old Trafford Test simply ignored Harris and picked Ranji, who marked his debut with 62 and 154 not out, and the precedent of an English-born-only Test team was broken forever.
Australia v England
1895-03-06
Across the five Tests of the 1894-95 Ashes, George Giffen — Australia's captain, opening bowler and number-three batsman — scored 475 runs at 52.78 and took 34 wickets at 24.12. The combined haul is still, 130 years later, the best all-round performance in any Test series in cricket history. Australia lost the rubber 2-3, but Giffen's series average has never been matched.
Australia v England
1895-01-11
On Test debut at Adelaide in January 1895, the 21-year-old Victorian all-rounder Albert Trott — playing alongside his older brother and captain Harry — batted at number ten for 38 not out and 72 not out (an unbeaten 110 in the match) and took 8 for 43 in England's second innings. Australia won by 382 runs. It was statistically the most complete Test debut in cricket history; within four years Trott would, for separate reasons, never play Test cricket for Australia again.
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
1894-12-29
Days after the Sydney follow-on miracle, England captain Andrew Stoddart played the innings he later called 'the century of my career' — 173 from 297 minutes at the MCG, taking England 2-0 up in the 1894-95 Ashes. The score remained the highest by an England captain in Australia until Mike Denness passed it 80 years later in 1974-75. Stoddart's tour was the high tide of his cricketing life.
England v Australia
1893-07-17
Francis Stanley Jackson, a 22-year-old Cambridge captain and Harrow product, made his Test debut for England against Australia at Lord's in July 1893. He scored 91 in his only innings and took 4 wickets, an introduction so commanding that he was retained for every home Ashes Test for the next twelve years and would, in 1905, captain England to the most one-sided Ashes series of the era.
England v Australia
1891-12-15
When the Earl of Sheffield financed an English tour of Australia in 1891-92 with WG Grace as captain, he ended the trip by donating £150 to the New South Wales Cricket Association to fund a perpetual trophy for inter-colonial cricket. The result: the Sheffield Shield, contested between NSW, Victoria and South Australia from 1892-93 onwards, and the foundational competition of Australian first-class cricket.
England / Australia
1889-04-15
Wisden's 1889 Almanack inaugurated what became the most prestigious individual award in cricket: the Cricketers of the Year. The first list — picked by editor Charles Pardon to mark the bowler-dominated 1888 summer — named six Great Bowlers: George Lohmann, Bobby Peel, Johnny Briggs (England), Charlie Turner, JJ Ferris and Sammy Woods (Australia). Between them they had taken 1,272 wickets in 1888 at 11.89 apiece.
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.
England v Australia
1888-07-17
On 17 July 1888, the second day of the first Test at Lord's, 27 wickets fell — a single-day Test record that has stood for 138 years. England were dismissed for 53 in 55 minutes, Australia for 60, England for 62 — three full innings inside one day's play, on a Lord's pitch baked then drenched. Australia won the match by 61 runs.
Australia (touring England)
1888-08-31
On the 1888 Australian tour of England, Charlie Turner and JJ Ferris bowled essentially unchanged through innings after innings, taking 534 of the 663 wickets that fell to the Australians across the summer. Turner's 283 first-class wickets that season was a record for any bowler in any English summer. The pair were named in the inaugural Wisden Cricketers of the Year list in 1889.
Australia
1888-09-30
Charles Thomas Biass Turner, nicknamed 'The Terror', was the outstanding bowler of the late 1880s. In the wet English summer of 1888 he took 283 first-class wickets at 11.27 — a tally only ever bettered by Tom Richardson in 1895 and Tich Freeman in 1928 and 1933. The previous Australian summer he had become the only bowler ever to take 100 first-class wickets in a single Australian season. He reached 50 Test wickets in only six matches (still the record) and was the second bowler in history to 100 Test wickets, behind Johnny Briggs by three days in 1895.
Australia / England (one tour)
1888-09-30
John James Ferris was the left-arm partner who shared the new ball with Charlie Turner through the great Australian bowling years of the late 1880s. He took 61 Test wickets in only 9 matches at 12.70 apiece — one of the best averages in Test history — was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1889, and later qualified for England by residence and toured South Africa as an Englishman in 1891-92, taking 13 wickets in his only Test for his second country. He died of typhoid fever in Durban in 1900, aged 33.
Australia
1888-08-31
Alexander Chalmers 'Alec' Bannerman, younger brother of Test cricket's first centurion Charles Bannerman, played 28 Tests for Australia between 1879 and 1893 as the most determined defensive opener of the 19th century. Where Charles attacked, Alec stonewalled. He never made a Test century in 50 innings; his highest was 94. His patience was a moral asset to a young Test side that could not yet match the depth of England's batting.
Australia / Derbyshire (later)
1888-06-01
In September 1886, on his fifth tour of England, Fred 'The Demon' Spofforth married Phillis Marsh Cadman at Breadsall, Derbyshire. By 1888 the couple had returned to England permanently; Spofforth took a position in his father-in-law's tea importing business and began a second life as a Derbyshire-domiciled cricketer. He played for Derbyshire from 1889, captained them in 1890, and lived out the rest of his life in England, dying at Long Ditton in 1926 — the most famous Australian cricketer ever to settle in the country he had so often demolished.
England v Australia
1886-08-12
Surrey medium-pacer George Lohmann had played two Tests in 1886 with a single wicket to show for them. At The Oval in August he changed his life: 7 for 36 and 5 for 68 — match figures of 12 for 104 against Australia, with England winning by an innings and 217. The performance launched the bowler whose career Test average (10.75) is still the lowest for any bowler with 100+ Test wickets.
Australia v England
1885-01-19
When the 1884 Australian touring side returned home and demanded 50% of the gate receipts for the second Test of the 1884-85 series at Melbourne, the Victoria Cricket Association refused. The result: nine of the eleven first-Test players boycotted; Australia fielded a side with eleven changes (only Sammy Jones and Tom Horan retained from earlier matches), all eleven men were Test debutants for that match alone, and England won by 10 wickets.
England v Australia
1884-08-12
On 11-12 August 1884, Australia's captain Billy Murdoch became the first man to score a double century in Test cricket — 211 against England at The Oval, in 525 minutes off 525 deliveries with 24 fours. Australia made 551, then a Test record. England, in desperation, used all eleven players as bowlers; the wicketkeeper Hon Alfred Lyttelton, bowling underhand lobs with his pads on, finished with the best figures, 4 for 19.
England v Australia
1884-07-21
On 21-23 July 1884, Lord's hosted its first Test match. England, with the Lancashire amateur AG Steel scoring 148 — the first Test century at headquarters — beat Australia by an innings and 5 runs. From this match onwards, Lord's became the spiritual centre of England's home Test programme.
England v Australia
1884-08-13
Sent in at number 10 to register a protest at the batting order, Surrey amateur Walter Read responded by hammering 117 off 155 balls in 113 minutes — the only Test century by a number 10 batsman, set in 1884 and not equalled in 142 years. With William Scotton blocking from the other end, the pair added 151 to save England from defeat against Murdoch's Australians.
England v Australia
1884-07-10
Old Trafford became the second English ground to stage a Test on 10 July 1884 — and was promptly rained off for the entire first day, setting a Manchester precedent that has held for over 140 years. The match was eventually drawn after Australia had inched ahead on first innings. The Lancashire ground would go on to host more Ashes washouts than any other.
England (Bligh's XI) v Australia
1884-02-09
When the Hon Ivo Bligh's England party arrived at Rupertswood near Sunbury for Christmas 1882, the captain was introduced to Florence Rose Morphy, music teacher and companion to Lady Janet Clarke, mistress of the house. The Ashes urn that emerged from the festivities was presented partly by Florence; within a year she and Bligh were engaged, and on 9 February 1884 they were married at Rupertswood. The Ashes therefore originate not just from a Sporting Times joke but from one of cricket's only real love stories.
Australia v England
1883-01-19
On 19 January 1883 Billy Bates of Yorkshire took the first hat-trick by an England bowler in a Test match — McDonnell, Giffen and Bonnor in successive deliveries — on the way to match figures of 14 for 102 and an innings win for Bligh's team at the MCG. It remained the only Ashes hat-trick by an England bowler for the rest of the 19th century.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
Across two August days in 1882, Australia beat England by seven runs at The Oval in the only Test of the tour. Fred 'The Demon' Spofforth took 14 for 90 in the match — 7/46 in the first innings and 7/44 in the second — to bowl England out for 77 chasing only 85. Within hours The Sporting Times printed a mock obituary declaring that English cricket was dead and that 'the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.' The most famous trophy in the game was born from a satirical paragraph.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
Fred 'The Demon' Spofforth took 7 for 46 and 7 for 44 at The Oval in August 1882, match figures of 14 for 90 that bowled Australia to a 7-run win and gave birth to the Ashes legend. The second-innings spell — bowled in tandem with Harry Boyle — broke an England chase of just 85 and stood as the best match analysis in Test cricket for 31 years.
England v Australia
1882-09-02
Four days after Australia's 7-run win at The Oval, the satirical weekly The Sporting Times printed a 30-line mock obituary by Reginald Shirley Brooks announcing the death of English cricket and noting that 'the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.' The squib was meant for one Saturday's amusement and ended up giving cricket its most enduring trophy name.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
With England needing 10 to beat Australia at The Oval and the Cambridge amateur CT Studd waiting at the non-striker's end, Yorkshire professional Ted Peate took strike at number 11, swung at Harry Boyle and was bowled. Asked in the dressing room why he hadn't simply blocked and given Studd the strike, Peate is supposed to have replied, 'I couldn't trust Mr Studd.' The line — Yorkshire pro on Cambridge amateur — has outlived everyone involved.
England v Australia
1882-12-30
Six weeks after the Sporting Times mock obituary, the Hon Ivo Bligh sailed for Australia at the head of a private English team with the explicit, half-joking goal of bringing 'the Ashes' home. England lost the first Test at Melbourne, won the next two at Melbourne and Sydney to take the official series 2-1, and at the end of the tour Bligh was presented with a small terracotta urn that, decades later, became the most famous trophy in cricket.
England v Australia
1882-12-25
Sometime over Christmas and Easter 1882-83, at the Rupertswood estate of Sir William Clarke at Sunbury, near Melbourne, the Hon Ivo Bligh was presented with a small terracotta urn 10.5 cm high that was said to contain the ashes of a burnt bail. The presentation, initially a private joke during a country-house cricket match, eventually produced the most famous trophy in the sport.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
On the second morning of the 1882 Oval Test, with Australia's score at 114 in their second innings, young Sammy Jones wandered out of his crease to do some gardening — and WG Grace, ball in hand at point, threw down the stumps. Spofforth, watching from the pavilion, called Grace 'a bloody cheat' and reportedly stormed into the England dressing room with the line, 'this will lose you the match.' Two hours later he had taken 7 for 44 and Australia had won by 7 runs.
Australia
1882-08-29
Jack Blackham of Victoria stood up to the stumps even to the fastest Australian bowlers in the 1880s, in gloves Wisden later described as 'little more than gardening gloves'. He was the wicketkeeper in the inaugural 1877 Test, kept in 35 Tests through 1894, and effectively eliminated the long-stop position from cricket. Wisden called him 'the prince of wicket-keepers' — a title that has stayed attached to him for 140 years.
Australia / England (one Test)
1882-08-29
William Lloyd Murdoch captained Australia in 16 Tests through the 1880s, scored the first Test 200 (211 at the Oval in 1884), held the Test record score (153* against England in 1880) for several years, and was the architect of Australia's 7-run win at the Oval in 1882. He later (controversially) played one Test for England against South Africa in 1891-92.
England (Bligh's XI) v Australia
1882-12-25
What is actually inside the Ashes urn? For over a century the standard answer was 'a burnt cricket bail', but in 1998 the 8th Earl of Darnley's daughter-in-law claimed the contents were the burnt remains of a lady's veil, possibly belonging to Florence Morphy or Lady Janet Clarke. MCC, which has had the urn since 1927, has never officially confirmed either version. After a 2006-07 examination an MCC official said it was '95 per cent certain' the contents were a bail — leaving 5 per cent of cricket's most famous mystery still open.
Private English XI v Australia
1881-09-15
Through the 1880s, three Nottinghamshire and Sussex professionals — Alfred Shaw, Arthur Shrewsbury and James Lillywhite — organised three private English tours of Australia (1881-82, 1884-85, 1886-87) outside MCC channels. They paid their own players, kept the gate receipts, and demonstrated that professionals could run international cricket as a business. Their model prefigured Packer's World Series Cricket nearly a century later.
England vs Australia
1880-09-06
George Frederick Grace, the youngest of the three Grace brothers, played his only Test at the Oval in September 1880 — the first Test ever played in England. He scored 0 and 0 with the bat but took a famous running catch to dismiss George Bonnor. Two weeks later, on 22 September 1880, Fred Grace died of pneumonia, aged 29.
England v Australia
1880-09-06
On 6 September 1880, in the very first Test match played in England, the 32-year-old WG Grace opened the innings with his elder brother EM and went on to score 152 — the first Test century by an England batsman, on debut and on home soil. England won by five wickets. The Grace family's three brothers (WG, EM and GF) all played, the only time three brothers have appeared together in a Test match.
England v Australia
1880-09-22
George Frederick 'Fred' Grace, the youngest of the cricketing Grace brothers, played his only Test at The Oval in September 1880, took the most famous deep catch of the 19th century, and was dead of pneumonia two weeks later, aged 29. His joint appearance with WG and EM is the only time three brothers have played together in a Test; the family lost their youngest within a fortnight of the historic match.
Australia
1880-09-06
George Bonnor stood six feet six, weighed 17 stone and could throw a cricket ball further than any man of his era. The 'Bathurst Giant' played 17 Tests for Australia in the 1880s, hit a six measured at 164 yards out of the MCG, completed three runs from a single shot before being caught at the boundary, and is supposed to have smashed the Melbourne pavilion clock with one stroke. He was the era's tallest, heaviest, biggest-hitting Test cricketer.
Australia vs England
1879-01-02
On 2 January 1879 Fred Spofforth took the first hat-trick in Test cricket — dismissing Vernon Royle bowled, Francis MacKinnon bowled (first ball of his Test career) and Tom Emmett caught — at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. England were 26 for some when the hat-trick fell. Spofforth went on to take 13 for 110 in the match, and Australia won by 10 wickets.
Australia (NSW) vs England
1879-02-08
On 8 February 1879 a crowd at the Association Ground in Sydney invaded the pitch after Victorian umpire George Coulthard gave Billy Murdoch run out. Lord Harris was struck across the back by a stick or whip, his teammate Monkey Hornby seized the assailant and frog-marched him to the pavilion, and 2,000 of the 10,000 spectators joined the disorder. It is cricket's first international riot.
Australia vs England
1879-01-02
The Reverend Vernon Royle — Lancashire amateur, future schoolmaster and one of the greatest cover-point fielders in cricket history — was the first wicket of Spofforth's hat-trick at Melbourne in January 1879. He played one Test, scored 18 runs, but lived in cricket folklore for his fielding. Tom Emmett's quip when his partner called for a single while Royle was at cover — 'Woa, mate, there's a policeman' — became a 19th-century cricket catchphrase.
Australia
1879-02-08
Charles Bannerman, the man who had scored Test cricket's first century in March 1877, played his last Test in February 1879. He continued for NSW until 1888 but his career declined sharply. He coached in Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand, and stood as umpire in twelve Tests between 1887 and 1902. He died in poverty in Sydney in 1930.
Australia v England
1879-01-02
On 2 January 1879, in only the third Test ever played, Fred Spofforth took the first hat-trick in Test cricket — Vernon Royle bowled, Francis MacKinnon bowled, Tom Emmett lbw — at the MCG. He finished the innings with 6 for 48 and the match with 13 wickets for 110 runs, an Australian win by 10 wickets, and an early sketch of the Demon Bowler legend that would mature at The Oval three years later.
Australia vs MCC
1878-05-27
On 27 May 1878 the touring Australians, on their first visit to England, bowled MCC out twice in a single day at Lord's. MCC made 33 and 19; Australia made 41 and 12 for 1 to win by 9 wickets. Fred Spofforth took 6/4 (including a hat-trick) and 4/16; Harry Boyle 3/14 and 6/3. W.G. Grace was clean-bowled by Spofforth for 4. The match made Australian cricket's reputation in a single afternoon.
Australia vs MCC
1878-05-27
Fred Spofforth's nickname 'The Demon' was coined on the afternoon of 27 May 1878. After clean-bowling W.G. Grace for 4 at Lord's, Spofforth — according to teammate Tom Horan — leapt two feet in the air at the wicket and in the dressing-room afterwards repeated the phrase 'Ain't I a demon?' A Vanity Fair cartoon by 'Spy' fixed the name in print within months.
England in Australia
1878-12-01
Lord Harris's 1878-79 tour of Australia was the first England touring side led by an amateur captain to play what would later be recognised as a Test match. The trip produced the third Test in history — the Spofforth hat-trick match at Melbourne — and the Sydney Riot at the Association Ground in February 1879.
Australia in England
1878-05-01
From May to September 1878 the first representative Australian XI toured Great Britain and North America. Captained by Dave Gregory and managed by John Conway, the side played 37 matches in four months, beat MCC at Lord's in a single day, and turned a profit of £750 each for the players. None of the matches were Tests — but the tour established that cricket between the two countries was financially and competitively viable.
Australia
1878-06-01
Fred Spofforth was 6ft 3in tall, lean, and bowled with what contemporaries called 'all legs, arms and nose'. After his initial fast spells in 1878 he developed an extraordinary capacity to bowl medium and slow with the same action — concealing pace changes invisibly. He stared at batsmen during his run-up. He was the first bowler treated as a deliberate intimidator.
Australia in England
1878-05-01
Billy Murdoch, a 23-year-old NSW solicitor and wicketkeeper, sailed with the first Australian touring side to England in 1878 as the team's first-choice gloveman. By the end of the season he had ceded the gloves to Jack Blackham and turned his attention exclusively to batting — a switch that would lead him to the Australian captaincy in 1880 and to many of the great Test batting innings of the next decade.
Australia
1878-05-27
Harry Boyle of Bendigo was the medium-pacer who shared the new ball with Fred Spofforth on Australia's first six tours of England. At Lord's on 27 May 1878 he took 3/14 and 6/3 against MCC; he played 12 Tests, took 32 wickets, and was Spofforth's accuracy-and-cunning foil for a decade.
MCC vs Australia
1878-05-27
W.G. Grace, the most famous batsman in the world, was clean-bowled by Fred Spofforth for 4 at Lord's on 27 May 1878. The dismissal — among the most famous of the 19th century — fixed Spofforth's reputation and shocked the English cricket establishment, which had assumed the touring Australians would be no match for MCC's strongest XI.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Cricket's first Test match was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground from 15 to 19 March 1877. A combined Australian XI captained by Dave Gregory beat James Lillywhite's touring English professionals by 45 runs. Charles Bannerman scored 165 retired hurt — the first Test century — and Tom Kendall took 7 for 55 in the second innings to clinch the win. The match was not officially designated a Test until decades later, but it has stood ever since as the start point of international Test cricket.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Charles Bannerman, a 25-year-old Sydney professional born in Kent, scored 165 before retiring hurt with a split finger in the first innings of the first Test at Melbourne in March 1877. It was the first century in Test cricket and represented 67.34% of Australia's total of 245 — a proportion no other Test centurion has ever matched.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Alfred Shaw of Nottinghamshire, the most accurate slow-medium bowler in England, delivered the first ball in Test cricket — to Charles Bannerman at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the morning of 15 March 1877. Bannerman took a single off the fourth ball of the over to register the first Test run.
Australia vs England
1877-03-19
Tom Kendall, a Tasmanian-born left-arm medium-pacer and the only Tasmanian in the side, took 7 for 55 to bowl Australia to a 45-run win in the first Test at Melbourne. England, set 154 to win, were dismissed for 108 on the fourth day, leaving Kendall with the first match-winning bowling figures in Test history.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Dave Gregory, a NSW public servant and the eldest cricketing brother of a long-running Australian dynasty, captained the All-Australian XI to a 45-run victory over James Lillywhite's England side at Melbourne in March 1877. He thus became the first Test captain in cricket history.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
James Lillywhite junior of Sussex, captain and promoter of the touring English professionals, became the first England Test captain when his side took the field at Melbourne on 15 March 1877. England lost the match by 45 runs but won the rematch a fortnight later, levelling the unofficial series.
Australia vs England
1877-03-31
A fortnight after losing the first Test, Lillywhite's England side won the rematch on the same Melbourne pitch by 4 wickets. Alfred Shaw took 5/40 and 4/41, George Ulyett scored 52 in the second innings, and the unofficial 1877 series was tied 1-1.
Australia vs England
1877-03-16
Billy Midwinter, the Gloucestershire-born Australian all-rounder, took 5 for 78 in England's first innings of the inaugural Test at Melbourne — the first five-wicket haul in Test cricket. He went on to become the only man to play Test cricket for both England and Australia.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Fred Spofforth, the leading fast bowler in the Australian colonies, refused to play in the first Test in March 1877. His protest was over the selectors' decision to pick Victorian Jack Blackham as wicketkeeper rather than the New South Welshman Billy Murdoch, the keeper Spofforth had bowled to all his career. Australia won without him.
Australia vs England
1877-03-15
Tom Garrett of NSW was 18 years and 232 days old when he opened the bowling for Australia in the first Test in March 1877. He remains the youngest player ever to represent Australia against England — a record that has stood for nearly 150 years. Garrett took 2/22 and 2/9 in the match and went on to play 19 Tests over the next decade.
Australia vs England
1877-03-13
Frank Allan of Victoria, hailed by W.G. Grace and others as 'the bowler of the century', sent a telegram two days before the first Test telling the selectors he could not play because it was carnival week in Warrnambool and his friends were in town. He never played in the inaugural Test and ended up with a single Test cap two years later.
England in Australia and New Zealand
1876-11-01
James Lillywhite's 1876-77 tour was the first English tour of Australia run as a private commercial venture rather than on invitation. The professionals travelled for a share of the gate; that share was repeatedly disputed throughout the trip, and the tour returned home with a slim profit only after months of haggling with local agents.
England (W.G. Grace's XI) in Australia
1873-10-01
Two weeks after marrying Agnes Day in October 1873, W.G. Grace took her on his honeymoon by sailing to Australia at the head of a private cricket tour. He was paid £1,500 — the equivalent of well over £100,000 today — for what was effectively a privately organised England side. The tour played 15 matches across Australia and laid the groundwork for the Test era that followed three years later.
Aboriginal Australian XI vs English club and county sides
1868-09-30
Thirteen Aboriginal cricketers from western Victoria, captained by the Sydney-based English professional Charles Lawrence, became the first Australian sporting team of any kind to tour England. Between 25 May and 17 October 1868 they played 47 matches across the country, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19. Johnny Mullagh, the side's leading all-rounder, scored 1,698 runs and took 245 wickets on the tour. Their visit was a commercial novelty in its day and is now recognised as the founding moment of Australian touring cricket.
Aboriginal Australian XI vs English club and county sides
1868-09-01
Johnny Mullagh — born Unaarrimin around 1841 on Mullagh station near Harrow, Victoria — was the outstanding all-rounder of the 1868 Aboriginal tour of England. In 47 matches he scored 1,698 runs at around 23 and took 245 wickets at 10, bowling round-arm in a free, wristy style and frequently keeping wicket between deliveries. The English fast bowler George Tarrant, after bowling at Mullagh in a tour interval, declared he had never bowled to a better batsman.
Aboriginal Australian XI
1867-12-01
An attempted Aboriginal cricket tour of England in late 1867 was blocked by the Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines in Victoria, who refused to permit the players to leave the colony. Charles Lawrence regrouped, moved his operation to Sydney, and on 8 February 1868 the team secretly boarded their ship at Queenscliff to evade the authorities — the moment that turned the 1868 Aboriginal tour from a stalled commercial project into a covert escape.
George Parr's English XII vs Australian and New Zealand colonial sides
1864-03-01
Two years after the Stephenson tour, the All-England Eleven captain George Parr led a second English party to Australia and added New Zealand to the itinerary for the first time. The twelve professionals, again playing against odds, lost only one of their thirteen Australian fixtures and introduced overarm bowling — legalised back home midway through their voyage — to colonial spectators who had never seen it.
England (All-England XI) vs Australian colonial sides
1862-03-01
Twelve English professionals captained by Surrey's H.H. Stephenson sailed on Brunel's SS Great Britain to play the first cricket tour ever undertaken to Australia. Funded by the Melbourne caterers Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond, the team played 12 matches against odds of 18 and 22 between Christmas Day 1861 and March 1862, drawing 45,000 spectators across three days for the opening fixture against Victoria and laying the commercial foundation of all future Anglo-Australian cricket.