Famous cricket documentaries before The Test

Amazon Prime Video’s The Test: A New Era, spanning Australian cricket’s resurgence following the 2018 Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, has been acclaimed by fans and critics alike. Here is a list of other cricket documentaries that have been appreciated in the past.

Trobriand Cricket (Jerry Leach, 1974)

Not many have heard of Trobriand Islands, an almost-forgotten archipelago near New Guinea. It took an anthropologist to find out (and narrate) the tale of the locals and innovations they brought to cricket.

Fire in Babylon (Stevan Riley, 2010)

Based on Clive Lloyd’s, and later, Viv Richards’, all-conquering West Indies’ side of the 1970s and the 1980s, Fire in Babylon won the British Independent Film Award for Best Documentary. The movie includes match footages and interviews of some of the stars of the era, allowing fans a trip down memory lane.

Out of the Ashes (Tim Albone, Lucy Martens, and Leslie Knott, 2010)

Few tales in cricket have been as spectacular as the rise of Afghanistan from a war-trodden nation to evolve into a team in the 2010 T20 World Cup. The documentary portrays the journey of cricketers from war camps to international cricket to the next level. Albone later wrote a book on the same subject with the same title.

From the Ashes (James Erskine, 2011)

The film narrates the tale of the famous 1981 Ashes, when England came back from behind to win the series. This was the series when Ian Botham, replaced midway as captain by Mike Brearley, provided one of the greatest series performances in the history of the sport.

Sachin: A Billion Dreams (James Erskine, 2017)

The second Erskine movie on the list, Sachin was promoted as a “docu-feature”, not a documentary per se. Nevertheless, the film consists of old footages and facts from Tendulkar’s career, not to speak of interviews from colleagues and the man himself.

The Edge (Barney Douglas, 2019)

The film portrays the rise of the England Test side to the No. 1 spot in ICC rankings for the first time in their history. Spanning from 2009 to 2013, it covers series win in Australia in 2010-11 (their first since 1986-87) and India in 2012-13 (their first since 1984-85).