It won’t surprise too many people here that it’s between the US and Canada.
I wonder how many people will be able to guess the sport. Please write your answers before peeking.
It’s cricket which was the most popular sport in the US before the Civil War. In fact it continued to be a major sport in Philadelphia till the early 20th century. The Wiki article discusses the history of US cricket and here is an articleabout the first US-Canada game. I find the story of US cricket: its decline and almost complete disappearance rather fascinating.
I’m not sure this ‘rivalry’ really counts. The last paragraph of the ESPN article says “The USA-Canada contest continued intermittently. They last met in 2004 in the ICC Intercontinental Cup in Florida, the only occasion that the two have faced off in a first-class match.”
I’m not sure that two teams playing each other ‘intermittently’, and in a sport which barely registers as a ‘sport’ in one of the countries concerned, really constitutes an ‘international rivalry’.
This coming from an American who quite enjoys cricket, for what it’s worth.
Well it’s not the oldest continuous rivalry or the oldest major rivalry between nations but I don’t think oldest international rivalry is inaccurate. By the standards of the mid-19th century, it was a genuine sporting rivalry and cricket was a major sport in North America at the time. Today it’s a very minor rivalry but it still exists.
Note to OP: Your spoiler text appears on mouseover. I think you can prevent that by adding blank “spoiler space” for several lines prior to posting the spoiler-tagged stuff.