Cricket Australia need to get it right for the next summer

With quite a bit of fanfare, Cricket Australia (CA) have announced the international schedule for the 2021-22 summer.

As a member of the Australian Cricket Family, I even received an email message announcing “an epic summer of cricket ahead”.

The Test season opens with a Test against Afghanistan (finally) in Tasmania on the 27th of November. This is followed by the Ashes series with a different format than previous years.

There will still be the usual five Tests, but Perth, which used to open the Test summer, will now close it with the fifth Test starting on the 14th of January, followed by ODI internationals against the Black Caps at the end of January and a five-game T20 series against Sri Lanka in February.

In the broader view, this seems to be both a full and exciting schedule, but as always, the devil’s in the details.

The T20 World Cup will dominate the first part of the Australian summer and how Cricket Australia manages this will be critical to the success the Test team will or won’t have.

As it stands, the World Cup schedule for Australia will start on the 24th of October and assuming the team makes the semi-finals, will still be going until at least the 11th of November.

If the Aussies make the final which is scheduled for the 15th of November, the earliest they’d be able to fly back to Australia would be the 16th. If they have to serve a 14-day quarantine, which would be the case (right now) because this tournament is to be played in India, none of the T20 squad would be available for the Test against Afghanistan.

I’m guessing this would rule out Dave Warner, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood from the Test side, as well as Jhye Richardson, Matthew Wade and Moises Henriques from the possible replacements.

(Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

As was pointed out to me the other day, Australian selectors don’t give away baggy green caps and in this instance, there are still plenty of quality players for the Hobart Test who have done enough to earn a debut.

These are the players I’d choose to make up a 14 man squad:

Marcus Harris, Will Puckovski, Marnus Labuschagne, Travis Head, Cameron Green, Sean Abbott, Tim Paine, James Pattinson, Michael Neser, Nathan Lyon, Jackson Bird, Mitchell Swepson, Josh Inglis and Scott Boland.

The focus of the summer is obviously the Ashes and as it stands, our Tests side will be going in the Brisbane Test with a serious lack of red-ball cricket, unless Cricket Australia manages the Sheffield Shield season effectively.

We have to remember England will be playing Tests against the top two teams in world cricket this year, with the last game finishing in mid-September. This will be a squad ready to play an Ashes series versus an Australian team that would have played only one Test against an improving opponent in the past year or so.

Greg Chappell recently made the very good point that there was no reason why the first Shield games could not start as early as August or early September and have a complete ten-round season finished by the time the Big Bash League (BBL) started.

If this was scheduled well, Test players returning from the World Cup would still be able to get in at least one Shield game before the First Test. It would also give the rest of the Test hopefuls plenty of opportunities to find form with bat or ball.

As an aside, if the Shield minor rounds were completed before Christmas, the final could be played in the week prior to the ODI series against the Black Caps in January.

The Ashes series timing is a reasonable compromise, given the end date of the World Cup and CA’s desire for fan focus to be on the BBL throughout January. I also think the ODI series against the Black Caps will be welcome, given how much focus there will be on other forms of the game.

What I don’t understand is why Australia is playing a five-game T20 series against Sri Lanka in February.

The World Cup finishes in mid-November, so I don’t see the point of playing more T20 games only three months later, especially after the many BBL games on the school holidays. Fair enough, Cricket Australia wants to hold our attention after January, but is this the right way to do it?

I’m also wondering how this fits in with the current future tours programme, which has Australia playing ODIs and T20s against South Africa in Australia at the same time. It’s safe to assume that tour will not be going ahead, but if Sri Lanka is a substitute, why not play games other than T20s?

Overall, the upcoming Australian cricket summer has so the potential to be “an epic summer of cricket”, but the season needs to be managed well, especially the domestic schedule.

It’s fair enough to focus on the international games, but if Cricket Australia does not plan and execute a strong domestic schedule, an underdone Australian Test team could be watching a beaming Joe Root holding a small urn aloft at the end of the Boxing Day Test.