Bangladesh

India settles most arguments before a ball is bowled — geography, partition history and three decades of close finishes have made it the fixture Bangladesh circles first, with Pakistan and Sri Lanka not far behind on the calendar. What separates Bangladesh from the neighbours it measures itself against is how late it arrived at the top table: full Test status came only on 26 June 2000, and the first Test itself was played at home against India that November.

The Bangladesh Cricket Board, formed on 26 November 1972 once independence had been won, spent years building toward that recognition. The side had already appeared at the 1979 ICC Trophy and taken its first One Day International steps against Pakistan at the 1986 Asia Cup, but Test cricket was the marker that changed how the rest of the game treated the team. It took five years from that first Test to register a maiden win, against Zimbabwe in 2005 — the kind of gap that shapes a cricketing culture more than the fixture itself.

Everyone still reaches for 2007 first. The World Cup quarter-final run, built on group-stage wins over India and England, is the result opponents remember Bangladesh by even now. Ten years later the Champions Trophy semi-final in 2017 did something similar against a different generation of players, and the habit of beating sides ranked well above them has carried into recent Test cricket, including a first win on Australian soil.

Mirpur is where most of that history was written. The Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium opened for cricket in 2006, hosted its first Test the following May against India, and holds 25,416 — a ground built almost in step with the team's arrival among the Test nations it now regularly troubles.