India Test Longest losing streaks: Match Records

Seven is the number. Between 8 June 1967 at Headingley and 31 January 1968 at the Sydney Cricket Ground, India played seven Test matches and lost all seven — three in England, four in Australia, on two tours squeezed into a single seven-month stretch. No India side before or since has lost more Tests in a row.

What makes the run harder to look at is that it was not a collapse of talent. Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Srinivas Venkataraghavan and Bapu Nadkarni were all in those squads; so were the Nawab of Pataudi, Ajit Wadekar and Farokh Engineer. The problem was scheduling and preparation. India flew from an English summer straight into an Australian one, with a first-class programme thin enough that the batters arrived at Adelaide having barely faced a fast bowler on a hard pitch. Three months later the same core of players went to New Zealand and won a series abroad for the first time.

Losing runs of this length are historical artefacts now. India have reached five consecutive Test defeats only twice since 1975, and neither run went further. The tables below list every sequence of five or more, then walk through each one; the wider context for all of it sits on the cricket in India hub.

Every India losing run of five Tests or more

Defeats	Span	Where the run happened	First match	Last match
7	Jun 1967 – Jan 1968	England (3), Australia (4)	Headingley, 8 Jun 1967	Sydney, 26 Jan 1968
6	Jun 1959 – Dec 1959	England (5), home v Australia (1)	Trent Bridge, 4 Jun 1959	Delhi, 12 Dec 1959
5	Feb 1962 – Apr 1962	West Indies (5)	Port of Spain, 16 Feb 1962	Kingston, 13 Apr 1962
5	Jun 1974 – Dec 1974	England (3), home v West Indies (2)	Old Trafford, 6 Jun 1974	Delhi, 11 Dec 1974
5	Dec 1999 – Mar 2000	Australia (3), home v South Africa (2)	Adelaide, 10 Dec 1999	Bengaluru, 2 Mar 2000
5	Jul 2014 – Dec 2014	England (3), Australia (2)	Southampton, 27 Jul 2014	Brisbane, 17 Dec 2014

Three of the six runs never came home at all. The other three begin abroad and continue into the following season in India, which is the pattern worth noticing: a side that has been beaten repeatedly overseas has usually also been reshuffled, and the reshuffled team then loses the first Test of the home summer before finding its feet.

The seven, match by match

#	Opponent	Venue	Date	Result
1	England	Headingley, Leeds	8 Jun 1967	Lost by 6 wickets
2	England	Lord's, London	22 Jun 1967	Lost by an innings and 124 runs
3	England	Edgbaston, Birmingham	13 Jul 1967	Lost by 132 runs
4	Australia	Adelaide Oval	23 Dec 1967	Lost by 146 runs
5	Australia	Melbourne Cricket Ground	30 Dec 1967	Lost by an innings and 4 runs
6	Australia	Brisbane Cricket Ground	19 Jan 1968	Lost by 39 runs
7	Australia	Sydney Cricket Ground	26 Jan 1968	Lost by 144 runs

Only two of the seven were heavy in the sense of an innings defeat. Brisbane went to the last afternoon and was lost by 39 runs; Headingley turned on India conceding 550 for 4 declared and then, having been asked to bat again, making 510 in the follow-on innings — a total that would have won most Tests and still left them beaten. The Sydney match ended on 30 January, and the tour party's next Test, at Dunedin on 15 February 1968, was won by five wickets. Seven defeats and then an away win, three weeks apart.

The England leg of the run is covered in the wider ledger on the India versus England Test record page, and the Australian leg on the India versus Australia Test record page.

1959: five in England, then one more at home

The 1959 run is the only one in which India lost every Test of a five-match series and then lost again in their next series as well. England won at Trent Bridge by an innings and 59 runs, at Lord's by eight wickets, at Headingley by an innings and 173 runs, at Old Trafford by 171 runs and at The Oval by an innings and 27 runs. It was the first time England had won all five matches of a home series against anyone.

India then hosted Australia in December. Richie Benaud's side won the first Test at the Feroz Shah Kotla by an innings and 127 runs, which took the sequence to six. The seventh match was at Green Park, Kanpur, where Jasu Patel took 9 for 69 and 5 for 55 on a crumbling surface and India won by 119 runs — their first Test victory over Australia, and the end of the streak. That is the pattern in miniature: the longest India losing runs tend to be broken by a single spinner on a home pitch rather than by a gradual improvement.

The Caribbean in 1962 and the double blow of 1974

India's tour of the West Indies in early 1962 produced five defeats in five Tests: by ten wickets at Port of Spain, by an innings and 18 runs at Sabina Park, by an innings and 30 runs at Kensington Oval, by seven wickets back at Port of Spain and by 123 runs back at Sabina Park. Nari Contractor's skull was fractured by a Charlie Griffith delivery in a tour match against Barbados between the second and third Tests, and the Nawab of Pataudi took over the captaincy at twenty-one. It is one of only two completed five-Test whitewashes India have been on the wrong end of, the other being England in 1959; the fixture as a whole is on the India versus West Indies Test record page.

Twelve years later came the other five. England won at Old Trafford by 113 runs, at Lord's by an innings and 285 runs and at Edgbaston by an innings and 78 runs — the Lord's Test being the one in which India were dismissed for 42, still their lowest total and the subject of the India Test lowest team totals page. Clive Lloyd's West Indians then arrived in India and won at Bangalore by 267 runs and at the Feroz Shah Kotla by an innings and 17 runs. India won the next two, at Eden Gardens by 85 runs and at Chennai by 100 runs, before losing the decider at the Wankhede.

The two modern runs

Both post-1975 runs of five follow the same shape: three defeats abroad, then two at the start of a home series.

In 1999-2000 Australia won at Adelaide by 285 runs, at Melbourne by 180 and at Sydney by an innings and 141. Hansie Cronje's South Africans then won at the Wankhede by four wickets and at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium by an innings and 71 runs. Five defeats, and the second of them was India's first home series loss to South Africa. Sachin Tendulkar captained through all five and gave up the job at the end of that South Africa series; the sequence of who led India through these runs is traced on the India Test captains page.

In 2014 England won at Southampton by 266 runs, at Old Trafford by an innings and 54 and at The Oval by an innings and 244, after India had won at Lord's. Australia then won at Adelaide by 48 runs and at Brisbane by four wickets. MS Dhoni retired from Test cricket midway through that Australian tour, at Melbourne, in the match that broke the streak with a draw.

Home ground, 2024

India's home record makes long losing runs almost impossible, which is why the autumn of 2024 registered as it did. New Zealand won at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium by eight wickets, at Pune by 113 runs and at the Wankhede by 25 runs — three consecutive home defeats, New Zealand's first series win in India, and the end of eighteen straight home Test series wins for India. It was India's first home series defeat since England's in 2012, and 2024 became only the third calendar year, after 1969 and 1983, in which India lost three or more Tests at home.

The run did not extend past three: India's next Test, at Perth in November 2024, was won by 295 runs. The New Zealand fixture is set out on the India versus New Zealand Test record page, and the 2024 home season sits inside the longer arc described on the India Test cricket history page.

Four things the streaks show

Every long run is a tour, not a slump. Five of the six sequences begin on the first day of an overseas series and none of them begins in the middle of a home summer. India have never lost five in a row without leaving the country.

The 1960s and 1970s produced them because of the calendar. India played 3-Test and 5-Test tours back to back with almost no gap, and a squad that was struggling had no way to reset. The seven-match run and the six-match run both straddle two series in the same season.

Nothing since 1975 has reached six. That is partly home strength and partly the fact that modern series are shorter, so a bad tour costs four or five Tests rather than seven — but it is also that India now win away often enough to break a run early. The scale of the away wins that have become normal since 2018 can be read off the India Test biggest wins by runs page.

The margins are wide, but not uniformly. Of the thirty-three defeats in these six runs, fifteen came by an innings and six came with the other side still holding wickets. Only two were lost by fewer than fifty runs: Brisbane in January 1968, by 39, and Adelaide in December 2014, by 48. A losing streak is rarely a procession of hammerings; it is a majority of hammerings and a handful of matches that were live on the fourth afternoon.

Sources and method

Streak lengths are taken from the published record of most consecutive Test defeats by a team and cross-checked match by match against India's Test results in date order, so that a drawn match anywhere in a sequence ends it. Match details — venue, dates, winning margin — come from the scorecards of each series, checked against the ICC and national-board match records for those tours.

The cut-off for the main table is five defeats. Runs of three and four are common enough that listing them would not tell a reader anything; India have had a four-match losing run as recently as the 2011 tour of England.

Statements about why a run happened — the compressed 1967-68 itinerary, the effect of a captaincy change — are readings of contemporary reports and of the fixture list rather than computed values, and are marked as such in the text. The 2024 home figures follow the ICC's series records for that season. Figures are current to 21 August 2026.