Some rivalries need an introduction. This one doesn’t. The England Men’s Cricket Team Vs Australia Men’s Cricket Team Test Timeline is the oldest, longest and most stubbornly personal contest in Test cricket, and it started with a joke about a dead sport that refused to stay dead.
It began in Melbourne in March 1877, when nobody involved knew they were founding anything. It got its name five years later from a mock obituary in a London newspaper. And it’s still running, still bitter, still capable of producing five-day classics that leave both dressing rooms hollowed out. This piece walks through that whole Australia vs England timeline, era by era, urn by urn, right up through the 2025-26 series that finished in January 2026 and the captaincy earthquake that followed it months later.
Grab a cup of tea. Or, if you’re Australian about it, something stronger.
England Men’s Cricket Team Vs Australia Men’s Cricket Team Test Timeline: The rivalry at a glance
| Year | Series/Event | Result | Key highlight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1877 | First Test | Australia won | First Test cricket match ever played |
| 1882 | The Oval Test | Australia won | Birth of the Ashes |
| 1932–33 | Bodyline Series | England won 4–1 | Bodyline controversy |
| 1948 | Ashes | Australia won 4–0 | Bradman’s Invincibles |
| 1981 | Ashes | England won 3–1 | Botham’s Ashes |
| 2005 | Ashes | England won 2–1 | Widely called the greatest modern Ashes |
| 2010–11 | Ashes | England won 3–1 | England’s last Ashes win on Australian soil |
| 2019 | Ashes | Drawn 2–2 | Australia retained the urn |
| 2023 | Ashes | Drawn 2–2 | Bazball era, Australia retained |
| 2025–26 | Ashes | Australia won 4–1 | Latest completed series |
How it started: a funeral notice that never ended
Australia beat England by 45 runs at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877. Nobody called it Test cricket yet. Nobody called it anything, really. It was just a game between an English touring side and a Melbourne-based Australian XI, and it happened to be the first time two nations played what we’d now recognize as a Test match.
The real spark came five years later. In August 1882, Australia beat England at The Oval for the first time on English soil, by seven runs, in a match so tense that one spectator reportedly died of a heart attack in the stands and W.G. Grace was booed off for running out an Australian batter mid-follow-through. The next morning, a satirical obituary ran in The Sporting Times, mourning English cricket, which had “died at The Oval” and noting that “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.” That single paragraph gave a cricket rivalry an urn, a myth and a name that’s outlasted every empire it was born under.
England toured Australia that winter and won the return series. Ivo Bligh, the England captain, was presented with a small terracotta urn, supposedly containing the ashes of a burnt bail, by a group of Melbourne women. That urn now sits, permanently, in a glass case at Lord’s. It never actually changes hands. Whoever wins just gets bragging rights and a replica.
Foundation years: 1877 to 1930
The early decades belonged mostly to Australia, but England had periods of real strength too, built around names like W.G. Grace, Wilfred Rhodes and the great Sydney Barnes, still statistically one of the finest bowlers to ever hold a cricket ball. Jack Hobbs, England’s “Master,” spent 22 years quietly building an Ashes batting record that would stand as England’s best for almost a century.
Then Australia found a 21-year-old from Bowral with a squash ball, a water tank stand and more patience than seemed biologically possible.
Don Bradman debuted in the 1928-29 Ashes and was dropped after one poor Test. He never had another bad one that mattered. In the 1930 series in England, Bradman scored 974 runs in seven innings, an Ashes record that has stood for over 90 years and shows no sign of falling. He made 254 at Lord’s, 334 at Headingley and 232 at The Oval. English bowlers left that tour with permanently altered self-esteem.
1932-33: the Bodyline series
England’s response to Bradman remains one of the most controversial tactical decisions in sporting history.
Captain Douglas Jardine, with fast bowler Harold Larwood as his weapon, instructed his bowlers to aim short-pitched deliveries at the batter’s body, backed by a ring of close leg-side fielders waiting for the fend-off catch. It was legal. It was also brutal, and it worked. Bradman’s average for the series dropped to a merely mortal 56.57. England won 4-1.
Australia called it “bodyline.” England, with a straight face, called it “leg theory.” Australian batter Bert Oldfield was struck in the skull and needed hospital treatment. The Australian Cricket Board sent a cable to England accusing the tourists of unsportsmanlike conduct, which nearly triggered a diplomatic incident between two governments, not just two cricket boards. The laws of cricket were rewritten afterward to limit leg-side fielders, permanently closing the tactic down. Jardine won his series and lost his reputation in the same three months.
The Invincibles and the long middle stretch: 1940s to 1970s
Bradman came back after the war for one final assignment: the 1948 tour of England. His side didn’t lose a single match all summer, in Tests or otherwise, and the “Invincibles” won the series 4-0. Bradman needed just four runs in his final Test innings, at The Oval, to finish with a Test average of exactly 100. He was bowled second ball for a duck by Eric Hollies, finishing on 99.94, arguably the most famous statistic in all of sport.
The rivalry ground on through the 1950s and 1960s in a fairly even trade of series wins, punctuated by Jim Laker’s astonishing 19 wickets in a single Test at Old Trafford in 1956, a bowling performance nobody has come close to repeating in Ashes cricket, or anywhere else. In 1977, both nations marked the centenary of that first 1877 Test with a one-off match in Melbourne. Australia won by 45 runs. The exact same margin as the original game, a century earlier, to the run.
1981: Botham’s Ashes
By the third Test at Headingley, England were 1-0 down, following on, and priced at 500-1 by bookmakers to win the match. Ian Botham, who’d just resigned the England captaincy after a miserable run, walked out and smashed 149 not out, an innings built on pure violence rather than technique. Australia needed 130 to win. Bob Willis then produced the spell of his life, 8 for 43, and Australia were bowled out for 111.
England won that Test, then won the next two as well, taking the series 3-1 after looking dead and buried. Botham finished with 399 runs and 34 wickets. It remains the gold standard for “impossible” comebacks in the sport, and the reason English cricket still occasionally whispers a player’s name followed by “could this be another Botham’s Ashes?”
Border, Warne and the long Australian winter for England: 1980s and 1990s
Allan Border inherited a broken Australian side in the mid-1980s and rebuilt it through sheer bloody-mindedness, scoring 3,222 Ashes runs along the way and refusing to give England an inch, socially or competitively. By the time Shane Warne arrived in 1993, Australia had turned the corner completely.
Warne’s first ball in Ashes cricket, to Mike Gatting at Old Trafston, has its own name: the Ball of the Century. It pitched outside leg stump, spun a foot and a half, and clipped off stump. Gatting stood there for several seconds looking personally betrayed by physics. That delivery announced an era. Australia won eight consecutive Ashes series from 1989 to 2003, a stretch so dominant that English fans of a certain age genuinely didn’t know what winning felt like.
2005: the series that saved English cricket
If you ask anyone over 30 in England where they were for the second Test at Edgbaston in 2005, most of them can tell you.
Australia arrived as reigning world champions of Test cricket. England, under Michael Vaughan, came out swinging from ball one, with Andrew Flintoff bowling like a man possessed and Kevin Pietersen playing with a fearlessness bordering on recklessness. The Edgbaston Test came down to Australia needing just 107 more runs with two wickets standing, and England won by 2 runs, still the closest margin in Ashes history. Warne took 40 wickets across the series, an extraordinary tally, and still finished on the losing side. England won the series 2-1, their first Ashes triumph in 18 years, and the whole country stopped to watch an open-top bus parade for a cricket team.
Eighteen months later, Australia reminded everyone who was actually in charge, winning the return series 5-0.
The pendulum swings: 2006 to 2019
England hit back with a genuinely dominant tour in 2010-11, winning 3-1 in Australia, their first series win there since 1986-87, built on Alastair Cook batting for what felt like entire calendar weeks at a time. That remains England’s last series win on Australian soil to this day.
The 2010s were competitive without a clear long-term winner. Australia crushed England 5-0 at home in 2013-14, a whitewash so total that England’s coach and several senior players didn’t survive it. England won narrowly at home in 2013 and 2015. Then came 2019, remembered mainly for two things: Steve Smith’s astonishing comeback from a ball-tampering ban, in which he scored 774 runs in four Tests, and Ben Stokes almost single-handedly winning the Headingley Test with an unbeaten 135, chasing 359, with England’s last pair somehow surviving the tension. The series finished 2-2, meaning Australia, who’d held the urn since 2017-18, kept it.
Bazball and the 2023 near-miss
England arrived in 2023 with a new brand: aggressive, fearless, occasionally reckless Test cricket nicknamed “Bazball” after coach Brendon McCullum. It produced brilliant, chaotic cricket and a series that swung wildly in both directions, including a bizarre stumping controversy involving Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s that had both sets of supporters furious for entirely different reasons. Australia won the series 2-2 on points that don’t quite add up the normal way, because a draw in the first Test still let them retain the urn they already held.
2025-26: the latest chapter
This is where the Australia vs England cricket history gets its newest entry, and it’s a series that England will remember for very mixed reasons.
Australia won the first three Tests to wrap up the urn with two matches still to play. Mitchell Starc was the difference, bowling with a fire that belied his 14 years of international experience and finishing the series with 31 wickets to claim the Compton-Miller Medal as player of the series. Travis Head was the standout batter with the ball moving at pace off the bat, scoring 629 runs at an average past 62.
Then, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day, something shifted. Josh Tongue took five wickets in Australia’s first innings, England somehow chased down 175 despite collapsing to 110 in their own first dig, and a teenage-feeling Jacob Bethell steadied the innings with a composed 40. England won by four wickets, ending an 18-match, 14-year winless run on Australian soil and denying Australia a 5-0 whitewash. It was a small mercy wrapped in a much bigger defeat.
Australia closed it out in Sydney regardless, winning by five wickets to seal a 4-1 series victory, their 35th series win in Ashes history. Steve Smith made it personal on the way out, becoming just the second man in history to pass 3,600 Ashes runs, overtaking Jack Hobbs in real time during the final Test and leaving only Bradman ahead of him. Joe Root, long haunted by never having scored a Test century in Australia, finally banished that particular ghost with hundreds at Brisbane and Sydney, on the very tour that ended in defeat. Cricket has a habit of handing out its kindest moments during its cruelest results.
2025-26 Ashes: Test by Test
| Test | Venue | Winner | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Test | Perth | Australia | 8 wickets |
| 2nd Test | Brisbane (day-night) | Australia | 8 wickets |
| 3rd Test | Adelaide | Australia | 82 runs |
| 4th Test | Melbourne | England | 4 wickets |
| 5th Test | Sydney | Australia | 5 wickets |
Australia National Cricket Team Vs England Cricket Team Timeline: the head-to-head record
Numbers make this rivalry real in a way stories can’t quite manage on their own. There’s a genuine distinction worth flagging here: overall Test matches between the two nations differ slightly from Ashes-specific Test totals, because a handful of early matches and neutral fixtures get counted differently depending on the source. Here’s both, current through the end of the 2025-26 series.
| Category | Figure (through Sep 2026) |
|---|---|
| Total Tests played (all-time) | 366 |
| Australia wins | 156 |
| England wins | 113 |
| Draws | 97 |
| Ashes-specific Tests played | 350 |
| Total Ashes series played | 74 |
| Ashes series won by Australia | 35 |
| Ashes series won by England | 32 |
| Ashes series drawn | 7 (urn retained by holder) |
| Highest team total | England 903/7 dec, The Oval, 1938 |
| Lowest team total | Australia 36 all out, Birmingham, 1902 |
| Biggest win margin | England, innings and 579 runs, The Oval, 1938 |
Australia holds the overall edge by a wide margin, and that gap has only grown since the 2025-26 result. But England’s share of series wins tells a slightly different story: this has never been one-way traffic for long. Every time Australia builds a period of total control, England eventually finds a Botham, a Flintoff or a Stokes to drag it back.
Most runs in the rivalry
| Rank | Player | Team | Ashes runs | Average | Centuries |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Don Bradman | Australia | 5,028 | 89.78 | 19 |
| 2 | Steve Smith | Australia | ~3,700 | 56+ | 13 |
| 3 | Jack Hobbs | England | 3,636 | 54.26 | 12 |
| 4 | Allan Border | Australia | 3,222 | 55.55 | 7 |
| 5 | Steve Waugh | Australia | 3,173 | — | 10 |
| 6 | Joe Root | England | 2,828 | 40.98 | 6 |
Note: Smith’s tally is still climbing at the time of writing and had already overtaken Hobbs mid-series in Sydney; this table reflects the position through the end of the 2025-26 Ashes.
Most wickets in the rivalry
| Rank | Bowler | Team | Ashes wickets | Matches | Best figures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shane Warne | Australia | 195 | 36 | 8/71 |
| 2 | Glenn McGrath | Australia | 157 | 30 | 8/38 |
| 3 | Stuart Broad | England | 153 | 40 | 6/17 |
| 4 | Hugh Trumble | Australia | 141 | 31 | 8/65 |
| 5 | Dennis Lillee | Australia | 128 | — | 7/89 |
| 5 | Ian Botham | England | 128 | — | 6/78 |
| 5 | Mitchell Starc | Australia | 128 | — | 7/94 |
| 8 | Bob Willis | England | 123 | — | 8/43 |
| 9 | James Anderson | England | 117 | — | 7/42 |
Warne’s record isn’t just the wickets. He’s also the only bowler to send down more than 10,000 balls in Ashes cricket, and he holds the record for most Ashes five-wicket hauls alongside a small handful of England’s finest, a genuinely bizarre level of longevity for a leg-spinner who once turned up to his first Ashes tour a little overweight and largely unproven.
ICC records and current standing
| Category | Detail (as of Sep 2026) |
|---|---|
| ICC Men’s Test ranking, Australia | 1st |
| ICC Men’s Test ranking, England | 5th |
| Reigning World Test Championship holders | South Africa (2023-25 cycle) |
| Current WTC cycle | 2025-2027 |
| Ashes editions completed | 74 |
| Player of the 2025-26 series | Mitchell Starc (Compton-Miller Medal) |
| Highest individual Ashes score | Wally Hammond, 251, Sydney, 1928-29 (Bradman’s 334 at Headingley, 1930, remains the standard reference innings) |
| Best bowling figures, match | Jim Laker, 19/90, Old Trafford, 1956 |
| Most runs in a single Ashes series | Don Bradman, 974 runs, 1930 |
Australia go into the rest of 2026 as the No. 1 ranked Test side in the world, a position they earned in part by winning this Ashes and largely holding it since. England sit fifth, a fair reflection of a difficult year that stretched well beyond the Ashes defeat itself.
Read Also : New Zealand Cricket Team Vs England Cricket Team Timeline
The aftershock nobody saw coming
Here’s the twist that most published Ashes histories haven’t caught up with yet. In June 2026, months after that Sydney defeat, Ben Stokes announced his retirement from international cricket, midway through a home series against New Zealand, following a further home Test series loss and continued questions about his side’s direction after the “Bazball” era’s slow unraveling. Brendon McCullum left the head coach role shortly after.
Joe Root, who first captained England from 2017 to 2022, was handed the job back in August 2026, with New Zealand great Stephen Fleming appointed as the new permanent head coach. It’s a strange, almost circular moment for English cricket: the man once nicknamed “Average Joe” during a rough Ashes tour is now the one tasked with rebuilding a Test side for the next Ashes assignment, this time with a genuine highest-Ashes-run-scorer case of his own to make. England are already down to tour Australia for white-ball cricket in November 2026, before returning in March 2027 for a standalone Test marking 150 years since that first match in Melbourne. Cricket, as ever, finds a way to make even its scheduling feel sentimental.
Frequently asked questions
When did England and Australia first play a Test match?
March 1877, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Australia won by 45 runs.
When was the first Ashes Test played?
The Ashes name dates from August 1882, after Australia’s win at The Oval prompted the famous mock obituary. The first tour played explicitly for the urn came that same winter, in 1882-83.
Why is England vs Australia called The Ashes?
Because of a satirical newspaper notice mourning the “death” of English cricket after the 1882 Oval defeat, joking that the ashes would be sent to Australia. England’s captain was later presented with a small urn during the return tour, and the name stuck permanently.
Who has won more England vs Australia Test matches?
Australia, by a clear margin, 156 wins to England’s 113 across 366 total Tests played between the sides.
Who has won more Ashes series?
Australia, 35 series wins to England’s 32, with 7 series drawn (in which the reigning holder retains the urn).
What was the result of the 2005 Ashes?
England won 2-1, ending an 18-year wait for the urn, in a series widely regarded as the best in modern Ashes history.
What happened in the 1981 Ashes?
England came back from being 1-0 down and following on at Headingley to win the Test and eventually the series 3-1, driven by Ian Botham’s all-round brilliance. It’s remembered simply as Botham’s Ashes.
Who won the 2023 Ashes?
The series finished drawn 2-2, meaning Australia, who already held the urn, retained it.
Who won the 2025-26 Ashes?
Australia, 4-1, winning the first three Tests before England salvaged pride with a four-wicket win in Melbourne.
When is the next Ashes series?
England play a one-off 150th anniversary Test in Australia in March 2027, ahead of the next full Ashes series.
Which player has scored the most runs in Ashes history?
Don Bradman, with 5,028 runs at an average of 89.78, a record that has stood since the 1940s and isn’t likely to fall.
Whichever way you slice the Australia vs England Head-to-Head numbers, one thing hasn’t changed since 1877: nobody involved treats this as just another Test series. The England Men’s Cricket Team Vs Australia Men’s Cricket Team Test Timeline is still being written, right now, with a new England captain, a new coach and a 150th anniversary Test already circled on the calendar for 2027. The urn stays at Lord’s either way. Everything else, apparently, is still up for grabs.
