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Australia are about to tour England. This is why it’s bad for cricket
Cricket’s international calendar will be placed under renewed scrutiny when Australia tour Scotland and England next month for a series of matches with no meaning or context whatsoever.
The Australian selectors will this week unveil the squad, set to be a strong line-up that retains the core of last year’s World Cup-winning team minus the retired David Warner. His place is most likely to be taken by Jake Fraser-McGurk.
Jake Fraser-McGurk has made an eye-catching start to his international career.Credit: Getty
But much of the players’ private enthusiasm for the tour revolves around its proximity to some of Scotland and England’s best golf courses rather than any wider sense of importance, as is the case with Test series to compete for the Ashes urn.
At the recent Cricket Connects conference hosted at Lord’s by the MCC, Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird and ECB counterpart Richard Thompson were part of a discussion about the need to reduce the number of meaningless matches.
“The key discussion point was the need to take meaningless content out of the schedule,” Baird said. “So content which is not attracting interest in terms of attendance at stadiums, viewership, without any sort of context for qualification [for world cups], those games need to be seriously considered.
“So I think it starts with making some hard decisions, looking at the content we have. If we can’t get to a position where that content has context and/or jeopardy, then we probably need to scale back some of those matches. That’s a decision that all countries have to look at and decide.”
The matches against Scotland were agreed after Ireland cancelled their own series against the Australians because they could not afford to put the matches on.
“The fact is, broadcast rights wise, Australia would probably be the fourth-largest of all the various [opponents] that we would have,” Ireland Cricket chief executive Warren Deutrom told The Final Word podcast in April. “It wouldn’t even have covered the cost of production, opening up Malahide and bearing in mind it’s an entirely green-field site. Those, unfortunately, are the difficult decisions we have to make.”
The Scotland series also serves as a make-up for the cancellation of a one-off game in 2020 during the previous Australian white-ball tour of England, which took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the series against England – now expanded to three Twenty20 internationals and five 50-over games – will have no meaning other than as a sort of warm-up for next year’s Champions Trophy tournament and as a booster for the ECB’s broadcast rights fees.
The previous such tour, by England in Australia immediately after the 2022 T20 World Cup, drew pointed criticism from visiting players after they won the global event, only to have to stay on and play more games. Australia’s players were put in a similar position after winning the ODI World Cup in India last year.
“The landscape of cricket has changed dramatically over the last few years, and we’re in a different time,” England’s white-ball captain, Jos Buttler, said at the time. “Lots of people are talking about how you keep bilateral cricket relevant and I think this series is a good example of how probably not to do it.
“Any time England play Australia you want to put up good performances, but it’s just been hard. I’m not fussed at all about the results, to be honest.”
Between 2019 and 2023, all such 50-over series were given more meaning by their use as league qualification matches for the World Cup. All series were capped at three matches apiece.
But that approach has since been scrapped so that competing countries are free to schedule as many bilateral games as they like – meaning more money out of the broadcasters and more games to share among venues in each country.
Former England captain Joe Root has suggested that the 2021-22 Ashes series should not have gone ahead because of the biosecurity restrictions that were in place in Australia at the time, but in reality the ECB was compelled to carry out the tour to repay Australia for its (admittedly shorter) 2020 visit.
Australia toured England to play in front of empty stadiums for a COVID-19 tour in 2020.Credit: Getty Images
“Thinking of COVID, it was about keeping the lights on last time we went,” Root said. “Arguably we shouldn’t have gone last time … We did what we thought was the right thing at the time.
“We’ll be in a completely different place going into next time. You can plan and you can have all the best intentions of getting a result, but it still has to fall into place.”
Since 2020, CA and the ECB have been extremely focused on “keeping the lights on”, and that attitude remains evident in the two boards’ scheduling decisions. But cricket is changing shape around them – in time, tours like this may contribute to power failure across the grid.
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