Day-Night Test History: How the Format Was Built

Test cricket under lights was obvious for about thirty-five years before anybody played it. Floodlit one-day cricket had been a commercial success since the late 1970s, television wanted the evening audience, and boards knew perfectly well that a five-day match beginning at eleven in the morning was scheduled for a working week that no longer existed. The obstacle was never the lights. It was the ball.

A red ball is unwatchable under floodlights once the light fades, and a white one is unusable in a game played in white clothing and over five days. Everything that followed — the coloured-ball trials, the ICC rule change, the long standoff over who would go first — was an attempt to solve that single problem, and the solution took decades.

By March 2026 twenty-five men's Tests and four women's Tests had been played under lights, hosted by Australia, England, India, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and, at neutral venues in the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan. Adelaide Oval has staged more of them than anywhere else. The format has produced two of the strangest scorecards in modern Test cricket and one of its great upsets, and it is still argued about.

Floodlights arrive without Test cricket

Cricket under artificial light is much older than the pink ball. A benefit match was played under the lights at Arsenal's stadium in London in 1952, which established mainly that it could be done and that nobody could see a red ball properly.

The commercial case was made in Australia in the late 1970s. When Kerry Packer's breakaway competition put a floodlit match on at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the crowd came in numbers that daytime fixtures in the same series had not remotely approached — a figure in the mid-forty-thousands, where earlier unlit games had drawn a couple of thousand people into enormous empty grounds. That single evening effectively decided the future of limited-overs cricket. The first officially sanctioned day-night international followed on 27 November 1979 at the SCG, where Australia beat the West Indies by five wickets.

The arithmetic that worked for a fifty-over game in coloured clothing with a white ball did not transfer. A Test match needs a ball that survives eighty overs and stays visible from mid-afternoon to nine at night against both sky and turf, and no such ball existed. Australia's domestic first-class competition tried yellow and orange balls in the 1990s and abandoned them; the story of that competition is told in the guide to the Sheffield Shield.

October 2012, and three years of nobody volunteering

The International Cricket Council amended its playing conditions in October 2012 to permit Test matches under lights, with the colour of the ball to be agreed between the two boards involved. It was a permissive change rather than a mandate, and it exposed something about how Test cricket is governed: a rule that requires two boards to agree can sit unused indefinitely.

Three years passed. Boards were reluctant for reasons that were not identical. England's hesitancy was partly about geography — English summer evenings are long enough that lights would only be needed for the last hour, and English rain made expensive permanent installations look like a poor investment. India's board was unconvinced that a marquee home Test needed help filling a ground. Players everywhere worried about the ball, and specifically about whether a fielder could see it in the twenty minutes after sunset.

What broke the deadlock was that Cricket Australia had both a commercial motive and a venue prepared to take the risk. Australia and New Zealand agreed in mid-2015 to make the third Test of that summer's series a day-night match at Adelaide Oval, using a pink Kookaburra. The manufacturing and behaviour of that ball are dealt with separately in the guide to pink-ball cricket.

Adelaide, 27 November 2015

The first day-night Test began exactly thirty-six years to the day after that first floodlit one-day international in Sydney. Play started at two in the afternoon, lunch and tea became tea and dinner, and the rest of the playing conditions were unchanged.

It was a low-scoring, fast-moving match. Australia won by three wickets inside three days, which meant the experiment answered the commercial question emphatically and left the cricket question open. The opening day drew 47,441 people, the largest crowd for a Test at Adelaide Oval since the Bodyline series of 1932-33, and more than 123,000 attended across the three days the match lasted. Television audiences were correspondingly large.

The reaction split immediately along lines that have not moved much since. Cricket Australia and the broadcasters had proof that evening Test cricket could fill a ground on a weekday. Sceptics pointed out that the match had been over in three days, that batting had been difficult in a way that had little to do with skill, and that a format designed to give spectators more Test cricket had delivered two days less of it.

The format goes travelling

Once one board had gone first, the rest followed within two years, and the sequence of Australian day-night Tests since then reads as follows.

Season	Opponent	Venue	Result
2015-16	New Zealand	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 3 wickets
2016-17	South Africa	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 7 wickets
2016-17	Pakistan	The Gabba	Australia won by 39 runs
2017-18	England	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 120 runs
2018-19	Sri Lanka	The Gabba	Australia won by an innings and 40 runs
2019-20	Pakistan	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by an innings and 48 runs
2019-20	New Zealand	Perth Stadium	Australia won by 296 runs
2020-21	India	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 8 wickets
2021-22	England	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 275 runs
2021-22	England	Bellerive Oval, Hobart	Australia won by 146 runs
2022-23	West Indies	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 419 runs
2023-24	West Indies	The Gabba	West Indies won by 8 runs
2024-25	India	Adelaide Oval	Australia won by 10 wickets
2025-26	England	The Gabba	Australia won by 8 wickets

Elsewhere, Pakistan and the West Indies played the second day-night Test in Dubai in October 2016, the first outside Australia, which Pakistan won by 56 runs. England's first came at Edgbaston in August 2017, against a West Indies side beaten by an innings and 209 runs. South Africa staged one at Port Elizabeth over the following Christmas against Zimbabwe, in a match scheduled over four days rather than five. New Zealand hosted England at Eden Park in March 2018 and won by an innings after an opening-day collapse; Sri Lanka won one in Barbados in 2018; and India, having resisted longest, finally played its first at Eden Gardens in November 2019, beating Bangladesh by an innings and 46 runs.

The Australian pattern in that table is worth noticing on its own. Adelaide Oval has hosted the format more than any other ground in the world, the Gabba is the clear second, and Perth and Hobart have one each. Two other Australian Test venues had staged none at all — until the fixture that will change that, discussed below.

Eleven wins, then Shamar Joseph

For eight years Australia did not lose a Test under lights. Eleven matches, eleven wins, several by enormous margins: 296 runs against New Zealand at Perth Stadium, 275 against England at Adelaide, 419 against the West Indies. The gap was so wide that the fairness of scheduling a pink-ball Test against a touring side with no exposure to the conditions became a genuine complaint rather than a talking point.

The run ended at the Gabba in January 2024. The West Indies, on their first Test tour of Australia in some years and given very little chance, set Australia 216 and won by eight runs. Shamar Joseph, in his second Test, took seven for 68 in the final innings, bowling with a foot he had had struck by a Mitchell Starc yorker the previous evening, and dismissed Josh Hazlewood to finish it. Steve Smith made 91 not out and was the only Australian who looked settled. It was the West Indies' first Test win in Australia in twenty-seven years.

That result did more for the format's credibility than any of the eleven wins had. A contest that only one side ever wins is a marketing exercise; a contest in which a debutant fast bowler can turn a match on a fourth evening is Test cricket. Australia's fuller record across formats is collected in the guide to Australian cricket team records.

Two scorecards that broke the script

The received story about pink-ball Tests is that they belong to fast bowlers. Two matches say otherwise, in different directions.

The first was at Ahmedabad in February 2021, where India beat England by ten wickets inside two days. The wickets did not fall to seam. They fell to spin, on a surface that gripped, with the pink ball skidding on rather than turning slowly, and England lost nineteen wickets to spinners across two innings. It remains the clearest demonstration that the pink ball does not impose a single kind of cricket — it interacts with whatever the pitch underneath is doing, a point developed in the guide to pitch conditions by Australian state.

The second was at Sabina Park in July 2025, and it is the most extreme scorecard the format has produced. Australia made 225 and 121; the West Indies made 143 and then, chasing 204, were bowled out for 27 — their lowest total in Test history and the second lowest by any side. Mitchell Starc took a five-wicket haul in fifteen balls, the fastest in Test cricket, and passed 400 Test wickets in the same innings; Scott Boland took a hat-trick. The whole match lasted three days.

Alongside those, India's 36 in Adelaide in December 2020 has become the reference point for what a pink ball can do to a good batting side. India had led on the first innings and were 62 for two overnight; Hazlewood and Pat Cummins removed the rest inside an hour and a half on the third morning. That series is covered in the guide to the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia.

The women's four

The women's game has taken the format up sparingly, in part because it plays so few Tests at all. Four women's day-night Tests have been played, all of them in Australia and all of them involving the home side.

England drew with Australia at North Sydney Oval in November 2017 in the first of them, and India drew at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in 2021. The two more recent matches were decisive: Australia beat England by an innings and 122 runs at the MCG in January 2025, and beat India by ten wickets at the WACA Ground in March 2026. The strength of that side, and why its Test matches are so one-sided, is examined in the guide to Australia's women's cricket dominance.

What is still unresolved

Three arguments remain live, and none of them has a clean answer.

The first is competitive fairness. A home side that plays a pink-ball Test most summers has an advantage over a touring side that plays one every few years, and Australia's record is the evidence. Rotating the fixture more widely would even that up and reduce the commercial value that justifies it, which nobody has yet volunteered to do.

The second is match length. The format's central claim is that it brings more people to Test cricket. It also, on the evidence so far, produces matches that finish early — which means fewer sessions sold and less cricket watched, even if the sessions that are played are better attended. The two effects have never been properly netted off in public.

The third is where it fits in the championship. Every one of these matches now carries points, and a format with a documented home advantage sits awkwardly inside a competition meant to compare sides across conditions; the mechanics of that competition are set out in the guide to the World Test Championship.

The format's next set-piece is a reminder of how far it has travelled. The MCG will stage a pink-ball Test against England in March 2027 to mark a hundred and fifty years since the first Test match was played on the same ground, and fifty years since the Centenary Test — the first men's day-night Test at the venue, and the first time the format has been chosen for an anniversary rather than a Tuesday in December. The ground's regular place in the calendar is described in the guide to the Boxing Day Test, and the Ashes context sits alongside it. For broadcast and ticketing details in this country, see how to watch cricket in Australia, and the rest of the game here is on the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This chronology rests on the ICC's own announcements of the 2012 playing-conditions change and of the 2027 anniversary fixture, on the published match records for every day-night Test to date, on contemporaneous reporting of the Adelaide attendance and broadcast figures in 2015, and on Cricket Australia and MCG material for scheduling. Results and margins are taken from scorecards. Match totals for the format move whenever a new one is played and are stated as at March 2026. Where a board's reluctance is described, it reflects reasons stated publicly at the time rather than any inference about internal deliberations. The ball's construction and the session-by-session statistical picture are treated on a separate page and are not repeated or recomputed here.