When cricketing worlds collide
Two cricketing worlds collide next week. On Friday, Australia and India meet in Perth in the opening Test of what promises to be an epic encounter – the first five-match series between the two great rivals since 1991-92. Five-match Test series used to be the norm, but with the exception of England v Australia they have become rare as one-day cricket (and in particular Twenty20) has eroded the time available for the longest form of the game, forcing series to be shortened to three or even two matches. What used to be a novel lasting all summer has become a novella, over in a trice. But in this Australian summer, something like tradition again rules. Five Tests spread over a month and a half, with the Christmas and New Year Tests in Melbourne and Sydney in their time-honoured place.
The new cricketing world is, however, reluctant to let the traditionalists have it all their own way. Two days after the start of the Perth Test, in Jeddah – Saudi Arabia imposes itself on all global sporting events these days – the Indian Premier League “mega-auction” will take place, a triennial event in which the 10 IPL franchises buy up their squads for the annual Twenty20 tournaments. More than 1,500 players have offered themselves for 204 slots across the 10 Indian state- or city-based teams. Forty-six players were retained by their existing franchises, so 250 players in all will be involved in the next two-month IPL tournament in spring 2025. Each player sets his auction base price, and the sums are eye-watering. Even 42-year-old Jimmy Anderson, who recently retired from Test cricket, has put himself on the slab for £115,000 a snip compared with the £2m-plus that proven Twenty20 match-winners command. It is sport meets high finance and a vision of the future: a stark and dystopian one if the traditional Test action in Perth is more to your liking, though IPL aficionados seem to find the auction process as compelling as the games themselves.
Soon, fully fledged franchise cricket on the IPL model will come to the UK. The eight teams involved in the Hundred, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s even shorter-form answer to the IPL, are in the process of being sold, with Indian franchise owners eager for a piece of the action. When that process is complete, there will be two rival structures in the English game: traditional counties trying to keep alive the long-form (at present, in the county championship, four-day) cricket beloved of purists and newly revamped franchises devoted to the whizzbang version of the game, awash with money and unashamedly offering mass entertainment.
The ECB argues that the cash generated from the sale of equity in the Hundred to mega-corporations will boost cricket at all levels and help reverse a perceived decline in recreational cricket. But will the patient survive the cure? It is far from clear that the counties and the franchises can co-exist, and entirely plausible that a competitive structure which dates back to the late 19th century will be marginalised or even destroyed. Long-form cricket will increasingly have to fight for the right to exist, perhaps becoming a partly amateur (and certainly second-tier) pursuit while handsomely remunerated pros play the big-money short-form game for interlinked franchises around the world. Test cricket is already under threat in some major cricket-playing countries, and it barely features in the women’s game. So make sure you savour the traditional Test opener in Perth next weekend. If, that is, you can divert your eyes from the high rollers in Jeddah.
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