This has long been on the way, and here it is. Test season, the centrepiece of Australia’s summer, will next time around consist of four matches played over four weekends, not starting until the second week of December and done a week into January. Cricket Australia will instead claim to have expanded the schedule to seven Tests, but their tropical excursion against Bangladesh is in August, and the pink-ball sideshow masquerading as the 150th anniversary Test will have half its overs in March darkness. Both are distant islands to the summer mainland. Unlike most cricket countries, Tests are still Australia’s most substantial earner and site of interest. Yet in a world of sports trying to claim more of the calendar, Australian administrators are in voluntary retreat.
Even as recent decades have squeezed the format into shorter series, while tour matches are euthanised and preparation is eroded as an outdated luxury, there still has to be time within a series itself. Two matches could run back to back, maybe three, but any longer and there has to be space built into the tour, gaps of a week or 10 days to offset the physical demand. Those pauses also gave the audience time for breath; they let players rest and storylines compound. Much of the rhythm of cricket is in waiting.
That said, Test cricket every week of a holiday month will have its appeal to the average spectator. More is more. Various parties have spent some years arguing for universal four-day Test cricket on this basis: that shortening the span could see Tests run routinely from Thursday to Sunday in consecutive weeks, using a predictable schedule to draw viewers. But this proposal also envisaged using the technique in shorter bursts: adding a third match to two-Test affairs, or adding a second two-Test series rather than one series of three.
Any longer than that, and the problem with a crammed schedule isn’t that punters won’t like it, but that players can’t do it. If each match goes the distance when Australia host New Zealand at the end of this year, there will be players on the field for 20 days out of 31, plus four travel days and Christmas on the road. Inevitably, especially for bowlers, they will have to rotate out of the team. Not all 11 players can or will, though. Injury risk will increase, as will mental burnout. Even for batters, how much time can one spend in the field before it undermines performance?
Given the work players do to be fit and ready, and the importance to them of every Test appearance, this is indefensible. Take Mitchell Starc, passing up umpteen IPL seasons and the riches therein to keep his body right. The message to him and every other player is that their ambition is secondary at best, by administrators setting a schedule that is physically impossible for the players to complete.
So far, this schedule is an anomaly, and Cricket Australia will claim force majeure via specific circumstances, in that New Zealand host India right before the Australia series, while Australia tour India right afterwards. Clearing the India tour before the 150th Test will be cited too. Really, though, it’s about the still-expanding Indian Premier League starting in March, and Test series against India becoming so lucrative that they have grown to five fixtures. Accommodating both means starting Tests in January – and be assured that this Border-Gavaskar series will have its longer breaks built in, with plans at this stage for two of them, not compromising the fitness of players or the quality of play.
No board here is a victim of circumstance. This is a squeeze that CA have been complicit in creating, and more of the same is on the way. This week the state associations and the federal body will hold a bumper two-day meeting to discuss selling tranches of the Big Bash League to foreign investors, with IPL conglomerates the most likely bidders. For months the messaging and positioning from the governing body has made a pretence of neutrality while positioning itself to encourage the sale. The promise of vast sums will likely suck in any stragglers.
Bear in mind that Cricket Australia remains a tax-exempt body set up to serve the public good, not a business tasked with seeking profit. Do any of those people believe that capitalist conglomerates will care about the development of future Australian players, or will accept Test duties keeping stars out of the league, or Test matches taking the prime Christmas holiday airtime while the Big Bash comes second? Cramming four Tests into four weeks unavoidably compromises the quality of the sport. But if cricket heads are turned by the promise of bags of cash, it will be the first in a very long list of compromises, ones that will leave Australian summers unrecognisable, and likely make Australian Test season a contradiction in terms.
