Assuming all seven of the Test matches England are scheduled to play between June 2 and September 12 this year last a full five days, the national men’s team will play on 50 out of 102 days in all three formats. Even allowing for the chaos caused by Covid-19-related postponements, that is crazy.
“It is definitely something that needs looking at. It’s ridiculous the amount of cricket that people are expected to play. It really needs looking at from a workload point of view, it is just so much,” said England’s newly appointed Test captain, Ben Stokes.
SA will play on 21 of those days, of course, with three Tests from August 17 to September 12 and three T20 Internationals and three ODIs squashed into a 13-day period before that. England play New Zealand in a similar schedule before the Proteas arrive and then tackle India in a one-off Test to decide the series which wasn’t finished last summer because the Indians left early to play in the Indian Premier League (IPL).
During the New Zealand Test series white-ball captain Eoin Morgan will take a different England team to the Netherlands to play three ODIs as part of the World Cup Super League which serves as qualification for the 2023 World Cup. It’s not the first time an international team has played concurrently in different formats, and it isn’t a big deal for England because they have all but qualified already and, with respect, it is “only” the Netherlands.
But for Stokes, who still wants to play all three formats, it is frustrating: “Overlapping international tours pretty well sums the situation up,” he said.
Far from respite after SA’s departure, the fixture list remains just as daunting during the English winter with tours to New Zealand, Bangladesh, Pakistan and SA. The three-match ODI series against the Proteas, another Covid-19 postponement from 2020, is due to be played here “... towards the end of January”. The fixtures haven’t been confirmed yet.
SA’s end of year tour to Australia has been confirmed, however, though not announced. For the first time in 12 years the Proteas will be playing three Test matches over the holiday season with the first in Brisbane and the traditional Boxing Day Test in Melbourne and the New Year Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The final Test cannot start before January 2, which means the team will not arrive home until January 8. That is, if they can postpone the ODI series scheduled for after the Tests.
This leaves an extremely small window of opportunity for the country’s best cricketers to play in the yet-to-be-named new T20 League announced last week. If the new teams in the new league were owned by Cricket SA, which was the case with the Mzansi Super League, this would be an unfortunate situation requiring a painful compromise. But they will not be owned by Cricket SA. They will be privately owned.
In an already overcrowded market of domestic T20 leagues, it would require an unlikely leap of faith and an unprecedented display of cricketing philanthropy for a private enterprise to pay millions of dollars for a team in SA and to invest heavily at a player auction in the knowledge that some, perhaps many, of their best players might only be available for a week of the league’s inaugural season.
The situation is complicated further by the announcement that the Emirates Cricket Board will be launching its own league ... at the end of January. The owners of the Mumbai Indians and Kolkatta Knight Riders are already in. Their budgets will not be small.
SuperSport, which owns 30% of the new league, would be more understanding but it, like the team owners and Cricket SA, desperately needs this new league to work. Having the best players on the field is a prerequisite.
Do you see where this is going?
It’s one thing for England to play internationals simultaneously, but the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is not leaving the country’s best players out of the national team to play in The Hundred. Cricket SA might have to consider doing something like that. Send the best multiformat players back from Australia after the Boxing Day Test and fill their places with reserves.
Unthinkable? Isn’t that what just happened two months ago? Five players went to the IPL rather than play Test cricket against Bangladesh.
And what of those ODIs against England? And what if the three ODIs against can’t be rescheduled? The Proteas have World Cup qualification series against England at home and both Australia and India away. They probably need to win them all to be certain of being at the World Cup next year.
Or maybe they just play a second-string team and concentrate their resources on the new league and hope they’re good enough to emerge from the second qualifying tournament involving teams such as Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Zimbabwe and Namibia.
“Some extremely difficult decisions are going to have to be made and there will need to be compromises from all sides,” said a person familiar with the imminent tangle.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.