Stable Fixturing Might Help Fuel Cricket’s Popularity In Australia Beyond Peak Summer

The Australian cricket season, which runs essentially from October-March but peaks in the country’s summer and school holiday period, has been a mishmash for a long time.

Apart from the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground’s Boxing Day Test match – starting on December 26 – and the Sydney Cricket Ground’s New Year’s Test, the rest of the calendar changes wildly every season causing widespread confusion, particularly to many casual fans that the sport tends to breed.

It has become something of an annual pastime debating how the ideal Australian cricket season should look like with administrators still seemingly searching for answers. Even the aforementioned SCG Test is not considered sacred with inclement weather badly affecting six of the last seven matches.

“We think there is great weight in historical matches because it drives that continued attendance and that continued support, but we haven’t locked in any venue for future years,” Cricket Australia head of operations Peter Roach said.

The debate reared with Australia’s 2023-24 home international fixtures confirmed and there were several changes. Brisbane, traditionally the first Test match of the season, has been for the second straight year usurped by Perth with the Gabba to host a day-night Test between Australia and West Indies in late January.

The pristine Adelaide Oval, which has reinvented its Test match as a pink ball contest in December, will host West Indies in mid-January before reverting back to its preferred time slot in the 2024-25 season.

The mid-December fixture is highly coveted – the most sought after other than Boxing Day and New Year’s which still seems locked in for the time being to Australia’s biggest cities – signalling the start of the school holidays, warmer weather and when cricket starts taking centre stage.

But Perth, the isolated capital of Western Australia, also wants the mid-December Test match. “We strongly believe that having the Test match before Christmas is ideal for us,” WA Cricket chief Christina Matthews told me recently. “Given the route (to Perth) from England and other places…and then off to the east coast for Boxing Day and New Year (Tests), it’s practical.

“Then people will have an understanding that ‘okay, this is when your Test is on…somewhere in December before Boxing Day’.”

Matthews’ wish was granted with the 60,000-seat Optus Stadium to host Australia and Pakistan in the first Test match between the teams in Perth since 2004. But Perth’s future beyond next season remains uncertain in what is a continuation of this haphazard fixturing.

Complicating matters is shoehorning the Big Bash League – Australia’s T20 franchise league – into an already tight calendar. Last summer, the BBL enjoyed a rejuvenation after Australia’s top players were able to play during a late season stretch due to no international commitments.

It led to wider public interest and a stronger competition. In other words, a clear window for the BBL after the SCG Test seems ideal, but is not possible next season due to a clash with West Indies’ Test tour in January.

While other countries, namely the lucrative Indian Premier League which essentially hogs the months of April and May, have exclusive windows for their money-spinning competitions, Australia still holds the wheezing Test format on a pedestal.

For the time being, whether laudable or simply delaying the inevitable, Test cricket seemingly has precedence over the BBL. Thus the BBL will be trimmed by 16 games in 2024-25 – ironic given its revival late last summer and with T20 franchise leagues sprouting worldwide sparking fears for the future of Test cricket.

Unlike in the U.K., where cricket rarely enjoys prominence, the sport is in good shape in Australia as underlined by its recent billion dollar media rights deal. But this summer pastime feels like it really only truly cuts through in December and January as the football codes of Australian rules and rugby league increasingly creep into cricket’s turf.

One feels a stability in fixturing might just help extend cricket’s popularity beyond the peak summer period.