Australia v New Zealand: The Trans-Tasman Rivalry

Australia has played New Zealand at cricket since 1946 and has never treated the fixture as a priority. That is the first thing to say about it, because everything else follows from it: the short tours, the two-Test series, the long gaps, the sense on the New Zealand side that Australia would rather be doing something else, and the sharpness that has occasionally produced.

The record explains the attitude without justifying it. Australia has won the great majority of Tests between the two countries and has lost only a handful. But the handful is memorable out of all proportion, and the two most famous moments in the fixture — one in 1981, one in 2015 — both involve Australia coming out badly.

New Zealanders talk about this rivalry constantly. Australians talk about it when something goes wrong. That asymmetry is real, and it is not a compliment to the Australian game.

Forty years before it was competitive

The countries played once in 1946, at Wellington, and then not again for twenty-seven years. Australia's stated reason was that New Zealand was not strong enough to justify Test cricket, and for much of that period the argument was defensible on the numbers even if the refusal to help was not.

Regular Tests began in the 1970s. Australia won most of them. New Zealand's first Test win over Australia came at Christchurch in 1974, with the Hadlee brothers both playing, and their first series win over Australia came a decade later.

That period also produced the split that reshaped both countries' cricket. New Zealand players took part in the breakaway competition of the late 1970s, and the one-day tournaments that came out of it — described in the guide to World Series Cricket — put Australia and New Zealand in the same limited-overs finals repeatedly, which is how the fixture became genuinely hostile.

1 February 1981

The single most notorious delivery in Australian cricket history was bowled at the MCG in a World Series Cup final.

New Zealand needed six from the last ball to tie. Greg Chappell, the Australian captain, told his younger brother Trevor to bowl it underarm along the ground. Trevor did. Brian McKechnie blocked it and threw his bat away. Rod Marsh, keeping wicket, was visibly telling his captain not to do it before the ball was bowled. Ian Chappell, in the commentary box, said out loud that his brother could not do that.

It was within the rules of that competition. It has not been within the rules of any competition since. The New Zealand prime minister called it an act of cowardice and noted that the Australians were wearing yellow. Greg Chappell has said since that he was exhausted, that it was the wrong decision, and that he has spent forty years being reminded of it — which, at every New Zealand ground he has visited since, is accurate.

What matters about the underarm in an Australian account is that it was not received in Australia as clever gamesmanship. It was received as an embarrassment, immediately and almost universally, including inside the Australian dressing room. Australian cricket has a long tradition of pushing at the boundaries of acceptable conduct; the underarm is the case where the country decided the line had been crossed and said so.

Hadlee at Brisbane

The 1985-86 series in Australia is the one that established New Zealand as a side capable of winning here rather than competing.

Richard Hadlee took nine wickets for 52 in the first innings of the opening Test at the Gabba, and fifteen in the match. New Zealand won that Test by an innings, and won the series. It was their first series win in Australia, achieved by a side built around Hadlee, Martin Crowe and John Wright against an Australian team in the middle of the worst period it had experienced since the war.

The Trans-Tasman Trophy dates from that series and has been contested in Test series between the two countries since. The one-day equivalent, the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy, was created two decades later and named — with a certain deliberate humour, given 1981 — for the two families whose members are most associated with the fixture.

Hobart, 2011

New Zealand did not win another Test in Australia for twenty-six years. When it came, in December 2011 at Bellerive Oval in Hobart, it came by seven runs in a match in which no side passed 240.

New Zealand made 150 and Australia 136. New Zealand's second innings reached 226, leaving Australia 241 to win, and Australia were well placed before Doug Bracewell, in his third Test, took six wickets for 40. Australia's last several wickets fell for very little. David Warner had made a century in the same match, which is the detail Australians remember alongside the collapse.

The loss cost Australia the series — it finished level at one apiece — and it landed in the middle of a period when Australian batting was collapsing regularly against good seam bowling in seaming conditions. The pattern repeated against South Africa in the same era, as set out in the guide to the Australia and South Africa rivalry.

2015, both ways

The 2015 World Cup was co-hosted by the two countries, and the two matches they played in it went in opposite directions.

At Eden Park in February, Australia were bowled out for 151. Trent Boult took five for 27, including a spell in which he conceded almost nothing and took five wickets. New Zealand then lost seven wickets for very few chasing it: Mitchell Starc took six for 28, the innings slid from a winning position to 146 for nine, and Kane Williamson hit Pat Cummins over the rope to win it by one wicket with 45 not out. It is generally rated the best one-day international played that decade.

The final, five weeks later at the MCG, was not close. Australia bowled New Zealand out for 183, with Starc removing Brendon McCullum in the first over, and won by seven wickets. Australia's fourth-innings batting was untroubled and the match was effectively over by mid-afternoon. New Zealand had never reached a World Cup final before and did not handle the occasion; Australia had, five times, and did.

Those two matches together are the fixture in miniature. New Zealand can beat Australia in a single game anywhere. Australia has kept winning the games that eliminate people, a record covered more fully in the guide to Australia's World Cup history.

Adelaide, and the pink ball

Later in 2015 New Zealand played the first day-night Test in history, at Adelaide Oval, and it is the most consequential thing the fixture has produced structurally.

Both boards agreed to it as an experiment. The match lasted three days, produced a low-scoring contest under lights, and Australia won by three wickets after a tense final session. Attendance and television audiences were substantially better than an ordinary Adelaide Test day would have drawn.

That result made the format permanent. Australia has played a day-night Test almost every summer since, Adelaide has become its home, and the pink ball has become a permanent argument in the game. The detail is in the guides to the Adelaide day-night Test and to pink ball cricket. New Zealand's willingness to be the guinea pig is not much remembered in Australia, and should be.

Recent series

The last decade has gone Australia's way in Test cricket and been closer in the short formats.

Series	Result	Note
2015-16 in Australia	Australia 2-0	Included the first day-night Test at Adelaide
2015-16 in New Zealand	Australia 2-0	Wellington and Christchurch
2019-20 in Australia	Australia 3-0	Nathan Lyon took five in the final Test at the SCG
2023-24 in New Zealand	Australia 2-0	Australia won by 172 runs at Wellington
2021 T20 World Cup final	Australia by eight wickets	Dubai; Australia's first men's T20 world title

The Christchurch Test of that 2023-24 tour was the closest of them and the most instructive. Australia were set 279 and lost half the side cheaply. Alex Carey made 98 not out and put on around 140 with Mitchell Marsh, and Pat Cummins hit the winning runs. Matt Henry took seventeen wickets in the two Tests and was player of the series in a losing side, which is a fair summary of most New Zealand tours of Australia as well: individually excellent, collectively short.

In white-ball cricket the results have been closer. Australia beat New Zealand in the 2021 men's T20 World Cup final in Dubai, and edged a very high-scoring match at Dharamsala in the 2023 World Cup by five runs. Chappell-Hadlee series have gone both ways.

Why Australia does not schedule it

The commercial explanation is straightforward and unsatisfying. Australian summers are built around two anchor series: the Ashes and India. Both fill grounds, both sell broadcast rights at a premium, and both take up most of the available Test weeks between November and January.

New Zealand fits in the gaps. Their visits are usually two Tests, often in November or February rather than over the holidays, and they do not get the Boxing Day or New Year fixtures except by accident. The board's revenue math makes this rational and the effect on the rivalry is corrosive: a contest played rarely, in the off-peak weeks, never accumulates the weight the Ashes has.

New Zealand Cricket has said as much publicly for years, and the objection has broadened into the general argument about whether the ICC's three largest boards are hollowing out the fixtures that do not involve them. Australia is squarely one of the three. The New Zealand view of all this is set out in the guide to the trans-Tasman rivalry from the New Zealand side.

The traffic in both directions

For all the scheduling neglect, the two cricket cultures are unusually intertwined at every level below the national teams.

New Zealanders have played state cricket in Australia for a century, and several played for Australia after moving. Australian coaches work throughout New Zealand and New Zealand coaches throughout Australia. The Big Bash League draws heavily on New Zealand players, and Australian players fill out the Super Smash. Club cricketers move across the Tasman in both directions every winter for a second season.

The consequence is that the players know each other well and the animosity is genuinely limited. It also means New Zealand cricket sits partly inside the Australian system, which is a reasonable arrangement for a country of five million and an uncomfortable one when the larger partner sets the calendar. The longer arc of that relationship runs through the history of New Zealand cricket.

Where it stands

New Zealand is a better cricket team now, relative to Australia, than at any point except the mid-1980s. They have won a World Test Championship final, reached World Cup finals, and produced a generation — Williamson, Boult, Southee, Henry — that would have walked into most Australian sides of the past thirty years.

Australia still holds the Test record comfortably, still holds the Trans-Tasman Trophy more often than not, and still wins the knockout matches. What it has not done is give the fixture the room to become what it should be. The list of tournaments in which the two have met is covered in the guide to cricket World Cup history, and the rest of the Australian game sits on the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on published Test, one-day international and Twenty20 international scorecards for matches between the two countries, ICC records for the World Cup and T20 World Cup fixtures described, and contemporaneous reporting used to confirm sequences of play in the matches at the MCG in 1981, Brisbane in 1985, Hobart in 2011, Auckland and Melbourne in 2015, Adelaide in 2015 and Christchurch in 2024. Trophy histories follow the two boards' own records. Aggregate head-to-head totals change with each series and are described in general terms rather than as fixed figures. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.