England vs South Africa: A Rivalry Interrupted

South Africa played their first Test against England in 1889 and their most recent one against England within the last few years. In between there is a hole twenty-one years wide, and no honest account of this fixture can be written around it. Every other great Test rivalry is a story about cricket. This one is a story about cricket and the state, and the two are not separable.

The consequence is a strange record. There are eras of this fixture that produced no cricket at all, and eras that produced some of the best of both countries: Barlow and Pollock against Cowdrey's England in the 1960s, Donald against Atherton in the 1990s, Smith and Kallis and Amla against a succession of English attacks in the 2000s, Stokes and Broad against Steyn and Philander in the 2010s. Players on both sides tend to name the other country as the hardest place to tour, and the head-to-head is closer than the raw totals suggest once the pre-war tours are set aside.

South Africa arrive at the current phase of the rivalry holding the World Test Championship, having beaten Australia in the 2025 final at Lord's — their first global title in twenty-seven years, sealed by Aiden Markram's 136. England go there in December 2026. That is a decent state of health for a fixture that was cancelled outright inside living memory.

St George's Park, 1889

The first Test was played at Port Elizabeth on 12 and 13 March 1889 — two days, which tells you what the cricket was like — and England won it by eight wickets. South Africa, captained by Owen Dunell, became the third country to play Test cricket.

For the next four decades the fixture followed a colonial rhythm. England sent teams that were sometimes representative and sometimes not; South Africa toured England from 1907 onwards and were competitive on matting wickets at home and much less so on grass in England. The mid-century sides were genuinely good. Under Trevor Goddard and then Peter van der Merwe, South Africa built a team around Graeme Pollock, Eddie Barlow, Colin Bland and Mike Procter that was, by the late 1960s, arguably the strongest in the world.

It never got to prove it, and the reason had nothing to do with cricket.

The D'Oliveira affair, and the twenty-one years

Basil D'Oliveira was a Cape Coloured cricketer who could not play first-class cricket in the country of his birth, moved to England, qualified for England and was picked for England from 1966. In 1968 England were due to tour South Africa, and the question of whether D'Oliveira would be in the party became the central political question of the English season.

MCC wrote to the South African Cricket Association asking for an assurance that selection would be free. The selectors then left D'Oliveira out of the touring party and insisted the decision was made on cricketing merit alone. The public reaction in Britain was immediate and hostile. When Tom Cartwright withdrew injured on 16 September, MCC named D'Oliveira as his replacement. The following day the South African prime minister, John Vorster, announced that his government would not accept the team, describing it as the team of the anti-apartheid movement rather than of MCC. The tour was cancelled.

South Africa were excluded from international cricket from 1970, and the exclusion lasted more than two decades. There is a case, still argued, that English cricket administration handled 1968 badly and that the affair was allowed to become a political test it did not need to be. There is no serious case that the outcome was wrong. The generation of South African cricketers who lost their international careers to it — Pollock among them — have generally said as much themselves.

1994: readmission, and dirt in a pocket

South Africa returned to Test cricket in 1992 and to England in 1994, their first Test series in the country since 1965. They won the opening Test at Lord's inside four days.

The match is not chiefly remembered for that. On the Saturday, television pictures showed the England captain Michael Atherton taking dirt from his trouser pocket and applying it to his hands, in a manner everybody accepted was connected to drying the ball and encouraging it to reverse. He was fined £2,000, not for the act itself but for failing to disclose it to the match referee, and he survived a week of demands that he resign.

England squared the series at The Oval, and did it through the most violent piece of fast bowling of the decade. Devon Malcolm, hit on the helmet while batting, took nine for 57 in the second innings — still the best Test bowling figures on the ground — and England chased 204 with Atherton 63 not out and Graeme Hick 81 not out. Allan Donald later described the spell as the most destructive he had seen. The series finished level at one apiece.

England toured that winter and lost, but the tour produced the defining rearguard of Atherton's career: 185 not out at the Wanderers over ten and three-quarter hours, with Jack Russell unbeaten on 29 from 235 balls in an unbroken stand of 106, against an attack led by Donald and a young Shaun Pollock. England finished on 351 for five and saved the Test.

Centurion, January 2000

The lowest moment in the fixture's history was made to look like one of its best. England were 2-0 down going into the fifth Test at Centurion. Rain wiped out most of the match. On 18 January 2000 the two captains, Hansie Cronje and Nasser Hussain, agreed to forfeit an innings each to manufacture a finish, and England won a game nobody had expected to be alive.

It was received at the time as an act of imagination that had rescued Test cricket from a dead draw. Cronje later admitted that bookmakers stood to lose heavily on a drawn match and that he had been under instruction to produce a result of some kind. The match is now filed under the corruption scandal that ended his career rather than under enterprising captaincy, and it did more than any other single game to make administrators take the integrity of results seriously.

Graeme Smith's decade

Smith captained South Africa against England for a decade and dominated the fixture in a way no other player has. He announced himself in 2003 with 277 at Edgbaston and 259 at Lord's in consecutive Tests, the first of those from 373 balls with thirty-five fours, and the highest score by a South African in Tests until 2010. That series finished two-all.

Five years later he finished the job. South Africa won at Edgbaston in 2008 by five wickets to take a series in England for the first time since 1965, Smith making 154 not out in the fourth innings and adding 112 with Mark Boucher against a bowling attack that had run out of ideas. England's captaincy changed hands during the same series: Michael Vaughan led in the first three Tests, Kevin Pietersen in the fourth.

In 2012 South Africa returned and won 2-0, going to the top of the Test rankings in the process. At The Oval, Hashim Amla made 311 not out — passing Smith's 277 as the highest South African score against England — and added an unbroken 377 for the third wicket with Jacques Kallis, who finished on 182 not out. It remains South Africa's record partnership against England. Those three tours, spread over nine years, are the strongest sustained run either side has managed in the modern rivalry.

England's answer: Cape Town, and the 2022 reversal

England's reply came in South Africa in 2015-16, and it came from Ben Stokes. At Newlands he made 258 from 198 balls, including 130 before lunch on the second morning, which is the most runs any batter has made in a pre-lunch session in a Test. It is the highest score by an England player against South Africa and was his first Test double hundred. Hashim Amla made 201 in the same match, which gives some idea of the surface. England won the series.

England won again at home in 2017 and in South Africa in 2019-20. The 2022 series in England was the most volatile of the recent set. South Africa won the Lord's Test by an innings and 12 runs, inside three days, which at that stage of England's Bazball summer looked like a genuine correction. England then won at Old Trafford by an innings and 85 runs and at The Oval by nine wickets to take the series 2-1. The method England were playing with by then is described in England's white-ball revolution and in the record of England's Test captains.

The white-ball fixture, and the semi-final that changed the laws

The limited-overs rivalry has produced one match that mattered more than any of the others, and it was decided by arithmetic.

At Sydney on 22 March 1992, South Africa needed 22 from 13 balls in a World Cup semi-final when rain stopped play. The interruption lasted about twelve minutes. Under the most-productive-overs method then in use, the chasing side's target was reduced by deducting the lowest-scoring overs bowled by their own attack, which in this case meant the two tight overs Meyrick Pringle had bowled early. The revised requirement that appeared on the scoreboard was 22 from a single ball — accounts differ on whether 21 was the arithmetically correct figure — and Brian McMillan pushed the last delivery from Chris Lewis for a single. South Africa were out, in their first World Cup after readmission.

That match is the direct reason the Duckworth-Lewis method was developed and adopted. The mechanics of the system that replaced it are in Duckworth-Lewis-Stern explained.

Reading the record

England lead the Test head-to-head by a comfortable margin, with roughly twice as many wins as South Africa and a very large block of draws. Both of those figures need context. A high proportion of the England wins come from the tours of the 1890s to the 1930s, when the sides were not close to equal, and a high proportion of the draws come from three-day and timeless Tests played under conditions no longer recognisable.

If you count only from readmission in 1992, the record is close to even, and the pattern is that home advantage matters less in this fixture than in almost any other. England have won in South Africa repeatedly since 1995. South Africa have won series in England in 1994 in part, and outright in 2008 and 2012. The reason is that the conditions rhyme: both countries offer seam and carry rather than turn, both use a hard ball that swings, and neither asks visiting batters to solve a problem they have never seen. Contrast that with India, where the examination is different in kind — the point developed in England against India.

Where South Africa's grounds do differ is altitude. The Wanderers and Centurion sit high enough for the ball to carry noticeably further and swing differently, and English seamers have historically enjoyed the Highveld more than they enjoy the coast. How the equivalent variation works across an English summer is set out in pitch conditions by season, and the ball England use at home is covered in the Dukes ball explained.

What comes next

England's next visit is a three-Test tour in the 2026-27 South African summer: the Wanderers from 17 December, a Boxing Day Test at Centurion from 26 December, and Newlands from 3 January. All three count towards the 2025-27 World Test Championship cycle, and the Twenty20 leg originally pencilled in was removed from the schedule. How those points work is explained in the World Test Championship explained.

South Africa go into it as the holders of that championship, which is not a status anyone would have predicted from the state of their domestic game five years ago. England go into it with a fast-bowling group that has usually travelled well to South Africa; the tradition behind it is traced in England's fast bowling tradition, and the players who have done most in this fixture appear in England's greatest Test players. Everything else in the English game is indexed on the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

The political history in this guide rests on contemporaneous accounts of the 1968 selection and Vorster's statement, and on the standard published record of South Africa's exclusion from international cricket from 1970. Match facts — the 1889 result, Malcolm's figures at The Oval, Atherton's rearguard at the Wanderers, Smith's and Amla's scores, Stokes's innings at Newlands, the 2022 and 2025 results, and the 1992 semi-final — were each checked against published scorecards, ground records or governing-body reports rather than recalled. Fixture dates for the 2026-27 tour come from the ECB and Cricket South Africa announcements. Head-to-head totals are described in general terms because they change with each series, and the 1992 semi-final target is given with the discrepancy in the contemporary accounts noted rather than resolved. No figure here is computed from our own datasets.