Talk is cheap!
Root warns mouthy Aussies of England comeback in Adelaide
So far, then, so predictable. England’s first month Down Under has brought little surprise: three low-key warm-up games which went well enough, and then a Test in Brisbane which emphatically did not.
The two are inherently linked. Substandard opposition in warm-up games means that, even when tourists play three warm-up games – something now unheard of outside Ashes tours – they can still appear woefully short of preparation come the first Test, giving the home team a huge advantage.
This matters – not just for England in this Ashes series, but for Test cricket more broadly. As Gideon Haigh wrote recently, every Test series has become a referendum on the game’s future – a test not just of the players, but Test cricket’s very popularity and relevance.
Talk to broadcasters about sport, and they emphasise how much viewers value unpredictability: essentially, turning on the match and not knowing who is going to win.
Here, Test cricket suffers badly compared to the other two formats of the sport. When two broadly evenly matched teams meet in Twenty20 or ODI cricket then, home advantage counts for little. But in modern Test cricket, as tours have got shorter, warmup matches have got fewer and there have become fewer opportunities for out-of-form tourists to regain form – or squad members outside the starting eleven to push their case for elevation mid-series – so home advantage has become increasingly salient. And so, when two similarly matched teams meet, the results are increasingly one-sided: whoever is at home wins, and often by a thumping amount.
The upshot is to make tight, competitive tussles scarcer, and Test cricket less interesting. That means fewer people watching, relative to the other formats. This, in turn, means less cash in Test cricket to pay the best players – thereby encouraging cricket’s stars, especially from outside the Big Three, to quit Tests prematurely, damaging the format’s quality and putting more people off.
Of course, tour matches that seldom rise above the pointless are far from the only things to blame for this distressing cycle. But, because inadequate preparation makes one-sided matches so much more likely, it is a huge threat to Test cricket.
All of which brings us to England coach Trevor Bayliss’s suggestion in recent days: that the England and Australia boards should work together to ensure that tourists for Test series have proper preparation. Once, Australia’s game with Yorkshire was unofficially known as the sixth Test of a summer. Now, when Australia play English first-class counties, the matches are mostly games against Division Two counties resting their entire first-choice bowling attack, in fear their stars might be injured – and miss more lucrative matches in the county summer.
Every England warm-up game Down Under used to be an exercise in humiliating the Poms. States, or even patched together sides, would pick the strongest possible team, their aim to unleash hostile pace bowling on England, breaking England’s spirits and – for good measure – often a few fingers, too.
On the current tour, England’s preparations for the Gabba consisted of two games against a Cricket Australia XI, and one against a Western Australia XI, each as tame as it sounds. Even the pitches, once designed to provide England’s batsmen with scares and scars in warm-ups, have been neutered. Rather than pummel England with quick bowling, Australia have essentially preferred to deprive England of any pace bowling at all. Warm-up matches have gone from being treasured idiosyncrasies of the cricket calendar to irrelevant borathons. Often, they don’t even fulfill the most fundamental criteria of a professional cricket game: being contested by two sides of eleven players apiece.
What are the solutions to this mess? Building on Bayliss’s comments, the Australian and English boards could sign a reciprocal arrangement, committing to arranging one warm-up game a tour for a winner-takes-all prize of, say, £150,000 – hardly the notorious Stanford 2020 for 20 million, but enough of an incentive to ensure a competitive team was fielded to give the tourists some proper practice, rendering them battle-hardened before the first Test.
But perhaps the best solution of all is to use other countries, who are hungry, ready and willing for their chance. When the British Lions next go on tour, in 2021, they are expected to play a Test against Argentina – but in South Africa, where they are touring.
The same principles could easily apply to cricket. Now that Afghanistan and Ireland have been awarded Test status, there is an opportunity for tourists of more established Test nations to play one-off matches against the new arrivals – simultaneously brilliant experience for Afghanistan and Ireland and infinitely preferable for the tourists to playing games against scratch teams.
So if England really want more arduous preparation for their next Ashes trip, perhaps they should offer to fly Afghanistan over for a Test at Perth.