The overseas cricket tour is dying a long, slow death

The most noteworthy event to take place in Australian cricket this week attracted rather fewer column inches and barely a fraction of the Twitter likes, but in its own small way showed us with devastating clarity where the game is heading. For it was announced by Cricket Australia that the senior men’s side would not play a single warm-up against local opposition ahead of the 2019 Ashes series. Not the counties, not the Lions: instead, Australia will play its own ‘A’ side in a five-day game at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton. And though it seems like a minor detail, in its own small way it is the latest rebuke to the very concept of the overseas tour, a historic institution disintegrating year on year, press release by press release.

This has, after all, been coming for a while. This summer, India prepared for their five-Test series in England by playing a single warm-up game against Essex, which was cut from four days to three because of the heatwave. And the packed 2019 summer brings its own set of mitigating circumstances: the Cricket World Cup final, for example, finishes barely a fortnight before the start of the Ashes. Nor is it a specifically English issue: India’s sole warm-up game ahead of their forthcoming series in Australia—a series that may well define the legacy of Virat Kohli’s side—is against a Cricket Australia squad containing five players without first-class experience.

Nevertheless, there was plenty of time for Australia to squeeze in a couple of county fixtures—or even a Test match against Ireland, as England have done—if the will had been there. That it was not speaks volumes about the sadly diminished status of the tour game, on all sides. Truncated matches, pitifully weak hosts, 14-a-side games and a general sense of ennui have been commonplace for years. Crowds are generally non-existent. Home boards denying their opponents meaningful preparation has become a sort of dark art in its own right: Australia used to delight in making England play on a green seamer in Hobart in the run-up to the first Test at a sweltering Gabba.

It’s striking how far we’ve come in the space of a generation. As recently as 1989, the Australians arrived in early May and didn’t leave until early September, playing no fewer than 36 matches in venues as varied as West Bromwich, Trowbridge and Copenhagen. The standard of those games probably wasn’t significantly higher than it would be today. But back in those days, there was a shared recognition of the deeper, more residual value of a cricket tour: a sort of ambassadorial mission, a state visit, a travelling circus.

And every so often, the tourists would get a startling comeuppance. They still talk in Sion Mills about the time Ireland toppled the mighty West Indians in 1969, bowling them out for just 25. Alastair Cook’s stunning double-century for Essex in 2005 not only ruined

These days, however, with attention spans declining, with the calendar jammed, with players and staff and media more reluctant to spend months away from home, the tour game has become a sort of unwanted irritant: an impediment to the central objective of the tour, which is to get in, make your money, and get out again. The overseas escapade as we know it, with all its intrepid sense of adventure, discovery and new frontiers, is dying a long, slow death. This was, of course, inevitable to a large extent. As long ago as 1964, Wisden was writing of “the general wish today to shorten overseas tours”. And it is, after all, a smaller world these days: the proliferation of ‘A’ tours, performance programmes, even school tours, has dulled the mystique of the foreign excursion. Most importantly, however, tour games don’t really make anybody rich, which in the overheated avarice of the modern game essentially renders them cancerous: something to be zapped, eliminated, cut out with minimum fuss. It’s tempting to wonder, though, where all this will lead us. Already, Test tours are being pared to the bone. One- and two-Test series are becoming increasingly prevalent: following their recent series against England, Sri Lanka will not play another three-Test series for almost two years.

Perhaps this is simply another strand in the increasing devolution of the game, in the migration of interest and money away from the international game and towards domestic franchise leagues. Perhaps the idea of travelling to some distant country to play cricket for months on end was always rather quaint and Victorian. Either way, it’s hard not to feel that something vague and vital has been lost somewhere along the way here: a certain spirit, the impossibly romantic notion that a cricket tour was, in some important sense, about so much more than cricket. THE INDEPENDENT