I've routinely lit cheap ematches with a single cell AA during ground tests without issue over 30ft of cable, I have a hard time believing that a 9.0V+ battery would fail to ignite... Then again, odd failure mode.
Then again, cheap batteries could still be an issue. Alkaline battery chemistry can be a strange thing. Batteries that are old can hold bizarre characteristics during discharge, even when the voltage seems okay. Batteries tend to drop voltage fast and then brown out. Even a AA reading 1.3V would seem usable, but if it has already discharged once or is old, can brown out within 30 seconds under use.
Basically, alkaline batteries lie to you with their voltage, it's not a good representation of how much charge is left.
When viewing discharge graphs for alkaline batteries it looks like it should be a good representation of total charge, but you need to consider that once the battery is no longer under load, that the chemistry will rebalance and the voltage will rise, often back to near initial voltages, but the total capacity is now lower. Upon re-use the voltage drops faster to the plateau point. The old batteries will have a lower capacity from being old fuddly batteries, and when a volt meter is attached appear usable, but the total capacity is not really known.
I would suggest for a cheap lot of batteries to complete a discharge test with an electric load that can discharge the battery at a certain current and you could log the voltage and used current over time to verify before flight, or stick to some lipo chemistry or reputable sourced alkaline.
The EEVblog had an interesting video along these lines. He's Australian and kind of difficult to listen to (his voice is rather annoying) but his YouTube channel is pretty awesome.
[video=youtube;8Ur9gM4DRdA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ur9gM4DRdA[/video]
But again, your batteries might be fine, and the failure still likely to be an ematch issue, but it's weird, and I've never had that failure with over three orders of 100 piece matches