Ashes crammed into just 46 days!

All over before August as ECB put the Hundred first

ThE Ashes, still the biggest series in cricket, will be crammed into just 46 days next season and will be over by the start of August as the ECB continue to prioritise the hundred.

But the biggest winners in a schedule confirmed yesterday are England’s women’s team, who will share the Ashes spotlight like never before.

England begin their international season at the start of June with a four- day Test against Ireland at Lord’s.

But it will be the Ashes and the mouthwatering prospect of Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum taking on Australia at full blast that, as ever, will dominate cricket’s landscape.

Yet it will be an endurance test for the players — particularly Jimmy Anderson, who turns 41 on the penultimate day of the series, with the first Ashes Test beginning at Edgbaston on June 16 and the fifth ending at the Oval on July 31.

That means, for the first time in 139 years, the blue riband event of the calendar will not feature in the prime summer month of August. Instead, the hundred will again get a largely clear run and is set in stone for the key school holiday month for the next five years.

It has been suggested that Australia’s fixture list has played a part in the extraordinary piece of scheduling which threatens to compromise the quality of the Ashes, as the matches will be so congested.

But the Aussies are not due to play again until they go to South Africa for a white-ball tour at the very end of August next year, so that cannot be

blamed for the unsatisfactory schedule. There is no such negativity for the women’s Ashes which, rightly, shares top billing after the huge strides made in the most positive consequence of the ECB’s controversial decision to invent a new format.

The success of the women’s hundred and the return of women’s cricket to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this summer has encouraged the ECB to stage a five- day women’s Test to launch the Ashes at the prime venue of Trent Bridge.

Then the multi-format women’s Ashes will continue to run pretty much concurrently with the men’s series rather than being an afterthought, with all their white- ball matches played at the larger, more established venues they have so often been denied.

‘I’m so happy, I feel like I’ve been banging the drum for five-day Tests for a long time so it’s a special moment,’ said England captain heather Knight, who has seen the last six women’s Tests staged worldwide over the last five years all end in four- day draws.

The final of the men’s World Test Championship — highly unlikely to feature England — will take place at the Oval before the Ashes, while England finish their summer with two late - season white-ball series against New Zealand and Ireland.