The Border-Gavaskar Trophy from an Australian View

The Border-Gavaskar Trophy is the prize for a Test series between Australia and India, and over the last fifteen years it has become the hardest thing in Australian cricket to win. Seventeen series had been played through the summer of 2024-25. India had won ten of them, Australia six, and one had been drawn. Australia hold the trophy now, after winning 3-1 at home under Pat Cummins in a five-Test series that broke the attendance record for a Test match in this country, but they held it before that only once since 2014-15.

Seen from Australia, the trophy has quietly replaced everything except the Ashes. It draws bigger crowds than any other visiting side, it produces the tightest Test cricket, and unlike the Ashes it carries a genuine risk of defeat at home — India won here in 2018-19 and again in 2020-21, the second time with a side stripped by injury. No other touring team has done that to Australia this century.

This guide covers the Border-Gavaskar Trophy from the Australian side: where the trophy came from, what the seventeen series actually produced, why the record splits so cleanly by continent, what the 2024-25 summer did for the fixture commercially, and what a supporter here should expect from the next one.

Two names, and why they are on it

Allan Border captained Australia through the worst decade in its cricket history and handed over a side that would go on to dominate the world for fifteen years. He retired in 1994 as the leading run scorer in Test cricket and had played 153 consecutive Tests, a record built on refusing to be dropped, injured or rested. In Australia he is understood less as a great batter than as the person who stopped the decline.

Sunil Gavaskar opened the batting for India from 1971 to 1987, was the first man to reach 10,000 Test runs, and faced the West Indian fast bowlers of that era without a helmet. He was also the first Indian batter whose technique Australians openly admired, which in the 1970s was not a small thing.

Neither man played in the trophy that carries his name. It was created in 1996 to give a regular shape to a fixture that had previously happened when the calendar allowed, and the choice of names was a way of saying that this was now a series with a history worth marking rather than another tour.

The scoreboard after seventeen series

The full record through 2024-25 is 17 series: India 10, Australia 6, one drawn. In Tests it is closer than that suggests — 61 matches, India 25 wins, Australia 23, with 13 draws.

63%38%

• India series wins10
• Australia series wins6

Series results only. The 2003-04 series in Australia was drawn 1-1 and India retained the trophy as holder, so it is counted in neither column.

Show the numbers

Border-Gavaskar series won, 1996-97 to 2024-25

Item	Value
India series wins	10
Australia series wins	6

The Test-match figures being nearly level while the series count is not tells you something specific: Australia lose in India by large margins in short bursts, and win at home in tight series. A 4-0 defeat and a 2-1 win count the same in the series column and very differently in the Test column.

Every series, and who held the trophy

Season	Host	Tests	Result	Holder after
1996-97	India	1	India won	India
1997-98	India	3	India won 2-1	India
1999-2000	Australia	3	Australia won 3-0	Australia
2000-01	India	3	India won 2-1	India
2003-04	Australia	4	Drawn 1-1	India
2004-05	India	4	Australia won 2-1	Australia
2007-08	Australia	4	Australia won 2-1	Australia
2008-09	India	4	India won 2-0	India
2010-11	India	2	India won 2-0	India
2011-12	Australia	4	Australia won 4-0	Australia
2012-13	India	4	India won 4-0	India
2014-15	Australia	4	Australia won 2-0	Australia
2016-17	India	4	India won 2-1	India
2018-19	Australia	4	India won 2-1	India
2020-21	Australia	4	India won 2-1	India
2022-23	India	4	India won 2-1	India
2024-25	Australia	5	Australia won 3-1	Australia

The geography of the record

Split the seventeen series by host and the shape of the rivalry becomes obvious. Nine have been played in India: India have won eight of them and Australia one. Eight have been played in Australia: Australia have won five, India two, and one was drawn.

• Australia series wins
• India series wins

Played in Australia52

Played in India18

Counts the seventeen completed series through 2024-25 by where they were played. The 2003-04 series in Australia was drawn and is not counted in either bar.

Show the numbers

Border-Gavaskar series results by host country

Item	Australia series wins	India series wins
Played in Australia	5	2
Played in India	1	8

This is not a peculiarity of the fixture. Home advantage in Test cricket has grown steadily over the last twenty years across every country. But it is more extreme here than in most rivalries, because the two sets of conditions are further apart than almost any other pair in the game. Australian Test pitches are fast and bouncy and reward seam bowling with the new ball. Indian Test pitches turn from day one, keep low from day three, and reward finger spin bowled to a packed off-side field.

An Australian batter who has spent a career playing off the back foot at Perth and Brisbane is being asked to do something close to a different sport in Nagpur. The reverse is equally true, which is why India's two series wins in Australia were both regarded as historic achievements rather than routine results.

1996 to 2001: the trophy finds its subject

The first series was a single Test in Delhi in October 1996, which India won. The following year India won 2-1 at home. Australia then won 3-0 at home in 1999-2000 with a side entering its peak, including a total of 552 for 5 declared at Sydney.

Then came 2000-01 in India, which is the series that made the trophy matter. Australia arrived on a sixteen-Test winning streak, the longest in the history of the game, and won the first Test in Mumbai to make it seventeen. At Kolkata they enforced the follow-on, India were 232 for 4 in their second innings still 42 behind, and VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid batted through the entire fourth day. India declared, bowled Australia out and won a Test after following on. India then took the decider in Chennai and the series 2-1.

For Australian cricket that fortnight is the closest equivalent to a foundational defeat. The streak ended, the assumption of invincibility ended with it, and Steve Waugh's description of India as the final frontier entered the language.

2004-05: the one Australian series win in India

Australia went back in 2004 without Waugh, who had retired, and with Adam Gilchrist captaining in place of the injured Ricky Ponting for the first two Tests. They won in Bangalore and Nagpur, lost the fourth in Mumbai on a pitch that broke apart inside three days, and took the series 2-1.

That remains Australia's only Border-Gavaskar series win in India, and their only series win there of any kind since 1969-70. Every Australian squad since has been asked about it in the first press conference of every subsequent tour.

2007-08 and the Sydney Test

The 2007-08 series in Australia produced the most acrimonious Test either country has played against the other. Australia won at Sydney in a match disfigured by a series of umpiring errors and by an off-field disciplinary case that was resolved only after India threatened to abandon the tour. India then won at Perth. Australia took the series 2-1.

The Sydney Test is worth understanding as the low point rather than the norm. It is also, in retrospect, part of why decision review technology was adopted in Test cricket: the match demonstrated in public what happens when there is no mechanism to correct obvious errors and one side believes the errors were not random.

The two 4-0s

In 2011-12 Australia beat India 4-0 at home. In 2012-13 India beat Australia 4-0 at home. Nothing about either result was close.

Taken together they mark the point at which the fixture became fully bifurcated. India's 2011-12 tour was the last to feature the batting generation of Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman, and they were unable to cope with pace and bounce late in their careers. Australia's 2012-13 tour was the first of a run in which Australian sides were routinely dismissed twice inside three days on turning pitches.

2014-15 and a series played in mourning

The 2014-15 series began in Adelaide in December 2014, two weeks after Phillip Hughes died from a head injury sustained while batting at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The first Test had been moved from Brisbane and delayed, and both sides played it in circumstances that had no precedent in Australian cricket.

Australia won it, won again at Melbourne, and took the series 2-0 with two draws. Steve Smith scored heavily and took over the captaincy during the series when Michael Clarke was injured. It was Australia's last Border-Gavaskar success for a decade.

2018-19: India win in Australia

India won 2-1 in the summer of 2018-19, taking Tests at Adelaide and Melbourne and drawing at Sydney, to become the first Asian team to win a Test series in Australia.

Australian cricket had a straightforward explanation available and mostly declined to use it. Smith and David Warner were both serving suspensions following the ball-tampering affair in South Africa earlier that year, and the batting order that replaced them was among the weakest Australia has fielded at home. India's bowling attack, meanwhile, was the best they had ever taken abroad. The result was earned, and it was also the product of a specific Australian crisis.

2020-21: the summer that hurt most

The following series is the one that still gets brought up. India led on first innings at Adelaide Oval in the day-night Test, then were bowled out for 36 in their second innings, the lowest total in their Test history. Josh Hazlewood took 5 for 8 and Cummins 4 for 21. Australia won by eight wickets inside three days.

India then lost their captain to paternity leave, lost bowler after bowler to injury, drew at Sydney with two injured batters blocking out the final session, and arrived at the Gabba with a bowling attack that had almost no Test experience between it. They chased 328 on the last day and won by three wickets, Rishabh Pant unbeaten on 89.

It ended Australia's unbeaten run at the Gabba, which had lasted since a defeat by the West Indies in 1988. It gave India the series 2-1. And it did so with what was, on paper, India's fourth-choice attack. No result in modern Australian home Test cricket has been harder to explain away.

2016-17 and 2022-23: the near misses in India

Between the two 4-0 results and the current era, Australia twice went to India with a plan and twice came home 2-1 down.

In 2016-17 Australia won the opening Test at Pune by a very large margin on a surface that turned from the first session, which was not what anyone had predicted from a side that had been dismissed cheaply on turning pitches for four years. India won the second at Bengaluru in a Test remembered in Australia mainly for a dispute over whether Steve Smith had looked to the dressing room before deciding on a review. India took the fourth at Dharamsala and the series with it.

In 2022-23 the pattern repeated in compressed form. India won the first two Tests inside three days each, Australia won at Indore on a pitch that drew heavy criticism, and the fourth at Ahmedabad was drawn on a flat surface prepared after the previous three had been condemned. India took the trophy 2-1.

The useful Australian reading of both series is that the gap in India is not as wide as the 4-0 results of 2012-13 suggested, and not as narrow as winning a Test on tour makes it feel. Australia can win one Test in India when conditions or selection break their way. Winning two out of four or three out of five is a different problem and has not been solved since 2004.

Four months after the 2022-23 series, Australia beat India in the World Test Championship final at The Oval. That result is often cited here as evidence that the sides are closer than the Border-Gavaskar record shows, and it is worth noting that it was played in England on an English pitch, which is to say on neutral ground where neither team's home advantage applied. Removing the conditions from the contest is the one reliable way to make it even.

2024-25: Australia take it back

The 2024-25 series was the first Border-Gavaskar Trophy played over five Tests, and Australia won it 3-1 to reclaim the trophy after ten years.

1. 1PerthIndia won the opening Test at Optus Stadium by 295 runs after Australia were bowled out cheaply in the first innings.
2. 2AdelaideAustralia levelled the series with a ten-wicket win in the day-night Test under lights at Adelaide Oval.
3. 3BrisbaneRain took large parts of the third Test at the Gabba and the match was drawn with the series still level.
4. 4MelbourneAustralia won the Boxing Day Test by 184 runs in front of the largest aggregate crowd for a Test in Australia.
5. 5SydneyAustralia closed out the series with a six-wicket win at the Sydney Cricket Ground to take it 3-1.

Match results as recorded on the series scorecards. The series was the first Border-Gavaskar Trophy contested over five Tests.

Two things about that summer are worth separating. The first is that India's best player was on the losing side by some distance: Jasprit Bumrah took 32 wickets and was named player of the series, which is a rare thing to happen in a 3-1 defeat and says something about how much of India's threat rested on one bowler.

The second is that Australia won it with a top order in flux. Nineteen-year-old Sam Konstas made his debut on Boxing Day, scored 60 from 65 balls and attacked Bumrah from the outset in a way nobody had managed all summer. At 19 years and 85 days he was the youngest Australian Test debutant since Ian Craig in 1953. He was not a solution to Australia's opening problem and the following two years demonstrated as much, but the innings changed the mood of the series in a single session.

The crowds, and what they now mean

The commercial story of the 2024-25 series was the more consequential one for Australian cricket. More than 373,000 people passed through the gates at the Melbourne Cricket Ground across the five days of the fourth Test, breaking an Australian record that had stood since the Bradman era in 1937. It became the second best-attended Test match ever played anywhere, behind only India against Pakistan at Eden Gardens in 1999.

That figure matters because it settles an argument. For years the assumption inside Australian cricket was that only England could fill a Test ground here. The Boxing Day Test against India now outdraws most Ashes Tests, driven partly by the size of the Indian-Australian population in Melbourne and Sydney and partly by the quality of the cricket over the previous decade.

• 17Series played since 1996-97
• 61Tests played
• 1Australian series wins in India
• 125Nathan Lyon wickets in the series
• 373691MCG crowd over five days in 2024-25

Records through the 2024-25 series. Player aggregates are the published Border-Gavaskar totals and will change when the next series is played.

What Australian conditions do to the contest

Australian Test pitches are not uniform, and the trophy is usually decided by how a touring side handles the variation rather than by any single surface.

Perth is the fastest and bounciest, and the newer drop-in square at Optus Stadium has been a genuine seam bowler's pitch. Brisbane offers pace and carry with more lateral movement in the first session than anywhere else. Adelaide is the flattest of the five and hosts the pink-ball Test, where the twilight session under lights has become the decisive hour of the match. Melbourne's drop-in surface is slow, low and increasingly uneven late. Sydney takes turn from the third day and is the one ground where a visiting spinner can dictate a Test.

For Australia the practical consequence is that a five-Test series requires two distinct plans: fast bowling wins Perth and Brisbane, and Melbourne and Sydney are won by patience and by a spinner who can bowl fifty overs in an innings. That is precisely why Nathan Lyon has been so central to Australia's record in this fixture, with 125 wickets in Border-Gavaskar matches, comfortably more than anyone else on either side.

What Indian conditions do to Australia

The away half is where the record is lost. Australia have won one series in India since the trophy began and one since 1969-70, and it is the same series.

The technical problem is well documented and slow to fix. Australian batters are taught to play the ball late off the back foot on true bounce. On a surface where the ball turns sharply and skids low, the back foot becomes a trap: the ball is past the bat before it can be played, and the leg before decision is available to the bowler from the first over. Sweeping is the standard adaptation and it is the shot Australian players get least practice at, because there is almost nowhere in Australia to practise it usefully.

The bowling problem is the mirror image. Australia's attacks are built on pace and bounce, and neither is available. Series in India have generally been decided by whether Australia's spinners can take twenty wickets, and the answer has usually been no.

Some of this is fixable through preparation and some of it is not. Australian domestic cricket is played on Australian pitches, which is the correct decision for Australian cricket and a permanent handicap in Chennai. The Sheffield Shield cannot produce players ready for subcontinental conditions without becoming a worse competition for every other purpose.

The batting and bowling records

Sachin Tendulkar holds the batting record for the trophy with 3,262 runs. On the Australian side the leading figures across the era are Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden, Michael Hussey and Steve Smith, whose record against India both home and away is the best of any Australian batter in the modern game.

With the ball it is Lyon on 125, ahead of every Indian bowler and every other Australian. Shane Warne's record against India was, uniquely for him, ordinary — Indian batters played spin better than anyone else in the world during his career, and Tendulkar in particular targeted him. That anomaly is one of the reasons Lyon's numbers in this fixture are held in such regard in Australia.

Five Tests, and the World Test Championship

The expansion to five Tests in 2024-25 was a commercial decision that has become a structural one. It gives the series the same length as an Ashes, it fills the Australian summer from late November to early January without needing a second touring side, and it makes the trophy a much larger contributor to World Test Championship points than a two or three-Test series.

That last point is not trivial. Under the championship's percentage-of-points system, a five-Test series is a large share of a two-year cycle for both countries, and losing it heavily can end a campaign. Australia's 2024-25 win kept them in the running in a cycle they had entered as defending champions.

Going to a Border-Gavaskar Test in Australia

Tickets for this series are now the second-hardest to get in Australian cricket after the Ashes, and for the Melbourne and Sydney Tests they sell in a way that non-Ashes Tests historically did not. Day one at Melbourne on Boxing Day is effectively a members and pre-sale event; days three, four and five remain much easier and are often available on the morning.

Perth and Brisbane are the softer options for a supporter wanting a Test in this series without a queue, and Adelaide's pink-ball Test sells well on the evening sessions rather than across the day. The general mechanics of ticketing, membership and broadcast are covered in the guide to watching cricket in Australia and the grounds guide.

The crowd itself is worth mentioning. A Border-Gavaskar Test in Melbourne or Sydney is the most mixed audience at any Australian sporting event, with a very large Indian-Australian contingent that is loud, well organised and entirely at home. It is a better atmosphere than an Ashes Test, and Australian supporters who have only been to the latter are usually surprised by it.

The next one, and what to expect

The next series is scheduled for India in 2026-27 over five Tests. On the historical record, Australia will start as clear underdogs: one series win there in more than fifty years, against eight for India in the trophy's own history. A five-Test series in India also removes the argument Australian sides have leaned on since 2013, which is that a short series gives no time to adjust.

Three things will decide it. Whether Australia can find a settled opening pair capable of surviving the new ball and the first spell of spin. Whether Australia's spinners can take twenty wickets across five Tests rather than two. And whether the batting group can score at a rate that puts pressure back on Indian captains, because blocking on a turning pitch has failed for Australia repeatedly and there is no evidence it will start working now.

For the broader Australian picture — the other rivalries, the domestic structures underneath the Test side and the players currently involved — see the Ashes guide, the trans-Tasman rivalry, the 1981 underarm incident for the sport's other great Australian argument, the history of Australian cricket, the player index, the cricket section and the Australia hub. The domestic game that supplies the Test side is set out in cricket in Australia.

How to read the numbers honestly

Two habits are worth adopting with this trophy. The first is to separate series results from Test results, because the two tell different stories and the series column exaggerates the gap. India lead 10-6 on series and 25-23 on Tests, which is a much narrower rivalry than the trophy count implies.

The second is to check where a series was played before drawing any conclusion from it. Almost every strong claim made about Australia or India in this fixture over the last fifteen years dissolves once you split the record by continent. Australia are a very good home Test side and a poor one in India. India were a poor away side and became a good one. Both of those statements are true and neither of them describes a general superiority, which is exactly what makes the fixture worth five Tests.