State Cricket Rivalries: Australia's Interstate Feuds

The most durable insult in Australian cricket is geographical. A Victorian will tell you that New South Wales players get picked on reputation. A Western Australian will tell you the selectors cannot find Perth on a map. A Tasmanian will remind you, unprompted, that his state spent five years being allowed to play only half a season. None of this is decoration on top of the cricket. It is the reason the cricket has the temperature it does.

Australia's first-class competition was designed as a contest between colonies that did not much like each other and had no reason to pretend otherwise. It kept that character through federation, through two world wars, through the arrival of three new teams and through the invention of a franchise league that was supposed to replace it. A player who has worn both a Test cap and a state cap will usually tell you the Test cap means more. He will also tell you exactly which state cap he wore, and in what order, and whether he was made to feel welcome.

Three colonies and a donated shield

Lord Sheffield toured Australia with an English side in 1891-92 and left behind £150 for a trophy. The intercolonial competition that money paid for began in the summer of 1892-93 with three entrants: New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. It ran briefly on a challenge basis before settling, within its first season, on the simpler principle of giving the shield to whoever had the best record. Victoria took the inaugural title.

Three teams meant the fixture list was short and the stakes in every match were absurd. Losing one game could cost the season, so intercolonial matches were played with a spite that had nowhere to dissipate. That is the root of everything that followed: a competition small enough that every result mattered, between administrations that were separately funded, separately governed and openly competitive for players. The wider story of how the game arrived and organised itself is set out in the origins of cricket in Australia; what concerns us here is that the organising unit was the colony, and it stayed the colony.

Matches were limited to four days from 1927-28. Bonus points for batting and bowling arrived in 1971-72, and a five-day final between the top two sides was introduced in 1982-83, which changed the psychology of a season considerably. The mechanics of the modern competition are covered in the guide to how the Sheffield Shield works.

The Big Two, and the 1107

For the first half of the competition's life, the shield was effectively the property of New South Wales and Victoria. They had the biggest cities, the deepest club structures and the two grounds that mattered most, and between them they won the great majority of the early titles. The rest of the field existed largely to be beaten.

The single most humiliating afternoon in that rivalry came at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in December 1926, when Victoria batted against New South Wales and did not stop. Bill Ponsford made 352, Jack Ryder made 295, and Victoria's innings closed on 1107. It remains the highest total in the history of first-class cricket anywhere. New South Wales lost a bowler to injury during it, which is the detail Victorians always mention and New South Welshmen always dispute the relevance of.

What that innings established was a tone. The Melbourne–Sydney fixture became the game Australian selectors watched most closely and the game state associations most wanted to win, and it has retained that status through every reorganisation since. A century later, a Victorian quick who removes a New South Wales top order at the MCG is still doing something that carries meaning beyond the points.

Bradman's defection and what it bought South Australia

The most consequential transfer in Australian domestic cricket happened in 1935, when the best batter in the world left Sydney for Adelaide. Don Bradman moved to South Australia, was made state captain and a state selector, and in December 1935 made 117 in his first Shield innings for his new employer — against New South Wales.

South Australia won the shield that season. Bradman also made 369 on the Adelaide Oval against Tasmania, still the highest individual score made at the ground. For a state that had been the junior member of the founding three, the arrival of one player produced a title, a decade of relevance and a permanent argument with Sydney about whether he had been allowed to leave or driven out. Not all of his new team-mates were delighted, either; several were uneasy about playing under a captain who was also going to be judging them as a selector.

The Bradman move set a pattern that recurs throughout the competition's history. States poach. They always have. Association loyalty in Australian cricket is fierce, sincere and entirely compatible with signing the other side's best player if the chance arises.

Latecomers, and the terms they were admitted on

Three teams joined after the founding trio, and each was let in on conditions that they resented at the time and have not entirely forgotten.

State	Joined	How they came in	First title
New South Wales	1892-93	Founding member	Most successful by a wide margin, past forty
Victoria	1892-93	Founding member	Won the inaugural season, second on the honour board
South Australia	1892-93	Founding member	Multiple titles, none since the 1990s
Queensland	1926-27	Admitted after decades of lobbying	1994-95
Western Australia	1947-48	Reduced fixture list until 1955-56	1947-48, in their first season
Tasmania	1977-78	Reduced fixture list until 1981-82	2006-07

Western Australia's entry is the strangest episode in the competition's history. Admitted for 1947-48 but too far away for a full fixture list in an era of long-distance rail and expensive air travel, they played each of the other states only once — four matches. They then won the title, which was settled on average rather than aggregate points. Perth had won the shield in its first attempt while playing half the cricket, and the eastern states have never quite conceded that this counted properly. Western Australia's answer, delivered over the following decades, was to build the hardest, fastest pitch in the country and a bowling tradition to exploit it, a lineage covered in the guide to Australia's greatest fast bowlers.

Tasmania got the same arrangement thirty years later and liked it even less, playing a reduced programme from 1977-78 until 1981-82. The grievance had substance: a side that plays fewer matches cannot win a competition decided on points, and its players are correspondingly harder for national selectors to assess. Tasmania spent its first three decades in the competition being told it was a development side, and the state's cricket identity is still partly organised around that insult.

Nine in a row, and the resentment it built

Between 1953-54 and 1961-62, New South Wales won the shield nine consecutive times. No side has come close to that since.

The team was extraordinary, and it was also the beneficiary of a structural advantage that the other states complained about loudly: Sydney's club competition was the largest in the country, the national side was picked disproportionately from it, and Test players returning from tours came back to the same dressing room. A young cricketer in Sydney in the late 1950s was learning his trade among Test bowlers every Saturday. The role of those senior club competitions across every state is explained in the guide to grade cricket.

The nine-year run is the origin of the specific accusation still heard in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide whenever a New South Wales player is picked ahead of a local one: that the selectors default to blue. It is not always fair. It is not entirely baseless either, and the arguments about who deserved a cap in which era run through the guide to Australia's greatest Test XI.

Queensland's long argument with itself

No state's rivalry with the rest was as raw as Queensland's, because for most of a century Queensland lost.

Admitted in 1926-27, they were runners-up eleven times before they won anything. Five of those second places came in seven seasons during the 1980s, including a defeat by one wicket at the hands of New South Wales in 1984-85. The state's response was to buy the best players it could find. Viv Richards played a Shield season in Brisbane in 1976-77. Greg Chappell arrived from South Australia. Allan Border came north from Sydney. Graeme Hick and Ian Botham both had Queensland summers, Botham's in 1987-88, in which he averaged in the thirties with the bat and took 28 wickets while Western Australia won the final.

None of it worked, and the failure hardened into a joke that the rest of the country enjoyed and Queensland did not. When the drought finally broke in March 1995, the side that did it was almost entirely home-grown. Queensland made 664 in the final at the Gabba — Trevor Barsby 151, Martin Love 146, Border 98 in his last season — and beat South Australia by an innings and 101 runs. Brisbane took it about as calmly as you would expect. Queensland then won three titles in a row from 1999-2000, which converted them from the competition's punchline into the side everyone wanted to beat, and the fixture against New South Wales became genuinely hostile in both directions.

The final, and the art of the useful draw

The five-day final introduced in 1982-83 added a wrinkle that has produced some of the competition's strangest cricket: if the final is drawn, the side that finished higher in the table keeps the shield.

South Australia's most recent title, in 1995-96, was won exactly that way. Having topped the table, they needed only to survive against Western Australia at the Adelaide Oval, and their lower order held out for the final session to force the draw that gave them the trophy. It is not the kind of finish a franchise competition would ever tolerate, and it is precisely the kind Shield followers remember, because the reward for a good season is the right to be defensive when it counts.

Tasmania's breakthrough came in 2007, in a season when the competition was not even called the Sheffield Shield. Sponsorship had renamed it the Pura Milk Cup in 1999-2000 and then the Pura Cup, and the historic name was only restored for 2008-09. So Tasmania's first title is, technically, a Pura Cup, won in a final at Bellerive Oval against New South Wales — the state that had spent thirty years explaining that Tasmania was not really a first-class side.

What the rivalries are worth now

Two things have pulled against interstate feeling in the last fifteen years.

The first is the Big Bash League, which replaced states with cities and, in Sydney and Melbourne, split each city in two. A Perth or Adelaide supporter can transfer state loyalty to a franchise more or less intact. A Sydney supporter is asked to choose between two Sydney teams, neither of which is New South Wales. Big Bash crowds dwarf Shield crowds — a Shield match is watched by a few hundred people and a Big Bash match by tens of thousands — and the money follows the crowds.

The second is scheduling. Australia's best players are almost never available for Shield cricket, the season is broken into blocks around internationals and the franchise window, and the one-day cup is compressed into whatever gaps remain. It is difficult to sustain a rivalry between two teams that rarely field their strongest sides at the same time.

And yet the rivalries have not died, for a straightforward reason: the Shield is still the only route into the Test side, so the players care even when the public is elsewhere. A Victorian batter making runs in Perth is not playing for a crowd. He is playing for a place, in front of selectors, against a side that would rather he failed. That is enough to keep an argument going. The competition's role in producing Test cricketers, and the century of national teams it fed, is traced in the history of Australian cricket.

The other thing that survives is the local knowledge. Each state's square has a character, and visiting sides are expected to be uncomfortable on it — Perth's bounce, Adelaide's slow drift towards spin, the Gabba's first-morning seam, the MCG's variable pace. Those grounds and what they do are described in the guide to Australian cricket grounds, and the ball that behaves differently on each of them is covered in the guide to the Kookaburra ball. The rest of the domestic game sits on the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page is built from the documented history of the Sheffield Shield: Lord Sheffield's 1892 donation and the 1892-93 founding season, the admission dates and reduced fixture arrangements for Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania, the introduction of four-day matches, bonus points and the five-day final, and the sponsorship-driven renaming of the competition between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. Individual match details — Victoria's 1107 at the MCG in December 1926, Bradman's move to South Australia in 1935, the 1994-95 and 1995-96 finals, and Tasmania's 2007 title — are drawn from published scorecards and Cricket Australia's own retrospective reporting. Title counts move with every completed season and are therefore described in relative terms rather than fixed numbers. Crowd comparisons between Shield and Big Bash cricket are stated as orders of magnitude, not as figures, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.