New Zealand's 2021 World Test Championship Title

New Zealand won the first World Test Championship on a Wednesday afternoon in Hampshire, on a day that had been set aside in case the weather ruined the match, in front of a small crowd, against the side that had topped the two-year league. Ross Taylor pulled Mohammed Shami through midwicket for four to finish it, and a country that had spent ninety years being the smallest full member with the fewest resources held the mace for Test cricket's world championship.

It was the first global men's title New Zealand had won since the ICC KnockOut Trophy in Nairobi in October 2000, when Chris Cairns made 102 not out to chase down India's 264 for six. Twenty-one years, and again against India.

The result also settled an argument the whole competition existed to have. Test cricket's traditional structure had no way of crowning anybody; series were bilateral, rankings were an algorithm, and a side could be the best in the world without ever getting the chance to prove it in a match. The championship gave the format one deciding fixture, and the first time it was played the side with the smaller population, thinner domestic base and shorter home season won it.

How the championship was meant to work

The 2019-21 cycle was the first attempt at giving Test cricket a league table, and the design was awkward by necessity. The nine competing sides did not all play each other, and series were of different lengths — some two Tests, some five — so awarding points per match would have rewarded whoever had the longest fixture list.

The solution was to make every series worth the same. A series carried a fixed maximum, divided by the number of matches in it, so a win in a two-Test series was worth more points than a win in a five-Test series. Draws and ties took proportional shares.

Then the pandemic arrived and cancelled series unevenly. Some sides had played most of their programme; others had not. In November 2020 the ICC changed the qualification basis from total points to the percentage of available points a side had actually won, which was the only workable fix but which produced a table that looked strange to anyone reading down the points column. India finished on 72.2 per cent and New Zealand on 70.0, and they were the two who went to Southampton. Australia, on 69.2 per cent, were third and missed out by a margin narrow enough to keep the argument alive. The competition's format is set out in more detail in the guide to how the World Test Championship works.

Eleven Tests over two years

New Zealand's league campaign was not smooth. They lost heavily in Australia and drew away in Sri Lanka before winning four consecutive home series, three of them by clean sweeps.

Series	Where	Result
Sri Lanka, August 2019	Away	Drawn 1-1
England, November 2019	Home	Won 1-0
Australia, December 2019 to January 2020	Away	Lost 0-3
India, February to March 2020	Home	Won 2-0
West Indies, December 2020	Home	Won 2-0
Pakistan, December 2020 to January 2021	Home	Won 2-0

The pattern is obvious and was used against them at the time: they were formidable at home and had been thrashed on the one long away tour they made. The counter-argument was that the home wins included beating India 2-0 with a full-strength Indian side — a result covered in the New Zealand–India rivalry — and that the Australian tour was the only series in the cycle where New Zealand faced three Tests in six weeks against a side with a settled attack in its own conditions. Losing 0-3 in Australia is not an unusual outcome, as the trans-Tasman rivalry makes plain, and by the percentage system it cost New Zealand far less than it would have cost them under the original points table.

The England series in November 2019 also produced a first: the opening Test was played at Bay Oval in Mount Maunganui, which had never staged Test cricket before, and New Zealand won it comfortably.

Two Tests in England nobody had planned as preparation

The scheduling gave New Zealand an accidental advantage that was widely noted before the final and looks decisive in hindsight. They played a two-Test series against England at Lord's and Edgbaston in June 2021, immediately before the final, while India arrived from a period of quarantine with no match practice in English conditions.

The Lord's Test was drawn, and Devon Conway — the Wellington opener who had qualified for New Zealand after moving from South Africa — made 200 on debut. New Zealand won at Edgbaston by eight wickets, taking the series 1-0. It was their first Test series win in England since 1999. The wider history of these fixtures is covered in the New Zealand–England rivalry.

By the time they reached Southampton, New Zealand had spent a month batting and bowling with the Dukes ball in June conditions. India had not.

Six days at the Rose Bowl

The final was played at the Rose Bowl in Southampton from 18 to 23 June 2021. There was no play at all on the first day because of rain, none on the fourth for the same reason, and 33.2 overs were lost to bad light on the second. The reserve day, which the ICC had built into the schedule and which several people had argued was unnecessary, was used.

New Zealand won the toss and bowled. India made 217 in a little over ninety-two overs, Ajinkya Rahane top-scoring with 49 from 117 balls, an innings that tells you what the batting was like — nobody scored quickly because nobody could.

An XI with four seamers and no spinner

New Zealand's team selection was the boldest thing about their week, and it was barely discussed at the time because it looked so obviously right once the ball started moving.

They picked Tom Latham and Conway to open, Williamson at three, Taylor at four, Henry Nicholls at five, BJ Watling to keep at six, Colin de Grandhomme at seven, and then Jamieson, Southee, Wagner and Boult. That is four specialist fast bowlers plus a fifth seam option in de Grandhomme, and no frontline spinner at all — Ajaz Patel was in the squad and did not play.

India, by contrast, picked both Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. The reasoning on each side was defensible: India's spinners are among the best in the world and a five-day match in late June could dry out. What actually happened is that two full days were lost to weather, the surface never dried, and India's two spinners bowled a combined fraction of the overs while New Zealand's four quick bowlers shared the work in conditions built for them. Selection is partly luck. This was the kind of luck a side earns by having four bowlers good enough to make the decision easy.

Wagner is worth singling out because his role is the least glamorous in the attack. He bowls short of a length at the body from a left-armer's angle, over after over, and his job is to make batting uncomfortable rather than to take the wicket himself. In a match where the other three were finding movement, that pressure was the thing India's middle order never got away from.

Watling's last match

The final was also BJ Watling's last Test. He had kept wicket for New Zealand for a decade in a way that attracted very little attention, which was rather the point — he took the ball cleanly standing up to spin and back to Boult and Southee, he batted at six or seven and made runs when the top order had failed, and he holds a place in New Zealand cricket's affections that has almost nothing to do with statistics.

That two of the side's senior figures were playing their last significant Test cricket in the same match — Watling retiring immediately, Taylor within a year — gave the win a valedictory quality it might otherwise have lacked. It was not a young side arriving. It was a group that had been together long enough to have lost two World Cup finals and come back.

Jamieson's spell

The match turned on Kyle Jamieson's first innings. Jamieson is unusually tall, gets the ball to bounce from a length that ought to be safe, and moves it just enough. He bowled twenty-two overs, twelve of them maidens, and took five for 31.

Getting Virat Kohli out with a ball that seamed away from a shortish length was the wicket that mattered most, and it was the sort of dismissal Jamieson had been producing since his debut. New Zealand then made 249, with Conway making 54 from 153 balls and Mohammed Shami taking four for 76 — a lead of 32, which in that match was substantial.

India's second innings lasted 73 overs for 170. Tim Southee took four for 48, Trent Boult and Jamieson shared most of the rest, and Rishabh Pant's 41 was the highest score anybody managed in the innings. New Zealand's pace attack had bowled the world's top-ranked Test side out for 217 and 170 in England in June, which is a fair description of what New Zealand cricket had become good at.

139 to win

The target was 139. There were 53 overs left in the match. New Zealand lost Conway and Tom Latham inside the first hour and briefly gave India something to hope for.

Kane Williamson and Ross Taylor then batted together for the rest of it, which was the appropriate way for the thing to end. The two had played more Tests for New Zealand than any pair before them, had been in the sides that lost the 2015 and 2019 World Cup finals, and had spent a decade being the reason New Zealand did not collapse. Williamson finished 52 not out, Taylor 47 not out, Ravichandran Ashwin took the two wickets that fell, and New Zealand won by eight wickets in 45.5 overs.

New Zealand received the Test Championship mace and 1.6 million US dollars; India took 800,000.

What the title changed, and what it did not

The immediate meaning was straightforward. New Zealand had been in two World Cup finals in six years and lost both, one on a boundary count, and the criticism that they could not close a final had begun to stick. Winning a Test championship — the format that most rewards depth, patience and bowling in partnerships, and where New Zealand's resources are least of a handicap — answered it in the format the players cared about most.

The longer-term picture is more mixed. New Zealand have not reached a second final in the cycles since, and the honest reason is that the championship rewards volume of home Tests against strong opposition, which New Zealand's calendar does not always supply. The core of the 2021 side also aged out: Taylor retired, Boult stepped back from a central contract, and Williamson's captaincy ended.

What survived is the method. The bowling attack of Boult, Southee, Jamieson and Neil Wagner, backed by whichever spinner suited the surface, is the most successful New Zealand have ever had, and it was built out of the same choices that produced the 2015 World Cup run and the near-miss in the 2019 World Cup final. The full arc of the country's five-day cricket is in the history of New Zealand cricket, and the rest of the national game sits on the cricket in New Zealand hub.

Sources and method

This page is built from the ICC's published playing conditions and points regulations for the 2019-21 championship cycle, the final league standings as published at the close of that cycle, and official scorecards for the final and for each series in New Zealand's campaign. Innings totals, individual scores, bowling figures, overs bowled and the reserve-day sequence are taken from the match record. Prize money figures are the amounts the ICC announced for the event. Series results are given as they stand in the official record, including the drawn series in Sri Lanka. The assessment of why the side was suited to that match, and of what the title did or did not change, is interpretive and is offered as such. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.