Beginning of international cricket

International cricket predates Test cricket by more than three decades. The first match between two national teams was played not in England or Australia but in Manhattan, New York, where the United States met Canada on 24–26 September 1844 — the earliest international fixture on record between two representative national sides in any sport.

USA v Canada, 1844: the actual first international match

The match was staged at the St George's Cricket Club ground at Bloomingdale Park, on what is now 30th Street and Broadway in Manhattan — not New Jersey, as sometimes claimed. Teams drawn from cricket clubs in New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Boston played a representative Canadian side over three days (bad weather washed out the middle day), and Canada won a low-scoring match by 23 runs. The idea for the fixture traced back to 1840, when a St George's Cricket Club side arrived in Toronto for a match arranged, they thought, by a Toronto official named Mr Phillpotts — who turned out to be an impostor. Rather than turn the exhausted travellers away, the Canadians improvised a match anyway, in front of a brass band and the colonial governor; the New Yorkers won by ten wickets and left on good enough terms to invite the Canadians south four years later, for the fixture now recognised as cricket's first true international. The 1844 game drew an extraordinary crowd for the era — estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000 spectators on the first day alone — with somewhere between $100,000 and $120,000 wagered on the outcome, evidence of how seriously the sport was followed in North America at the time. Cricket in the United States never sustained that early momentum against the rise of baseball, but the fixture's legacy lived on: the two countries continued to meet periodically, and their rivalry later became the basis of the Auty Cup.

Test cricket arrives: 1877

The first fixture between national teams recognised as a Test match came 33 years later, when a Combined Australian XI beat James Lillywhite's England side by 45 runs at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877. The rivalry's most famous chapter was written five years after that: in 1882, Australia beat England by seven runs at the Oval, England's first defeat on home soil, prompting The Sporting Times to publish a mock obituary mourning the death of English cricket, whose "body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia." The phrase gave the Ashes their name, though the small urn later gifted to England captain Ivo Bligh in Australia was a personal keepsake, never adopted as the series' official trophy.

From Tests to limited overs

International cricket stayed a purely multi-day pursuit for almost a century. The first One Day International was played on 5 January 1971, when a rain-ruined Test between Australia and England at the MCG was abandoned and replaced with a one-off, 40-overs-a-side match instead; Australia won by five wickets. The format's first World Cup followed in 1975 in England, won by the West Indies. Twenty20 internationals arrived three decades later: the first was played between Australia and New Zealand on 17 February 2005, and the inaugural ICC World Twenty20 followed in 2007.

Cricket in America today

The country that hosted the very first international match spent most of the 20th century on the margins of the sport it helped launch, regarded at home as a poor cousin of baseball. That has changed sharply since 2023, when Major League Cricket, a professional Twenty20 competition backed by American Cricket Enterprises, launched with city-based franchises across the United States. In 2024, the United States co-hosted the ICC Men's T20 World Cup with the West Indies — the first major ICC tournament to stage matches on American soil — fielding its own team at a global tournament for the first time.

For the ICC's own history and current membership, see ICC and the World Cricket; for a full timeline of cricket's landmark dates, see Important Dates in the history of cricket.