NEW DELHI – The Board of Control for Cricket in India is in active talks with Cricket South Africa to arrange a four-to-six match ODI series in 2027, just weeks before the ICC Men’s ODI World Cup kicks off across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. It is a logistical negotiation between two boards competing for a narrow window in an already crowded bilateral calendar. It is also a recognition, thirty-five years into a relationship, that each nation needs the other to know what it is capable of.
The India national cricket team vs South Africa national cricket team timeline begins on November 10, 1991, at Eden Gardens, Calcutta. South Africa were playing international cricket again after twenty-one years of apartheid isolation. The crowd gave them a standing ovation at the toss. India won the match by three wickets. Nobody in the ground imagined they were watching the opening of one of world cricket’s most technically demanding bilateral rivalries.
What India vs South Africa has, consistently, is quality. The two sides have rarely met in a series where the cricket was not worth watching. Not in Kolkata in 1991, not in Gwalior in 2010, not in Bridgetown in 2024, not in Ahmedabad in February 2026. The overall head-to-head record sits narrowly in South Africa’s favour across Tests and ODIs – but India lead in T20Is by a margin that two World Cup finals have widened further.
| Format | Matches | India Wins | SA Wins | Drawn / NR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tests | 44 | 16 | 18 | 10 |
| ODIs | 97 | 42 | 52 | 3 |
| T20Is | 35 | 21 | 13 | 1 |
| All Formats | 176 | 79 | 83 | 14 |
| Source: ESPNcricinfo head-to-head records. T20Is include ICC tournament matches. Data as of September 2026. | ||||
The first decade (1991-2000) established South Africa as India’s clearest opposition outside the subcontinent. Between 1992 and 2000, South Africa won fifteen of twenty-eight ODIs between the nations. The balance of Test cricket on South African soil was equally unflattering for India. Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock and Makhaya Ntini formed a pace attack that India’s top order, reliant heavily on Sachin Tendulkar, had no consistent answer for. India’s batting average in South Africa in those years was below 22 per wicket in Tests. They played attractive cricket on occasion. They did not win series.
The middle era (2001-2010) rewrote the terms. India learned to use the pitch. The Indian home Test environment became nearly impenetrable once Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh were generating turn at Mumbai, Nagpur and Chennai on surfaces South Africa’s technically accomplished batters could not consistently read. India won at home; South Africa won in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Both teams had concluded they needed entirely different game plans for different continents. That standoff defined bilateral cricket between the two nations for the better part of eight years.
The landmark moment of that period did not happen in a Test. On February 24, 2010 at the Captain Roop Singh Stadium in Gwalior, Sachin Tendulkar batted for 147 balls and made 200 not out – the first double century in the history of one-day international cricket. He hit 25 fours and three sixes. South Africa scored 153 in response. India finished the chase before lunch. In the hours after the match, Tendulkar told reporters he had not specifically targeted the record. His acceleration in the final fifteen overs made that explanation difficult to sustain.
The South Africa tour of India from November 14 to December 19, 2025, produced the most dramatic bilateral series in two decades. South Africa won the two-match Test series 2-0: India chased 124 in Kolkata and were dismissed for 93; in Guwahati, India needed 549 and made 140. The combined run margin – 438 runs across two Tests – was India’s heaviest home Test series defeat by runs in the format’s history. Marco Jansen and Kagiso Rabada found seam movement that Rohit Sharma’s rebuilding top order could not manage. The second Test in Guwahati ended inside three days. It was, by the measurement of scorelines, the worst Test performance India had produced at home in the modern era.
India recovered completely in white-ball cricket. The ODI series went 2-1 to India, with the deciding match at Visakhapatnam settled by nine wickets – India scoring 271 for 1 in 39.5 overs. The five-match T20I series, with the fourth match in Lucknow abandoned without a ball bowled, ended 3-1 to India. The two narratives from that tour – dominant South Africa in the five-day game, dominant India in the shorter formats – captured the structural tension of the rivalry more precisely than any single result could.
The 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka brought both nations to the same tournament stage for the second successive cycle. At the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on February 22, David Miller made 63 off 35 balls, recovering from 20 for 3 in the powerplay, to steer South Africa to 187 for 7. India lost seven wickets for 57 runs in the middle overs and were dismissed for 111. According to Al Jazeera, the 76-run defeat ended India’s twelve-match T20 World Cup winning streak – the longest in the tournament’s history at that point. It was the first T20 World Cup loss India had suffered since the 2022 group stage.
South Africa did not win the 2026 tournament. New Zealand, with Finn Allen’s record fifty-three-ball century at Eden Gardens, eliminated the Proteas in the semifinal. India met New Zealand in the March 8 final at the same Ahmedabad ground, posted 255 for 5 – a World Cup final record – and dismissed New Zealand for 159 to win by 96 runs. India became the first nation to win three Men’s T20 World Cup titles.
The women’s rivalry has followed its own different arc. India Women toured South Africa in April 2026 for a five-match T20I series and lost 4-1. Laura Wolvaardt scored 330 runs in the series, the highest aggregate in any bilateral T20I series between the two nations at either gender level. South Africa Women have now won four of their last six bilateral T20I series against India, signalling a structural shift that mirrors what South Africa’s men have long established in Test cricket.
EH’s complete India-South Africa scorecard record from 2024 to 2026 covers every bilateral fixture from the Barbados final through the Ahmedabad Super Eights. The South Africa vs India match scorecard archive details the November 2025 Tests individually, including the ball-by-ball collapse in Guwahati.
The BCCI-CSA negotiations will determine when the next line of this timeline gets written. If the proposed ODI series is confirmed for 2027 before the World Cup, it would be India’s first bilateral ODI visit to South Africa since 2023. They have never won a Test series there. After thirty-five years, three World Cup titles, and one history-rewriting afternoon in Gwalior, that remains the one record in the India national cricket team vs South Africa national cricket team timeline that still waits to be settled.
