New Zealand v India: A Rivalry Built on Upsets

Most cricket rivalries are built on long series. This one is built on single matches, and New Zealand has won a startling proportion of the ones that mattered most.

A World Test Championship final. An ICC KnockOut final. A World Cup semi-final. Three separate occasions on which New Zealand walked into a match against India with less money, fewer players, a smaller television audience and no realistic expectation of winning, and won anyway. India has taken far more of the bilateral series, and in the white-ball formats India leads the overall count. But when the two sides have met with a trophy immediately at stake, New Zealand's record is better than anybody would predict from the resources involved.

Then in October 2024 New Zealand did something no side had ever done, and the framing of "gallant underdog" stopped being adequate.

1955-56, and a fixture created as a soft assignment

The two countries first played a Test on 6 January 1956, during New Zealand's tour of India. Neither side was strong. India had not yet won a Test series against a major opponent; New Zealand had not yet won a Test at all, and would not until later that same year, against the West Indies.

For the first decade the fixture served a purpose that neither board would state out loud: it was the series each could plausibly win. India's early Test record against England and Australia was poor, and a New Zealand tour offered turning pitches and a beatable opponent. New Zealand's early record against everybody was poor, and India offered the same courtesy in reverse.

1967-68: India's first win away from home

The tour that gave the fixture its first real significance was India's visit to New Zealand in February and March 1968.

India won the series 3-1 under Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, and the first Test — won by five wickets — was India's first Test victory anywhere outside India. That is a substantial thing for New Zealand to have been on the wrong end of, and a substantial thing for India to have achieved on grass, in the cold, against seam.

The second Test went the other way and was New Zealand's first Test win over India, so the same series contains both sides' breakthroughs against each other. Graham Dowling made 239 in the course of scoring 471 runs across the four matches, a New Zealand Test record at the time; Gary Bartlett produced what were then the best Test figures by a New Zealand bowler, six for 38. India's answer was E A S Prasanna, who took twenty-four wickets, and Ajit Wadekar, who made 328 runs. India won the last Test by 272 runs.

The pattern that series established held for decades: India's spin was decisive in India, New Zealand's seam was decisive in New Zealand, and away wins were rare in both directions. India would not lose a home series to New Zealand for another fifty-six years.

Nairobi, October 2000

New Zealand's first global trophy came against India, on a neutral ground, and it came from behind.

The ICC KnockOut final was played at the Gymkhana Club Ground in Nairobi on 15 October 2000. Sourav Ganguly made 117 from 130 balls as India posted 264 for six. New Zealand were 132 for five in reply, which in a fifty-over chase of that size is effectively over.

Chris Cairns then made 102 not out from 113 balls, adding 122 with Chris Harris, and New Zealand got home with four wickets and two balls to spare. It remains the country's first win at an ICC event, and it was achieved by a side that had never previously reached a global final.

There is a coda that says more about the relationship than the result does. Within weeks of that final, India appointed a New Zealander to run their cricket. John Wright — an opening batter with 5,334 Test runs in 82 matches, the first New Zealander past five thousand, and New Zealand's captain in the late 1980s — became India's head coach in November 2000 and stayed until April 2005. Under him India shared the 2002 Champions Trophy, reached the 2003 World Cup final, beat Australia 2-1 at home in the series that included the Kolkata Test, and drew 1-1 in Australia in 2003-04. New Zealand's most durable contribution to Indian cricket is a coach rather than a result.

Old Trafford, 2019

The 2019 World Cup semi-final is the match Indian supporters bring up most and New Zealand supporters mention least, because it was won so unglamorously.

New Zealand beat India by 18 runs. Matt Henry took three for 37 and was named player of the match. India's top order was removed cheaply by two seamers using the conditions, and a chase that should have been straightforward for the tournament's best batting line-up never recovered.

It was the third time in four World Cups that New Zealand had reached a semi-final, and the second in succession that they had won one. They then lost the final at Lord's in the manner described in the guide to the New Zealand-England rivalry, which is why the semi-final is not remembered in New Zealand as a triumph so much as the first half of a very long fortnight.

Southampton, June 2021

The World Test Championship final was the most consequential match the two countries have played, because it was the first time either had contested a global title in the longest format.

Played at the Rose Bowl in Southampton from 18 to 23 June 2021, it needed the reserve day after rain. India made 217 and 170. New Zealand made 249 and chased 140 for the loss of two wickets, winning by eight wickets. Kyle Jamieson took five for 31 in India's first innings, seven in the match, and was player of the match; Mohammed Shami took four for 76. Kane Williamson finished unbeaten on 52 and Ross Taylor made 47 in the chase that ended it.

The result mattered for reasons beyond the trophy. New Zealand had been the smallest full member in the competition and had qualified by winning away Tests that larger sides had not. The final was played in English conditions, which suited New Zealand's seam attack, and New Zealand had just finished a Test series in England while India came in without a warm-up match — a scheduling advantage New Zealand did not create but did not decline either. How the competition is structured, and why a two-year league decided by one match at a neutral venue remains contentious, is set out in the explainer on the World Test Championship.

Ajaz Patel's ten, and losing anyway

Six months later, at the Wankhede Stadium on 3 December 2021, a New Zealand spinner born in Mumbai took all ten wickets in an innings against India.

Ajaz Patel finished with ten for 119 from 47.5 overs, and fourteen for 225 in the match — the best Test match figures anybody has recorded against India, and the best by a visiting bowler anywhere in Asia. He became only the third bowler in the history of Test cricket to take ten in an innings, after Jim Laker in 1956 and Anil Kumble in 1999, and the only one of the three to end up on the losing side. New Zealand lost the Test heavily.

Patel was born in Mumbai in 1988 and emigrated to New Zealand at eight. He took his ten wickets roughly a mile from where he was born. It is the single most improbable individual performance in the fixture, and it produced no points at all.

October 2024: the whitewash

Then New Zealand went to India and won all three Tests.

Test	Venue	Result
First	M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru	New Zealand won by 8 wickets
Second	MCA Stadium, Pune	New Zealand won by 113 runs
Third	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	New Zealand won by 25 runs

The first Test set the tone in a way nobody expected: India, batting first at home, were bowled out for 46, with Matt Henry taking five for 15. Rachin Ravindra then made 134. New Zealand won inside four days.

At Pune the match turned on spin, which is the part India found hardest to accept — New Zealand's slow bowlers out-bowled India's on an Indian surface. At the Wankhede, Ajaz Patel took six in an innings again and New Zealand held on to win by 25 runs to complete the sweep.

The records attached to it are stark. It was New Zealand's first Test series win in India. It was the first time India had been whitewashed at home in a Test series of any length. And it was India's first home series defeat since England's 2012-13 tour, ending a run of more than a decade. Rishabh Pant made the most runs across the series and India's spinners took wickets in volume, and none of it mattered.

Rachin Ravindra's part in it is worth dwelling on. He was born in Wellington in 1999 to parents from Bangalore; his father played club cricket there before settling in New Zealand in 1997, and he was named after Sachin Tendulkar. Nine months before the tour he had made 240 against South Africa, the highest maiden Test century by a New Zealander, having already made 550 runs with three centuries at the 2023 World Cup on his first appearance in the tournament. He made his hundred in India in front of relatives.

The white-ball ledger, and Dubai 2025

Away from the knockouts, India has generally had the better of it. India leads the one-day head-to-head across well over a hundred matches; the Twenty20 record is close, with an unusual number of tied matches for such a small sample.

The recent pattern reasserted itself twice. At the Wankhede on 15 November 2023, in a World Cup semi-final, Mohammed Shami took seven for 57 — his best figures in the format and the first seven-wicket haul by an Indian in a World Cup — and India won comfortably. In the Champions Trophy final at Dubai on 9 March 2025, New Zealand made 251 for seven, with Daryl Mitchell scoring 63 and Michael Bracewell 53 not out, and India chased 254 for six inside 49 overs. Rohit Sharma made 76 and was player of the match. It was India's third Champions Trophy and it was won without losing a match in the tournament.

So the ledger of finals is now split: New Zealand took Nairobi in 2000 and Southampton in 2021, India took Dubai in 2025. The semi-finals are split too, one each in 2019 and 2023.

What holds the fixture together

There is no antagonism in it, and there never has been. No political freight, no historical grievance, no crowd trouble worth reporting. What there is instead is a genuine two-way flow of people.

• New Zealand's cricket has been repeatedly shaped by players of Indian origin: Dipak Patel, born in Nairobi in 1958 and a New Zealand international from 1987 to 1997, whose 1992 World Cup role opening the bowling with off-spin against the first fifteen overs became a template other sides copied; Ajaz Patel, born in Mumbai; Jeetan Patel; Rachin Ravindra.
• India's coaching and franchise system has repeatedly employed New Zealanders, starting with John Wright and continuing through the Indian Premier League.
• And the two boards sit at opposite ends of the sport's financial scale, which means every bilateral schedule is a negotiation New Zealand does not have much leverage in.

That last point is the honest frame for the whole rivalry. New Zealand plays India when India's calendar allows, in whatever format sells, and has built a record in those matches that its resources do not explain. That mentality is part of the wider cricket in New Zealand story, and the domestic competition that produces the players is described in the Plunket Shield guide.

For the Indian side of the picture, the guide to India's spin bowling tradition explains what New Zealand had to solve in 2024, and the wider Indian game sits on the cricket in India hub. The New Zealand grounds where the home leg is played are covered in the New Zealand cricket grounds guide, the longer national arc is in the history of New Zealand cricket, and the rest of the domestic game sits on the cricket in New Zealand hub.

Sources and method

Match results, margins, individual figures and the records attached to them have been verified against published scorecards and tournament records, including ICC material on the World Test Championship final and the Champions Trophy. Biographical details of players are taken from published career records. Head-to-head totals in all three formats move with every fixture and are therefore described in relative terms rather than as fixed numbers. Where a record is described as a first or a best, it is stated as it stood at the time of that match and may since have been matched or passed. This page is descriptive and no figures in it were computed from our own datasets.