LONDON — The first Test match between England and India was played at Lord’s in June 1932. England won by 158 runs. India had been playing Test cricket for eight months. The result was as predictable as anything in sport can be when one side has been playing a format for sixty years and the other has not. What followed across the next ninety years was considerably less predictable.
What followed 1932 — across Test series, World Cups, bilateral contests, and every format cricket has invented since — is the sport’s most transformed rivalry. The team that lost at Lord’s by 158 runs became the engine of world cricket’s finances, the only touring party whose arrival determines broadcast revenues on the English circuit, and the side that has progressively reset the competitive standard every time the two teams play. The transformation was political, economic, and — when they actually meet — still contested on its own terms each time.
The pivotal year was 1971. India won their first Test series on English soil: three Tests played, one won, two drawn. Ajit Wadekar captained a side that included Bishan Bedi and Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, spinners whose accuracy on English pitches was not supposed to work the way it did. Sunil Gavaskar was 21. England had Keith Fletcher and Ray Illingworth. The series win did not immediately alter the balance — England remained competitive in home Tests through the 1970s — but it established that India did not come to England to participate. They came to compete.
The 1983 World Cup changed what competition meant.
Kapil Dev’s side arrived at the 1983 edition as 66-to-one outsiders. They beat West Indies in the final at Lord’s — the same ground where the 1932 Test had established the relationship’s starting point. The victory was not specifically against England, but it was at the heart of English cricket, and it announced that the subcontinent had arrived in global cricket as a force. The broader commercial and political implications took a decade to crystallise. By 1993, the BCCI’s negotiating position within the ICC had fundamentally changed. By 2003, it was dominant.
The specific England-India rivalry through the 1990s was defined, more than anything else, by one player. Sachin Tendulkar’s first tour of England came in 1990 — he was 17, already selected, and made 119 not out at Old Trafford against a Devon Malcolm attack that had dismissed far more experienced batters. His record against England across a career that extended to 2013 — 2188 Test runs, seven centuries, a batting average of 54.7 — tracks the broader competitive trajectory of the two sides. When England were strong, Tendulkar still made runs. When India were strong, he made them faster.
The 21st century produced distinct phases. India under Sourav Ganguly, who captained from 2000 to 2005, was the most combative Indian team to tour England to that point — aggressive in the field, assertive in press rooms, willing to conduct competitive diplomacy through the boundary boards. The 2002 England-India series ended drawn. Both sides left knowing neither had won decisively.
Kohli’s 2014 England tour was one end of a particular story: 134 runs across ten innings, 13.4 average, repeatedly dismissed by James Anderson targeting the gap between bat and pad. His 2018 return was the counter-narrative: 593 runs, 59.3 average, two centuries, the same bowlers producing different results against a batter who had studied the 2014 footage and adjusted. That four-year arc — from 13.4 to 59.3, same conditions, same bowlers, different Kohli — is the clearest possible illustration of how the rivalry rewards preparation. Kohli’s ODI century record extended far beyond that bilateral arc into one of cricket’s defining statistical landmarks.
The Bazball era has added another dimension. Ben Stokes’s England has restructured Test cricket around aggression, intent, and a declaration-of-intent batting approach that has won matches from positions that would have previously been scored as draws or defeats. Against India’s 2024 Test tour — five Tests, India won 3-1 — the Bazball template worked differently. India, who had watched the approach evolve and prepared counter-strategies accordingly, won the series in England with a 3-1 margin that reversed the recent home-away pattern and showed that India’s tactical flexibility had kept pace with England’s structural innovation.
In limited-overs cricket, the two sides have met in World Cup group stages, knockouts, and semi-finals across multiple editions. India beat England by 100 runs in Lucknow during the 2023 ODI World Cup group stage — a result that effectively ended England’s campaign — before India met Australia in the final. The two sides have not yet played each other in a World Cup final, a fact that carries its own particular tension for cricket’s financial and sporting centre of gravity.
The 2023 Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup 2024 have added more data points. India’s pace depth — Bumrah, Shami, Siraj cycling through formats and tournaments — has made India’s bowling attacks as dangerous as any in the modern game. England’s response, in Test cricket at least, has been to bat in a way that takes bowling attacks less seriously than their statistics suggest they should be. Whether that approach can survive Indian fast bowling in Indian conditions remains the open question.
The rivalry is 94 years old by this season. Lord’s is still the same ground. The dimensions of the contest — who has power, who has money, who produces the players, who wins the matches — have changed in almost every direction since 1932. What has not changed is that the matches between England and India retain a weight in both countries that bilateral cricket between other sides rarely produces. That weight is earned, accumulated, and not going anywhere.
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