New Zealand v England: A Rivalry of Long Waits

England gave New Zealand Test cricket, and then spent fifty years demonstrating that the gift had been premature. The first Test was at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, beginning on 10 January 1930, and it made New Zealand the fifth Test-playing country. The England side that conferred the honour was a second-string one, because a stronger England team was simultaneously in the West Indies. New Zealand cricket historians record that openly, which tells you something about the tone the relationship set.

For the next forty-eight years New Zealand did not beat them. Not once, in forty-eight attempts. There is no other fixture in the sport in which one side waited that long, and the wait shaped how New Zealand thought about itself as a cricketing country in ways that took another generation to shake off.

What has happened since is a slow, uneven reversal. England still lead the overall Test count heavily — a legacy of those five decades — but New Zealand have won more of the recent contests than England has, hold the trophy the two sides now play for, and in 2026 won a Test series in England for the second time. The fixture is no longer an examination. It is a contest England has to prepare for.

The long apprenticeship

The 1930 series produced four Tests and no New Zealand win, but it did produce evidence. The second Test, at the Basin Reserve from 24 January, established that ground as a Test venue permanently and established that New Zealand's best batters — Dempster and Mills among them — could bat at that level. The bowling took considerably longer.

New Zealand did not win a Test against anybody until 1956, against the West Indies at Eden Park, in the country's forty-fifth match. The first series win of any kind came in Pakistan in 1969-70. Against England the drought ran on into the late 1970s, through touring sides of varying seriousness and home summers in which draws counted as successes.

The low point is easy to date. At Eden Park in March 1955, New Zealand made 200 in the first innings and trailed England's 246 by only 46 — a competitive position. They were then dismissed for 26 in 27 overs, Bob Appleyard taking four for seven, with Bert Sutcliffe's eleven the highest score in the innings. England won by an innings and 20 runs. Seventy years later that 26 is still the lowest total in the history of Test cricket, and it was made against England, at home, from a position of parity. Nothing else in the fixture's first half-century is as complete a statement of the gap between the two sides.

February 1978, Basin Reserve

The wait ended in Wellington, and it ended in a way nobody had scripted.

New Zealand made 228 and 123 — totals that lose Test matches. England, needing 137, were bowled out for 64. Richard Hadlee took six for 26 in the innings that decided it and ten in the match. The surface was used and the bounce was low and uneven, and a crowd raised entirely on defeat watched England collapse without quite believing it.

The Basin Reserve has staged bigger cricket since, but that week remains the ground's defining occasion and arguably New Zealand cricket's. Every subsequent generation dates the country's self-belief from it, which is part of the wider cricket in New Zealand story.

Headingley 1983, and Trent Bridge 1986

Winning at home was one thing. Winning in England was the next barrier, and Hadlee's generation cleared both.

The 1983 tour was lost 3-1, but the one New Zealand won — the second Test at Headingley, by five wickets — was the country's first Test victory on English soil. It is a good example of a result mattering more than a series: three defeats around it changed nothing about the fact that the barrier had gone.

Three years later, Jeremy Coney's side went one better. The 1986 series finished 1-0 to New Zealand with two draws, and it was the first Test series New Zealand had won in England. The match was the second Test at Trent Bridge, won by eight wickets. John Bracewell made 110 batting down the order as New Zealand built 413, and Hadlee took six for 80 and four for 60. Martin Crowe had made a century in the drawn Lord's Test that opened the series.

Two things about that side are worth noting. It was built around one great fast bowler and one great batter, with a supporting cast of professionals who did specific jobs extremely well — the pattern New Zealand has repeated ever since. And it won in England by bowling England out twice on a surface that helped, which is the only way a side with New Zealand's resources has ever won away from home.

1999: the summer England hit the bottom

The most consequential series between the two countries, measured by what it did to the loser, was in 1999.

New Zealand won it 2-1 with one draw. England took Edgbaston by seven wickets; New Zealand won at Lord's by nine wickets and at The Oval by 83 runs, with Old Trafford drawn. Chris Cairns took nineteen wickets and was named player of the series jointly with England's Andy Caddick, who took twenty and still finished on the losing side. Matt Horne made the most runs for the tourists.

The consequence was that England fell to the bottom of the Wisden Test rankings, below Zimbabwe. That single fact did more to force change in English cricket than any defeat by Australia in the same period, because it removed the excuse that England were merely behind the best. They were behind everybody. Central contracts, a restructured county programme and a professionalised England set-up followed within a few years, and New Zealand's 1999 tour is one of the reasons.

There is a certain irony in that, given how much of the following two decades New Zealand spent losing to the England side those reforms produced.

Lord's, 14 July 2019

The most famous match between the two countries was not a Test.

New Zealand made 241 for eight in the World Cup final. England were bowled out for exactly 241 in reply — the first tied final in the tournament's history, and the first to require a Super Over. Both Super Overs produced fifteen runs. England were awarded the World Cup on boundary count, 26 to 17.

Ben Stokes made 84 not out and was player of the match. Henry Nicholls made 55. In the closing overs an overthrow that ricocheted off Stokes's bat was signalled as six runs, a decision the umpires later accepted was wrong under the law governing overthrows, though it is impossible to say it decided the result.

The ICC removed the boundary-count tiebreaker afterwards, replacing it with repeated Super Overs. That change is, in effect, an admission that New Zealand were on the wrong end of a rule nobody would design deliberately. New Zealand's response at the time — no protest, no campaign, a captain congratulating the winners — is the single most-cited piece of evidence for the country's cricketing self-image, and it did more for its international standing than the trophy would have. The tournament's wider history is set out in the guide to the 50-over Cricket World Cup.

2022: a New Zealander rebuilds England

In June 2022 England beat New Zealand 3-0 at home, and the significance had almost nothing to do with New Zealand.

England had won one of their previous seventeen Tests. They arrived at Lord's with a new captain in Stokes and a new coach in Brendon McCullum — a former New Zealand captain, appointed to make England play the way his New Zealand side had. They won at Lord's by five wickets with Joe Root making 115 not out and passing 10,000 Test runs, chased 299 at Trent Bridge after New Zealand had made 553, their highest innings total in England, with Jonny Bairstow scoring a century in 77 balls, and knocked off 113 in 15.2 overs at Headingley. It was the first time any side had chased more than 250 to win three Tests in a row.

Daryl Mitchell made 538 runs across the series and Trent Boult took sixteen wickets, and neither mattered to the outcome. New Zealand were the opposition against which England discovered a method, and that method — chase anything, declare early, treat a draw as a failure — has defined England ever since. The bowling craft New Zealand brought to that series is covered in the guides to New Zealand's swing bowling tradition and its left-arm seamers.

The one-run Test

Eight months later, in February 2023, the two sides produced one of the strangest results in the sport's history.

At Mount Maunganui, England won the first Test by 267 runs. At the Basin Reserve, England declared on 435 for eight and bowled New Zealand out for 209 — a lead large enough to enforce the follow-on, which England did. New Zealand then made 483, with Kane Williamson scoring 132, and bowled England out for 256 in the fourth innings.

New Zealand won by one run. It was only the second Test in history decided by a single run, and New Zealand became just the fourth side to win a Test after being asked to follow on. The series finished level.

The Crowe-Thorpe Trophy

Since 2024 the fixture has had a trophy, launched during England's tour of New Zealand that November and named for Martin Crowe and Graham Thorpe, both of whom died young. It was made by the artist David Ngawati from bats used in century innings in series between the two countries in the mid-1990s, inlaid with pounamu.

The first two contests for it went one each.

Series	Host	Result	Trophy
2024-25	New Zealand	England won 2-1	England
2026	England	New Zealand won 2-1	New Zealand

The 2024-25 series was won by England at Hagley Oval, where Brydon Carse took ten wickets in the match, and at the Basin Reserve, where Gus Atkinson finished the game with a hat-trick. New Zealand then won the dead third Test at Seddon Park by 423 runs, equalling their largest Test victory by runs, with Mitchell Santner player of the match.

The 2026 series in England was the more significant. England won at Lord's by 115 runs; New Zealand won at The Oval by 253 and at Trent Bridge by 160, taking the series 2-1 and the trophy for the first time. Nathan Smith took sixteen wickets and shared the player-of-the-series award with Jofra Archer, who took eleven. It was also the last Test series for Williamson and for Stokes, which gives it a valedictory quality it will keep.

That is New Zealand's second series win in England, forty years after the first, and it means the trophy record stands level at three Tests each with New Zealand holding it.

Where the fixture stands

The raw Test ledger still favours England enormously. New Zealand have won only a small fraction of well over a hundred Tests between the sides, and lost more than fifty, with a very large number of draws. Almost all of that damage was done before 1980.

The modern picture is different in every format. New Zealand have the better of the one-day head-to-head. The Twenty20 record favours England. The Test contests since 2019 have gone: England 3-0, drawn 1-1, England 2-1, New Zealand 2-1 — which is a genuinely even fixture between two sides that keep beating each other in each other's conditions rather than only at home.

What makes the rivalry unusual is the absence of edge. There is no historical grievance of the kind that runs through the trans-Tasman rivalry, no political weight, and a great deal of movement of personnel in both directions — an English county circuit full of New Zealanders, and a New Zealander coaching England. The 2019 final is the one place a genuine wound exists, and even that is remembered in New Zealand as a rule failing rather than an opponent cheating.

The rest of the domestic and international picture sits on the cricket in New Zealand hub, the longer national arc is in the history of New Zealand cricket, and New Zealand's other defining modern contest is covered in the guide to the New Zealand-India rivalry. The venues involved are described in the New Zealand cricket grounds guide.

Sources and method

Series results, match margins and individual performances have been checked against published match records and scorecards, together with material on the Crowe-Thorpe Trophy's introduction and design. The account of the 2019 World Cup final follows the recorded scores, the Super Over result, the boundary-count regulation as it then stood and the ICC's subsequent amendment, together with the umpires' later acknowledgement of the overthrow signal. Head-to-head totals change with every match and are described in relative terms rather than as fixed figures for that reason. Where a result is very recent, it is stated as recorded at the time of writing. This page is descriptive and contains no figures computed from our own datasets.