Whitewash (sport)

This article is about the term when used in sports; for other uses see Whitewash (disambiguation)

A whitewash is an informal term in sport describing a game or series in which the losing person or team fails to score.

A whitewash may be in a single game where the loser fails to score any points or goals, or in a series where the loser fails to win a game. In the United States, the former is more usually called a shutout, while the latter is termed a sweep (or alternatively a 'clean sweep').

It is not typically used for low-scoring games such as football (soccer) or baseball, where a failure to score is not particularly rare; in football the winning team's goalkeeper is said to keep a clean sheet if they do not concede a goal, while in baseball the winner pitches a shutout.

[edit] Cricket

In cricket, the term is used when one team wins every single match in a particular series. A series which includes a drawn match is not termed a whitewash even if the losing team fails to win one match. Some notable whitewashes in Test cricket include the following:

• Australia's 5-0 defeat of England to win the 1921 Ashes series.
• Australia's 5-0 defeat of England to win the 2006-07 Ashes series.
• West Indies' consecutive 5-0 defeats of England in 1984 and 1985-86. These two results are also commonly labelled blackwashes because all of the West Indies players were black.
• New Zealand defeated Australia 3-0 in the Chappell-Hadlee Series in 2007, one of those victories a 10 wicket thrashing. Many Australian media also dubbed it a "blackwash", due to New Zealand's usage of black uniforms for most of its national sporting teams.

For a full list of Test whitewashes, see Cricinfo - Test Series Whitewashes.

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