Bangladesh vs Pakistan
1999-05-31
On May 31, 1999, Bangladesh — playing in their debut World Cup — beat tournament favourites Pakistan by 62 runs at Northampton. Khaled Mahmud (3/31 and 27 with the bat) was Player of the Match. The result remains shrouded in match-fixing suspicion that Pakistan's later Justice Qayyum report partially supported.
West Indies
1998-11-05
On November 5, 1998, West Indies' touring squad — heading to South Africa for their first post-apartheid tour — refused to board the connecting flight from London to Johannesburg. Captain Brian Lara and vice-captain Carl Hooper led nine players in a stand-off with the West Indies Cricket Board over allowances and tour fees. The team holed up at Heathrow's Excelsior Hotel for almost a week. The board sacked Lara and Hooper, then reinstated them, and the squad arrived in South Africa demoralised and unprepared. They lost the Test series 5-0.
Sri Lanka vs Australia / West Indies
1996-02-17
After a Tamil Tigers truck bomb killed 91 people at Colombo's Central Bank on January 31, 1996, both Australia and West Indies refused to travel to Sri Lanka for their 1996 World Cup group matches. The ICC awarded Sri Lanka both games on forfeit — a decision that propelled the eventual champions into the knockouts unbeaten on points.
India vs Sri Lanka
1996-03-13
On March 13, 1996, an estimated 110,000 spectators at Eden Gardens watched India collapse from 98/1 to 120/8 chasing 252 against Sri Lanka. As the Indian innings disintegrated, sections of the crowd set fire to the stands and threw bottles onto the field. Match referee Clive Lloyd halted play, returned briefly, and finally awarded the semi-final to Sri Lanka. Vinod Kambli walked off in tears.
England vs Pakistan
1992-08-22
During Pakistan's 1992 tour of England, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis took 41 wickets between them with reverse-swing bowling that English batters and tabloid press could not understand. Pakistan won the series 2-1; English newspapers accused them of ball-tampering and the row poisoned England-Pakistan relations for a decade.
South Africa and the international cricket community
1969-09-01
By 1969, in the wake of the D'Oliveira Affair of 1968, South Africa's cricketing isolation was accelerating. The ICC had cancelled the England tour of South Africa in 1968-69; pressure was building from newly independent African nations in the ICC; and the 1970 Rest of the World tour — arranged as a replacement for South Africa's cancelled England tour — was itself boycotted by several nations. South Africa would play their last Test in March 1970.
West Indies vs Various
1966-07-01
Charlie Griffith of Barbados was the fastest bowler in the world in the mid-1960s, but his career was permanently shadowed by accusations that his bouncer and yorker were thrown rather than bowled. Several senior umpires, players and administrators — including Don Bradman — stated publicly that Griffith threw; the West Indies Cricket Board and ICC declined to take formal action. His career never fully recovered from the controversy.
New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland
1905-05-06
On 6 May 1905, at Wesley College in Melbourne, the New South Wales Cricket Association and the Victorian Cricket Association founded the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket — the body that would become Cricket Australia. South Australia refused to join because the constitution gave players no representation; the dispute would eventually trigger the 1912 Big Six walkout.
Cambridgeshire vs major counties
1869-09-01
Cambridgeshire, briefly one of England's strongest counties in the mid-1860s thanks to the batting of Tom Hayward and Bob Carpenter, fell into rapid decline at the end of the decade when their leading professionals were poached by wealthier counties and the county's small financial base left it unable to compete. The episode illustrated a structural flaw in county cricket — small counties with good players but no money could not survive in competition with wealthy urban counties — that prefigured the formal two-tier county cricket structure of later generations.
Various county sides
1865-08-01
Despite MCC's attempts to reduce gambling on cricket through the 1840s and 1850s, county cricket in the 1860s still operated in a culture where betting was widespread and where allegations of arranged results circulated freely among those closest to the game. Several county fixtures of the decade generated suspicion among contemporaries that the outcome had been agreed in advance, though the absence of formal investigation meant that no players were ever charged.
Various county and representative sides
1864-06-01
The legalisation of overarm bowling in 1864 created an immediate grey zone: how high could the arm go, and at what point did a fast delivery become an illegal throw? Through the 1860s English cricket struggled with this question as a succession of fast bowlers developed actions that umpires suspected but rarely no-balled, creating a climate of suspicion that would recur in every generation of cricket thereafter.
All-England Eleven — players vs Clarke management
1848-07-01
By the late 1840s, William Clarke's management of the All-England Eleven had generated serious discontent among the players he recruited. Clarke kept the lion's share of gate money for himself, paid players a fixed day rate regardless of receipts, and selected and dropped players according to personal favour rather than merit. By 1848–49 a core of leading professionals — including John Wisden and James Dean — had concluded that Clarke's terms were exploitative and were planning the breakaway that would become the United All-England Eleven in 1852.
English professional bowlers and MCC
1845-06-01
Through the 1840s a growing number of English professional bowlers were experimenting with deliveries that raised the bowling arm above the established roundarm height, daring umpires to no-ball them. The debate that would culminate in Edgar Willsher's famous walk-off in 1862 and MCC's legalisation of overarm in 1864 had its roots in the 1840s, when the commercial success of the All-England Eleven touring matches put a premium on pace and hostility that roundarm could not always provide.
MCC Committee
1841-05-01
The MCC committee in 1841 further tightened the maximum-stakes rule introduced in 1807, responding to renewed concerns that bookmakers operating at the Lord's ground were corrupting the conduct of matches. The committee's minutes record a formal resolution to exclude known betting men from the ground and to forbid players from receiving money from outside parties during matches — an early attempt to codify what would later become cricket's anti-corruption framework.
Eton vs Harrow
1829-07-01
After several years of escalating crowd misbehaviour and post-match excess, the headmasters of Eton and Harrow agreed in 1829 to suspend their schools' annual cricket match at Lord's. The fixture, which Lord Byron had played in for Harrow in the inaugural game of 1805 and which had been annual since 1822, was not played again until 1832. The interruption is the only voluntary suspension in the long history of the oldest schoolboy fixture in the world.
Sheffield vs Nottingham
1822-08-12
The first major match at Sheffield's Darnall ground in 1822, a 15 of Sheffield v 11 of Nottingham fixture, was marred when a temporary spectators' stand collapsed under the weight of the crowd, injuring nearly two dozen people. The incident was the first known crowd-safety disaster in English cricket and a foretaste of Lord's-era complaints about hastily built spectator scaffolding.
Various private elevens at Lord's Middle Ground
1813-06-09
In the three years between 1811 and 1813, with the Napoleonic War at its height and the country bleeding men and money, only three senior cricket matches were played in England — all of them at Lord's Middle Ground in Marylebone. The fixture lists of the previous century shrank to a handful of private challenges between the elevens of Aislabie, Beauclerk, Osbaldeston and Bligh. County cricket effectively ceased to exist; the great clubs of Kent, Surrey and Hampshire scarcely fielded a senior side. Cricket survived only through the obstinacy of a few amateurs at Lord's.