Pakistan vs Australia Cricket Rivalry

Pakistan against Australia divides cleanly by geography, and it has done so for seventy years. In Pakistan and in the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan have beaten Australia repeatedly and sometimes heavily. In Australia, Pakistan have won a handful of Tests in half a century of touring and have not won a series since the 1970s.

That is not a story about Pakistani fragility abroad in general — Pakistan have won Test series in England, in the West Indies and in India. It is specific to Australian conditions: hard, fast pitches with even bounce, a Kookaburra ball that stops moving after twenty overs, and grounds where the batting collapse Pakistan can usually recover from at home becomes terminal.

The fixture has also produced several of the best individual bowling performances in Pakistan's history, an era of one-day finals that went Australia's way, and the tour that confirmed international cricket had genuinely returned to Pakistan.

Karachi, October 1956

Australia's first Test in Pakistan was a single match at the National Stadium in Karachi in October 1956, and it was neither quick nor close.

The opening day produced 95 runs, still the slowest first day in Test history. Australia were bowled out for 80 and then for 187. Fazal Mahmood took 6 for 34 and 7 for 80 — thirteen wickets in the match — and Pakistan won by nine wickets, needing only 69 in the fourth innings.

Fazal had already bowled Pakistan to a Test win in England two years earlier. What he did to Australia at Karachi established the pattern that has held ever since: Australian batting, superbly equipped for bounce, has repeatedly struggled against a Pakistani bowler exploiting a surface that offers none. The ground's longer history is in the guide to the National Stadium in Karachi.

Sydney, January 1977

Pakistan's first Test win in Australia came on the 1976-77 tour, and it belonged almost entirely to one bowler.

Australia had won the second Test at Melbourne by 348 runs, with Dennis Lillee taking six in an innings and Gary Cosier making 168. The series looked settled. At Sydney in the third Test, Australia were bowled out for 211 and 180. Imran Khan took 6 for 102 and then 6 for 63 — twelve wickets in the match, still cited as the finest bowling by an Asian bowler in a Test in Australia. Asif Iqbal made 120, having already made an unbeaten 152 in the drawn first Test at Adelaide.

Pakistan won by eight wickets and squared the series 1-1. Imran was twenty-four. The fast-bowling culture that produced him, and everyone after him, is set out in the guide to Pakistan's fast bowling tradition.

Melbourne, March 1979

Two years later Pakistan returned for a two-Test series and produced the most extraordinary single spell in the fixture's history.

At Melbourne, Australia were chasing and well placed when Sarfraz Nawaz took 9 for 86 in the second innings. Pakistan won by 71 runs. Australia won the second Test at Perth by seven wickets, chasing 285 with Rick Darling making 79, and the series finished 1-1 again.

Sarfraz's nine is the performance that most directly connects to the skill Pakistan is best known for. He was among the first bowlers to make an old ball move consistently in the air in conditions where it should not have, and the technique's development is covered in the guide to reverse swing.

Those two drawn series in Australia, in 1976-77 and 1978-79, remain the closest Pakistan have come to winning one there.

Karachi, October 1994

The most famous match between the sides was won by a single wicket.

Australia made 337 and 232 at the National Stadium. Pakistan, set 314, finished on 315 for nine — the last pair surviving to win it. Shane Warne took eight wickets in the match and was man of the match on the losing side; Wasim Akram also took eight. Michael Bevan made his Test debut.

Australia lost the series and returned home without having won a Test in Pakistan on the tour. It was also, in retrospect, the last time an Australian side would tour Pakistan for a generation. Career records for the players involved are in the player index.

Lord's, June 1999

Pakistan reached the 1999 World Cup final at Lord's and lost it inside two sessions.

Pakistan were bowled out for 132 in 39 overs, Warne taking four wickets. Australia chased 133 in just over twenty overs, Adam Gilchrist making 54 from 36 balls and Mark Waugh finishing unbeaten on 37. Australia won by eight wickets to take their second world title.

It was the shortest World Cup final on record at the time and, from Pakistan's side, the most deflating result of the modern era. Pakistan had beaten Australia in the group stage of the same tournament and had gone into the final as many people's favourites. The tournament is one of two Pakistan reached the final of; the other, which they won, is covered in the guide to Pakistan's 1992 World Cup title.

The UAE years

Between 2009 and 2019 Pakistan could not stage home international cricket in Pakistan, and Australia's Test series against them were played in the United Arab Emirates instead. On those pitches — slow, low and abrasive, with the ball scuffing quickly — Pakistan were formidable.

The clearest example was October 2018. The first Test at Dubai was drawn only because Usman Khawaja made 141 in the fourth innings to save it. The second, at Abu Dhabi, Pakistan won by 373 runs. Mohammad Abbas took seventeen wickets in the two matches and was player of the series, bowling at a pace Australian batters found unthreatening on paper and could not get away from in practice.

Pakistan took that series 1-0. The arrangement that made those years possible, and what it cost Pakistani cricket, is described in the guide to Pakistan's home series in the UAE.

Headingley, July 2010

There is one other category: Tests between the two played in England, on neutral ground, because Pakistan had no home venue available.

Two were played in July 2010. Australia won at Lord's by 150 runs, Simon Katich making 80 and 83 and Shane Watson taking five in an innings. At Headingley, Pakistan won by three wickets. Watson took 6 for 33 to restrict Pakistan to 258 in the first innings, Australia were held to 349 in their second, and Pakistan chased 180 in a little over fifty overs, Imran Farhat making 67. Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif each took eleven wickets across the two matches.

The series finished 1-1. It also produced the useful comparison: on an English pitch, with a Dukes ball that keeps moving, Pakistan matched Australia. It is only in Australia that the fixture becomes lopsided.

Rawalpindi, March 2022

Australia toured Pakistan in 2021-22 for the first time in twenty-four years. That was the point of the tour, and everyone involved said so.

The three Tests introduced the Benaud-Qadir Trophy, named for Richie Benaud and Abdul Qadir, and produced a series that only came alive at the end.

Test	Venue	Result
First	Rawalpindi	Drawn. Pakistan 476 for 4 declared and 252 for 0; Australia 459
Second	Karachi	Drawn. Australia 556 for 9 declared; Pakistan 148 and 443 for 7
Third	Lahore	Australia won by 115 runs, taking the series 1-0

The Karachi Test is the one that matters. Pakistan were 148 all out in reply to 556 and then batted through most of three days to save it, Babar Azam making 196 in the fourth innings. It is among the great rearguard innings in Pakistan's Test history and it did not win a match.

Australia then won at Lahore with Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon taking twelve wickets each across the series and Khawaja — born in Islamabad — scoring 496 runs and taking the player-of-the-series award on his return to the country of his birth. Shaheen Shah Afridi and Nauman Ali took nine each for Pakistan.

Pakistan won the one-day series 2-1, including their highest successful chase in the format, and Australia took the single Twenty20 international by three wickets. The Rawalpindi ground's own record is in the guide to Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium.

The record in Australia

The clearest illustration came in 2016-17, when Australia completed a 3-0 series win that took their run of consecutive Test victories over Pakistan in Australia to twelve.

That number understates how close the first of those three was. The Gabba Test was played under lights, and Pakistan, set an enormous target, made 450 in the fourth innings — their highest fourth-innings total in Test cricket and one of the largest ever made in a losing cause. Asad Shafiq made 137 not out, the highest individual fourth-innings score in a Test at the ground. Australia won by 39 runs.

At Melbourne, Azhar Ali made 205 not out, the highest Test score by a Pakistani in Australia. Pakistan still lost. Steve Smith made 441 runs in the series and Josh Hazlewood took fifteen wickets. The tour is the best evidence that Pakistan's problem in Australia is not the absence of good individual performances but the absence of enough of them at once.

The 2023-24 tour showed the pattern intact.

Australia won all three Tests: by 360 runs at Perth, by 79 at Melbourne and by eight wickets at Sydney. Cummins took nineteen wickets and was player of the series. Mitchell Marsh made 344 runs. It was David Warner's last Test and it took Lyon past 500 Test wickets.

Pakistan were not without performers. Aamir Jamal took eighteen wickets in the series, including six on debut at Perth and six more at Sydney, becoming the fourteenth Pakistan bowler to take five wickets in a first Test. Mohammad Rizwan made 193 runs, the most of any Pakistani batter. Pakistan were also docked World Test Championship points for a slow over rate in the first Test, which sums up the tour's tone reasonably well.

The structural problem is the batting. Pakistan's domestic first-class cricket, whose repeated restructuring is examined in the guide to Pakistan's regional cricket reforms, is played almost entirely on slow, low surfaces. A batter arriving in Perth has had no preparation for a pitch where the ball carries through at chest height for four days, and three-Test tours give no time to learn.

The white-ball fixture

The one-day and Twenty20 relationship follows the same geography as the Test one, with one difference: Australia's advantage has come at tournaments rather than in bilateral series.

The 1999 World Cup illustrates both halves. Pakistan beat Australia in the group stage at Headingley on 23 May by ten runs — Pakistan 275 for eight, Australia 265, Inzamam-ul-Haq unbeaten on 81 and Wasim Akram taking four for 40. Four weeks later the same two sides met in the final at Lord's and Australia won it in twenty overs. Beating Australia in a group match and losing to them in a knockout is a pattern Pakistani supporters recognise.

Bilaterally, and especially at home, Pakistan have generally had the better of it. The one-day series during Australia's 2021-22 tour went to Pakistan 2-1 and included Pakistan's highest successful run chase in the format, with Babar Azam taking the player-of-the-series award. Australia salvaged the single Twenty20 international by three wickets.

Because Pakistan spent a decade unable to host, a great deal of this fixture's white-ball history was played in the UAE or at neutral tournaments, which makes any long-run comparison of home and away records misleading. There simply was not a home record to compile for those years.

Where the fixture stands

Australia have now toured Pakistan and will presumably do so again, which is more than could be said for most of the last thirty years. The Benaud-Qadir Trophy gives the Test series a name, and both boards have an interest in keeping it scheduled.

What has not changed is the asymmetry. Pakistan can beat Australia at home and could beat them again. Winning a Test series in Australia would require Pakistan to develop batters on pitches Pakistan does not have, which is a domestic-cricket problem rather than a selection one, and nobody has yet proposed a credible way round it. The longer national story is in the history of Pakistan cricket, and the rest of the game there sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page uses official scorecards and series records for the Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals named, ICC tournament documentation for the 1999 World Cup, and PCB and Cricket Australia material on the 2021-22 tour and the Benaud-Qadir Trophy. Series results and individual figures are as published in match records rather than computed here. Head-to-head totals across the whole fixture are deliberately not given as fixed numbers, since they change with each series; the comparisons drawn are between the results described. Judgements about conditions and batting preparation are editorial.