New Zealand v South Africa Cricket Rivalry

For most of the twentieth century this was not a rivalry at all. It was a fixture South Africa expected to win and usually did, arranged when the calendar allowed, and it ran for more than seventy years before New Zealand managed to beat the Proteas in a Test on their own soil. The imbalance is stark enough that it distorts how the contest is remembered: a reader looking only at the Test ledger would conclude the two teams have never had much of a contest.

The one-day record tells a different story, and so does the knockout record. New Zealand have twice removed South Africa from a World Cup, once in a quarter-final in Dhaka and once in a semi-final at Eden Park, and the second of those is among the best-remembered matches either country has played. Then, in February 2024, New Zealand finally won a Test series against South Africa for the first time — against a side so depleted by a domestic T20 window that the achievement came wrapped in an argument about what it proved.

What follows is the fixture as it actually unfolded: the accidental first tour, the Johannesburg Test that stopped being about cricket, the away win that took New Zealand thirty years to find, and the long stretch of one-sided results that the shorter formats have never quite matched.

A tour nobody had planned

South Africa's first cricket visit to New Zealand, in February and March 1932, was an addition rather than a design. The side had been in Australia and had lost all five Tests there, and the New Zealand leg was not part of the original itinerary. Two Tests were arranged. South Africa won both.

The first, at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, went by an innings and 12 runs. The second, at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, was over inside four days and South Africa won by eight wickets. New Zealand were captained by Curly Page; South Africa by the wicketkeeper Jock Cameron, whose reputation for hitting fast bowling stayed with the fixture long after his early death.

Those two matches set a pattern in both fact and tone. New Zealand's Test side was less than five years old, still finding out how to hold a first innings together, and South Africa arrived with a settled batting order and genuine pace. The early years of the national side are covered more broadly in the history of New Zealand cricket.

Ellis Park, 1953: a Test that outgrew its result

The second Test of New Zealand's 1953-54 tour of South Africa began at Ellis Park in Johannesburg on 24 December and is remembered for reasons that have nothing to do with who won.

Play broke for Christmas Day. Overnight, news reached the touring party of the Tangiwai rail disaster in the central North Island, in which 151 people were killed. Among the dead was Nerissa Love, the fiancée of the 21-year-old fast bowler Bob Blair. Blair stayed at the team hotel and was not expected to take any further part in the match.

On the Boxing Day resumption, Neil Adcock bowled fast and short at a lively surface. Bert Sutcliffe was struck on the head, left the field bleeding from a split ear, and came back with his head bandaged to make 80 not out with seven sixes in it. Lawrie Miller also retired hurt. When the ninth wicket fell, Blair walked out from the pavilion unannounced. He and Sutcliffe added 33 for the last wicket before Blair was stumped for 6.

South Africa still won the match. New Zealand, set 233, were 75 for three on the final morning and lost their last seven wickets for 25. The scorecard is a footnote; the innings is not. New Zealand Cricket and the country's museums have kept the day in circulation for seventy years, and Blair's death in 2023 brought it back into print again.

Reid's side and the first away win

New Zealand's 1961-62 tour of South Africa remains the most productive series either side has played against the other. The rubber finished 2-2 — the only drawn series in the fixture's history that came about because New Zealand won two Tests.

The third Test at Cape Town, over the New Year, was the breakthrough. Zin Harris made 101, the captain John Reid 92, and Frank Cameron took five for 48 while Jack Alabaster took four for 61 as South Africa were held to 190 in their first innings. New Zealand won by 72 runs. It was the first time a New Zealand representative side had won a Test anywhere outside New Zealand. They won again at Port Elizabeth in February, by 40 runs, to square the series.

Reid's own tour is the part that has aged best. He made 546 runs at better than 60 and took 11 wickets in the Tests, becoming the first captain to pass 500 runs and 10 wickets in the same series, and across the whole tour he made 1,915 runs — the most any touring batter had made in South Africa. He captained, opened the bowling when needed, and kept wicket in first-class matches on the same trip.

Twenty-one years of nothing

The fixture then stopped, along with every other South African fixture. From 1970 until 1991 South Africa played no official international cricket, and the two countries did not meet again in a Test until the mid-1990s. The politics behind that exclusion, and the terms on which South Africa returned, sit inside the history of South African cricket.

Two things followed from the gap. The first is that the head-to-head Test count is small for two countries who have both been playing since the 1930s — a little over forty-five matches, where England and Australia have played more than three hundred. The second is that the modern era of the fixture is essentially all of it. Most of the matches, and almost all of the New Zealand wins, belong to the last thirty years.

When Tests resumed, South Africa were among the strongest sides in the world and New Zealand were not. Series in 1994-95, 1998-99, 2000-01, 2005-06 and 2012-13 went South Africa's way, several of them heavily. New Zealand's seam attack in that period had good bowlers in it and rarely enough of them at once, which is a recurring theme in the New Zealand swing bowling tradition.

The 1994-95 tour did, though, produce the one New Zealand win of the decade, and it produced it in an unusual shape. New Zealand won the opening Test at the Wanderers in Johannesburg in November 1994 and then lost the next two, which made them the first side since the nineteenth century to lose a three-match series after leading it. The tour is remembered in South Africa as much for its off-field disorder as its cricket; several players were sent home before it ended.

The complete list of New Zealand Test wins

Seven matches, spread across sixty-two years:

Test	Venue	Margin
3rd Test, 1961-62	Cape Town	72 runs
5th Test, 1961-62	Port Elizabeth	40 runs
1st Test, 1994-95	Johannesburg	New Zealand's only win of the 1990s
2nd Test, 2003-04	Eden Park, Auckland	9 wickets
1st Test, 2021-22	Hagley Oval, Christchurch	Innings and 276 runs
1st Test, 2023-24	Bay Oval, Mount Maunganui	281 runs
2nd Test, 2023-24	Seddon Park, Hamilton	7 wickets

Three of the seven came in the space of two years. Two of the seven came in a single week of January and February 1962.

Eden Park, 2004

New Zealand's first home Test win over South Africa came in March 2004, in the second match of a three-Test series, at Eden Park in Auckland. Seventy-two years had passed since the first meeting in Christchurch.

The context is worth keeping. The opening Test at Hamilton had been a high-scoring draw. New Zealand won at Auckland to lead the series, and South Africa won the third at Wellington to level it. So the win did not produce a series victory, and the fixture went back to type afterwards. But it removed the specific line that had followed New Zealand around for seven decades — that they had never beaten this opponent at home — and it did so at a ground whose short straight boundaries and drop-in pitch make it a strange place to play a Test at all.

Hagley Oval and Bay Oval: the shift

The last decade has produced the two most interesting stretches of the fixture.

In February 2022 South Africa played two Tests, both at Hagley Oval in Christchurch, in a COVID-restricted tour. On the first morning of the first Test, Matt Henry took seven for 23 on his home ground and South Africa were out for 95, their lowest Test total against New Zealand; Zubayr Hamza's 25 was the top score. New Zealand won by an innings and 276 runs and Henry finished as player of the series. South Africa then won the second Test at the same ground by 198 runs, having batted first and made 364, with Kagiso Rabada player of the match. A 1-1 series, at one venue, decided by which attack got the new ball to behave.

Two years later South Africa returned for two Tests and lost both. The first, at the Bay Oval in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand won by 281 runs after making 511 in the first innings. The second, at Seddon Park in Hamilton, they won by seven wickets, with Kane Williamson making a century and taking the player-of-the-series award. It was New Zealand's first Test series win over South Africa in any conditions.

The asterisk is real and should be stated. South Africa's leading players were contracted to the domestic T20 competition running at home, and the touring squad contained only seven capped players. Neil Brand captained the side on debut. New Zealand played a full-strength team and won comfortably, which is what a full-strength team should do; what the two matches did not settle is how New Zealand would have fared against South Africa's first choice attack.

The white-ball ledger runs the other way

Across one-day internationals the two sides are much closer than the Test record suggests, and in knockout cricket New Zealand have the better of it.

At the 2011 World Cup, in the third quarter-final at Mirpur, New Zealand made 221 for eight — Jesse Ryder 83 — and bowled South Africa out for 172. Jacob Oram took four for 39 and held two catches, and South Africa went from 108 for two to all out, losing eight wickets for 64. New Zealand won by 49 runs.

Four years later came the match that both countries still argue about. In the first semi-final of the 2015 tournament at Eden Park, rain cut the game to 43 overs a side. South Africa made 281 for five, Faf du Plessis top-scoring with 82. New Zealand's revised target was 298. Brendon McCullum hit 59 from 26 balls at the top; from 149 for four, Grant Elliott and Corey Anderson added 58; and with five needed from two balls Elliott hit Dale Steyn into the stand to finish on 84 not out. New Zealand won by four wickets and reached their first World Cup final at the seventh attempt. The revised target arithmetic that shaped the chase is explained in the guide to Duckworth-Lewis-Stern, and the wider campaign is covered in New Zealand's 2015 World Cup run.

Those two results are why the rivalry has any emotional charge at all from a South African point of view. A country whose World Cup history is a catalogue of knockout misfortune has had New Zealand as the agent of it twice.

Where the fixture stands

New Zealand have won fewer than ten Tests against South Africa in more than ninety years, and South Africa have won well over twenty. That gap will not close quickly. But the recent trend is not what the aggregate implies: New Zealand have won three of the last handful of Tests played between them, at home, with a settled seam attack and grounds that suit it.

Tours are also short now. The World Test Championship cycle allocates two-Test series to this fixture rather than the four- and five-match rubbers of the 1990s, which means each meeting has less room to swing back and forth. That structural squeeze affects New Zealand more than most, and it is the same pressure that shapes the trans-Tasman rivalry with Australia.

For the domestic competitions that supply the New Zealand side, see the Plunket Shield guide. The rest of the national game, including venues, pathways and how to watch a match, sits on the cricket in New Zealand hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on published Test and one-day match records for both countries, New Zealand Cricket and New Zealand Cricket Museum material on the 1953-54 tour and Bob Blair, Wisden's contemporary account of the 1961-62 series in South Africa, and scorecards for the 2004, 2022 and 2024 Test series and the 2011 and 2015 World Cup knockout matches. Aggregate win-loss figures move with every series played, so they are given here in general terms rather than as fixed totals. Nothing in this article is computed from our own datasets; it is a descriptive history, and where accounts of the Ellis Park Test differ in small details the version given follows New Zealand Cricket's own published record.