Whitewash (sport)
From The UCSC Wikipedia Trust Project
:This article is about 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.
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 is said to keep a clean sheet, while in baseball the winner pitches a shutout.
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.
For a full list of Test whitewashes, see Cricinfo - Test Series Whitewashes.
