Tag Cricket Records

No world cups and almost none triseries (except a few between England, Australia & South Africa centuries ago), test matches have been a neglected format of International cricket. No day-night fixtures to make spectators fill stadiums or watch on television eating dinner and no, we haven't had any rules to make the game more result oriented (one third of tests still end as draw, few interestingly but mostly dull).

That said, test match is undeniably the toughest of 3 formats of cricket and purists (like me) hope senario will change in days to come and historic game will contiue on.

Talking historic, test matches began way back in 1877 when English played Aussies for fun and South Africans joined in, followed by West Indies, New Zealand, India, Pakistan and then Sri Lanka. Bangladesh were given test status only in year 2000 while Zimbabwe were demoted after failing to compile a recognisable test team since early y2k.

Australia has been the best test team ever, winning nearly half of test matches they play when loss and draw are two other possibilities. England and West Indies once had a superb test team but have lost their way in last two decades while Pakistan and Sri Lanka are only now beginging to challenge consistently. India too have had their moments of test glory but their win percentage is still less than 25% and loss 10 units higher.

10 teams mentioned above are known but one fact that many may have missed, is that World XI is another team that played one test match, back in 2005, against Australia, and lost pathetically (by 210 runs). ICC dropped the idea of world's best against a team of rest after that.

Following list explains the rate of success, faliure & draws all team's have had in test match, upto July 2010 when 2000th test match was played.

All country win-loss summary in test matches
Country	Debut	Tests	Won	Lost	Tied	Draw	Win %	Draw %	Loss %
England	1877	912	323	261	0	328	35.41	35.96	28.61
Australia	1877	730	341	192	2	195	46.71	26.71	26.30
West Indies	1928	473	153	156	1	163	32.34	34.46	32.98
India	1932	452	110	140	1	201	24.33	44.46	30.97
New Zealand	1930	364	68	147	0	149	18.68	40.93	40.38
South Africa	1889	358	125	124	0	109	34.91	30.44	34.63
Pakistan	1952	358	108	100	0	150	30.16	41.89	27.93
Sri Lanka	1982	201	61	71	0	69	30.34	34.32	35.32
Zimbabwe	1992	83	8	49	0	26	9.63	59.03	31.32
Bangladesh	2000	68	3	59	0	6	4.41	8.82	86.76
List is sorted by number of test played by each team, updated upto July 2011