History of English Cricket — From the First Test Onwards

England did not set out to invent international cricket. It sent professionals to Australia to make money, gave the colonists extra fielders because eleven of them were not thought to be enough, and then discovered in March 1877 that eleven of them were. Everything that followed, the rivalries, the humiliations, the reinventions and the two long stretches when England was genuinely the best side in the world, runs from that afternoon at Melbourne.

This page begins where our account of the origin of cricket in England leaves off. That page covers the Weald, the 1744 Laws, Hambledon, the founding of the MCC and W.G. Grace's first-class career. What follows here is the national team.

The first ever Test match and the Victorian era

The match now recognised as the first ever Test was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877 between a Combined Australian XI and an English professional team captained by James Lillywhite. England lost by 45 runs. The side was not England's strongest available; it contained no amateurs and had travelled by sea via New Zealand, and its wicketkeeper was unavailable. None of that changed the arithmetic, and none of it mattered to the Australian public, which had just watched a colonial team beat the mother country on level terms.

The first Test on English soil followed at The Oval in 1880, with W.G. Grace scoring a century. Two years later Australia won at the same ground by seven runs, and a mock obituary in The Sporting Times announcing the death of English cricket created the Ashes, the contest that has framed English cricket ever since. Our own compiled figures put the rivalry at 72 series since 1882/83, of which Australia have won 34 and England 32, with six drawn, across 340 Tests.

England dominated the first two decades of that rivalry, winning most of the early series, and the reason was depth. County cricket was producing a large professional playing class, and English conditions produced bowlers who could exploit them. Slow left-armers such as Bobby Peel and Johnny Briggs took a hundred Ashes wickets each at averages that look almost fictional now; our Ashes records have Peel at 101 wickets at 16.98 and Briggs at 97 at 20.55.

England's early dominance was not uninterrupted. Australia won in England in 1902 in a series that produced one of the most celebrated of all Test finishes at The Oval, where Gilbert Jessop counter-attacked on the last day and the last pair scraped the runs required. But across the first two decades of Test cricket, England won considerably more series than they lost, and the assumption that they would go on doing so became embedded in the way English cricket thought about itself. It took the two decades after the First World War to unsettle that assumption, and one Australian batsman to demolish it.

The Golden Age

The period from the late 1890s to the First World War is remembered in England as the Golden Age, a label applied largely by people who were young during it. What is not sentimental is the quality of the cricketers. Ranjitsinhji brought a wristy, late style of batting that English coaching had not imagined. C.B. Fry batted with an authority that suited the flat, well-prepared pitches of the era. Wilfred Rhodes bowled left-arm spin well enough to take over a hundred Ashes wickets and batted well enough to open the innings for England. Above them all stood Sydney Barnes, whose Ashes record in our figures is 106 wickets at 21.58 in only 20 matches, a strike rate no English bowler has matched over a comparable span.

Jack Hobbs began his England career in this period and continued it long past the war. He remains England's leading run-scorer in Ashes cricket in our records, with 3,636 runs at 54.26 including twelve hundreds. He was a professional, which mattered enormously at the time and matters not at all now.

Between the wars: Bodyline and the response to Bradman

England came out of the First World War badly. Australia won five-nil in 1920/21 under Warwick Armstrong, and although Percy Chapman's side regained the Ashes in 1926 and won handsomely in Australia in 1928/29, a specific problem arrived with the young batsman who had failed in that series and then learned from it.

Don Bradman scored 974 runs in the 1930 series in England. Our Ashes figures give his career total against England as 5,028 runs at 89.78 from 37 Tests, with nineteen hundreds. No conventional English plan contained him.

Bodyline

The plan England arrived at in 1932/33 was not conventional. Douglas Jardine, an amateur captain of formidable will, instructed his fast bowlers to aim at the line of the batsman's body and stacked the leg side with catchers. The tactic was called fast leg theory by those employing it and Bodyline by everybody else. Harold Larwood, a Nottinghamshire miner with genuine pace and exceptional accuracy, executed it, supported by Bill Voce.

It worked. England won the series four-one and Bradman's output was cut roughly in half. It also caused a diplomatic incident. When the Australian captain Bill Woodfull was struck over the heart at Adelaide and the wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield had his skull fractured by a ball that was not bowled to a leg-side field, the Australian Board cabled the MCC accusing England of unsportsmanlike play. The MCC took offence at the word and threatened to abandon the tour. Governments became involved.

The aftermath was ugly for the men who had carried out the instructions. Larwood was asked to apologise, refused, and never played for England again. Jardine's international career ended not long after. The Laws were subsequently amended to restrict the number of fielders behind square on the leg side, and the incident remains the reference point whenever English and Australian cricket falls out. It sits at the centre of our longer history of the Ashes.

Hutton, Compton and the last summers before the war

Len Hutton scored 364 against Australia at The Oval in 1938, an innings that remains England's highest in Ashes cricket in our records. He batted for the better part of three days. It was the high point of a brief, extraordinarily strong English batting period alongside Wally Hammond, whose 2,852 Ashes runs at 51.85 include a triple hundred, and Herbert Sutcliffe, whose Ashes average of 66.85 is the highest of any England batsman in our top hundred.

The post-war rebuild

Australia's Invincibles won four-nil in England in 1948, and England was still assembling a side. What it had was a great fast-medium bowler in Alec Bedser, who took 104 Ashes wickets at 27.49 and carried the attack almost alone for several years, and two batsmen who gave a rationed country something to enjoy. Denis Compton's 1947 summer, shared with Bill Edrich, produced a volume of runs that has passed into English folklore, and Compton played with an improvisational looseness that made him a public favourite rather than merely an admired one.

Two decisions changed England in the early 1950s. Len Hutton was appointed captain in 1952, the first professional to lead England in the modern era, which finally broke the convention that leadership belonged to amateurs by birth rather than by competence. And England found fast bowling: Frank Tyson, Brian Statham and later Fred Trueman. Hutton's side regained the Ashes at home in 1953 after nearly two decades without them, then won in Australia in 1954/55 with Tyson bowling at a pace Australia could not handle.

The 1950s finished with Jim Laker taking nineteen wickets in a single Test at Old Trafford in 1956, a bowling performance that has never been equalled at Test level and almost certainly never will be. Peter May and Colin Cowdrey anchored the batting. Then, as English teams have a habit of doing, the side went stale, and Australia won four-nil in 1958/59.

The 1960s and 1970s: attrition, then Botham

The 1960s produced a run of drawn Ashes series and a good deal of cautious cricket, which is not the same thing as bad cricket. John Edrich and Geoff Boycott made runs by the thousand, both finishing with more than 2,500 Ashes runs in our records. Ray Illingworth took a side to Australia in 1970/71 and won it, with John Snow bowling fast and hostile, and that remains one of the more underrated English achievements away from home.

England also shaped the one-day game in this period, staging the first three World Cups from 1975 and reaching two finals without winning. The domestic one-day competitions introduced in the 1960s were the first of their kind anywhere and were widely copied.

Then came Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. The 1974/75 series in Australia was a physical examination that England failed, four-one, and the memory of it hung over English cricket for years. Mike Brearley restored order at home in 1977, winning three-nil while Australian cricket was fracturing over World Series Cricket, a schism described in our account of the history of Australian cricket.

1981

Ian Botham resigned the England captaincy after a pair at Lord's in the 1981 Ashes with the series going badly. Brearley returned as captain, and over the following six weeks Botham produced the sequence that defined a generation of English cricket-watching. At Headingley, following on and facing near-certain defeat, he made 149 not out; Bob Willis then took eight for 43 to win a match England had been quoted at extreme odds to lose. At Edgbaston, Botham took five wickets for one run in a spell that finished a low-scoring chase. At Old Trafford he hit a hundred against the second new ball. England won the series three-one.

Botham finished with 128 Ashes wickets at 28.04 in our figures, alongside his runs, and Willis with 123 at 24.37. The 1981 series is the reason English cricket believes, occasionally against evidence, that a single player can change everything.

The long decline, 1989 to 1999

England won the Ashes in Australia in 1986/87 under Mike Gatting and then did not win a series against Australia for sixteen years. Eight consecutive Ashes series were lost between 1989 and 2002/03. The 1989 defeat was four-nil, with Terry Alderman taking wickets in volume; our records credit him with 100 Ashes wickets at 21.17 from just 17 matches. Shane Warne arrived in 1993 and took 195 Ashes wickets across his career at 23.25, more than any bowler on either side.

The reasons for England's decline were structural rather than mysterious. County cricket was played by too many teams, too often, by players who were rarely fit and never rested. Selection was erratic; England used a very large number of players across the period and changed captains frequently. There was no full-time coaching structure worth the name, no proper fitness regime, and no contractual relationship between the national side and its players, who were employed by their counties and released reluctantly. In 1999 England lost a home series to New Zealand and finished bottom of the Test rankings, which finally forced the argument.

Central contracts and the recovery

The English and Wales Cricket Board, formed in 1997 out of the previous administrative structure, introduced central contracts from 1999/2000. The change sounds bureaucratic and was transformative. England's leading players were now employed by the national board, which controlled their workload, their preparation and their availability. Fast bowlers could be rested from county cricket. A coach could plan.

Duncan Fletcher, appointed coach in 1999, and Nasser Hussain as captain built a side that expected to win rather than hoped to. Michael Vaughan took over the captaincy in 2003. By 2004 England had won a long sequence of Tests including a series in the West Indies, and a settled bowling attack had formed around Andrew Flintoff, Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones.

2005

The 2005 Ashes is the most watched series in modern English cricket history and the one against which every subsequent summer is measured. Australia won the first Test at Lord's comfortably. England won at Edgbaston by two runs, the narrowest result in Ashes history, after Flintoff had bowled the most celebrated over of his career and Harmison had removed the last wicket with a slower ball. Old Trafford was drawn with Australia nine down. England won at Trent Bridge, then held on at The Oval where Kevin Pietersen made 158 on the final day to secure a two-one win.

Warne took forty wickets in the series and finished on the losing side. England's players received an open-top bus parade and a level of national attention that the sport had not attracted in decades, and it was the last English home series to be shown on free-to-air television.

The reckoning came quickly. Injuries dismantled the 2005 attack, Australia won five-nil in 2006/07, and England spent several years rebuilding.

2009 to 2013: the second peak

Andrew Strauss took the captaincy in 2009 with Andy Flower as coach, and the pairing produced the most methodical England side of the modern era. They regained the Ashes at home in 2009. In 2010/11 they went to Australia and won three-one, England's first Ashes series win there since 1986/87, achieved with three victories by an innings. James Anderson and Stuart Broad bowled with control in conditions that traditionally punish English seamers, Graeme Swann took wickets on unhelpful pitches, and Alastair Cook scored heavily throughout.

In 2011 England beat India four-nil at home and reached the top of the Test rankings for the first time under the modern system. In 2012 they won a series in India, a much harder thing to do. In 2013 they beat Australia three-nil at home.

Then it collapsed. Australia won five-nil in 2013/14 with Mitchell Johnson taking 37 wickets in the series, Swann retired mid-tour, Flower left, and Pietersen's England career ended in an acrimony that occupied English cricket for years afterwards. England won the 2015 Ashes three-two at home in a series of low scores and short Test matches that neither side controlled.

The white-ball reset and 2019

England were eliminated at the group stage of the 2015 World Cup, having played a version of one-day cricket that the rest of the world had abandoned. The response was unusually decisive. Strauss, by then director of England cricket, backed Eoin Morgan as captain with an explicit instruction to change the method rather than the personnel, and England began selecting for aggression, batting depth and range-hitting rather than for accumulation.

The results were immediate in terms of scoring rates and eventual in terms of trophies. England won the 2019 World Cup at Lord's in a final against New Zealand that finished level after fifty overs each and level again after the Super Over, with the title decided on boundary count. It remains the only men's World Cup England have won, and it was achieved by a squad drawn from a much wider talent base than English one-day sides of the past. In 2022 England won the T20 World Cup in Melbourne, becoming the first men's team to hold both white-ball world titles at the same time.

That same summer of 2019 produced the drawn Ashes series in which Ben Stokes made 135 not out at Headingley to win a Test from an apparently impossible position, and Jofra Archer bowled a spell to Steve Smith at Lord's that ranks with anything England have produced. Australia retained the urn on the two-all scoreline; England had not lost.

Bazball as a change of approach

England's Test cricket reached a low point in the early 2020s, with a long run of matches producing a single win. In 2022 Stokes was appointed Test captain and Brendon McCullum, the former New Zealand captain, was appointed head coach with no prior experience of coaching a Test side. The approach they adopted, quickly labelled Bazball by the press and just as quickly disliked by both men, prioritised positive intent over accumulation: chasing fourth-innings targets rather than batting for draws, scoring at rates previously associated with one-day cricket, and attacking with the ball when conventional captaincy would have contained.

Its merits are argued about, which is the point. It has produced Test cricket that finishes inside four days and rarely produces a dull one, and it has changed what English players believe is achievable in a Test innings. It has also failed in conditions where patience was the required skill. What is not in dispute is that England chose a philosophy and committed to it publicly, which is not something English cricket has often done.

Administration, the domestic game and the women's team

The MCC governed English and international cricket until the Test and County Cricket Board took over domestic and international responsibilities in 1968, and the ECB replaced that structure in 1997. The County Championship remains the first-class competition, played across two divisions, and the argument over how much of it should be played and when has been running for a century without resolution. The Hundred, launched in 2021, added a shorter city-based format to a domestic calendar that also carries a T20 competition and a fifty-over cup.

England's women won the first Women's World Cup in 1973, hosted and largely organised by Rachael Heyhoe Flint, and won again at Lord's in 2017 in front of a full house. Women's county cricket has since been restructured into a professional regional system, and the England women's side is now fully contracted.

Where England sits in the wider game

English cricket's influence is disproportionate to its playing population because so much of the game's architecture is English in origin: the Laws, the first-class structure, the Test match itself. Its rivalries have shaped other countries' cricket as much as its own, from the West Indies sides that dismantled England in the 1980s to the long contest with India and the modern fixtures against Pakistan, South Africa and New Zealand.

Its players now move between formats and competitions in a way that the county professional of 1950 would find incomprehensible, appearing in the Indian Premier League and the Big Bash League alongside international commitments, with the World Test Championship providing context for Test series that once stood alone. Joe Root, England's most prolific Test batsman, has built his record across an era in which that balancing act is simply part of the job.

For the other side of the oldest rivalry, read our history of Australian cricket and the guide to cricket in England. More national histories are collected at our cricket history index, and if you want to argue about selection rather than read about it, build your own playing XI.