Even the prime minister has an opinion. He thinks England should pick Moeen Ali, or “that 18-year-old who played that one Test” against Pakistan in the winter, Rehan Ahmed. This time last week they projected pictures of England’s two captains, Ben Stokes and Heather Knight, on to Tower Bridge, 65m high. Bandit is teaching Bluey the meaning of cricket. The Met Office has forecast a heatwave. They’ve had a million requests for tickets to the fifth Test at the Oval. Glenn McGrath is, of course, predicting it will be 5-0 to Australia. And the talk, everywhere, is about 2005, and that series. Stuart Broad has already mentioned it. So has Ben Stokes. And Ollie Pope.
If you look with the right kind of eyes, you can see, underneath all the excitement, a certain anxious yearning for this to work. Everyone who cares about this format of the sport wants this series to be a spectacular, and for 2023 to become one of those runaway summers when the public is captivated by the Ashes. The truth is Test cricket needs it. Because the big picture, beyond all the questions about which bowlers England will pick and whether David Warner can still cut it, isn’t pretty to look at. People have been worrying about the state of cricket almost as long as they have been playing it, but just because you’re paranoid and all that. The game really is changing, and the only reason to disagree is that you haven’t been paying attention.
International cricket is scheduled in four-year blocks. The next one, between 2023 and 2027, includes 173 Test matches, which is actually 21 more than were played in the previous window, between 2019 and 2023. Look a little closer though, and you’ll see that the large part of the increase is because Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland (the latter two are new playing nations) have all scheduled so many more games. Five of the nine older teams have cut back on the amount of Test cricket they’ve arranged, and some, like South Africa, are committed to the bare minimum they can get away with. Outside of England, Australia, and India, almost no one is playing three, four, or five Test series any more.
And fans in those three countries are going to get awfully familiar with each other. England play 43 games in these four years, and almost half of them are against Australia and India.
In the four-year stretch ahead, the teams have an average of 14 Tests each scheduled. In the equivalent years of the 2010s the number was 17, in the 2000s it was 19, and in the 1990s it was 16. From here on out, there are only going to be fewer Tests, divided into shorter series, between players who have less exposure to, and experience of, and expertise in the format. Which means there will be fewer competitive teams, which will lead to waning interest in the game in some of the countries who have been playing it longest, like South Africa, West Indies, and New Zealand.
The space opened up in the overflowing schedule will be filled with, yes, you guessed, more T20 cricket. It is, after all, where most of the money is made. Recent estimates suggest that the Board of Control for Cricket in India make as much from a single game of T20 as they do from all five days of a Test. Most of it, though, will be between franchise teams. Most of the leagues now have dedicated windows in the schedule; the Ashes, remember, has been squeezed into seven weeks of early summer to make sure that August is entirely free for the Hundred.
There is already talk that the IPL teams are looking to sign players up to year-round contracts. Soon enough it won’t be franchise competitions that are boxed off in particular bits of the calendar, but international cricket, and it won’t be the franchise side who require permission to select the best players, but the national teams.
Everything England are doing under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum has to be understood as an attempt to fix this, something the administrators have singularly failed to do. When Stokes talks about trying to save Test cricket, he wants to make it more entertaining to watch, so it brings in an audience more used to T20, and more enjoyable to play, so it appeals to a generation of cricketers who have easier, and more lucrative, career paths available to them. His England have cut down on the amount of training required, and he encourages his team to play the very same sort of way they usually do, which is going to make it much easier to hop between the formats.
Cricket is full of people who talk about how great the Test game is, but too few who actually act like it. If the version of it Stokes and McCullum have cooked up is a little different to what you’re used to, if, in fact, you’re going to rail about how reckless their batting is when they have an inevitable collapse, or wail about the sorry state of modern batting techniques when they fall in a heap, or grumble that Australia wouldn’t have won that match if Stokes had only batted on a little longer before declaration, you need to remember there’s an existential question hanging over these Ashes. What matters isn’t just whether or not England can win, but how many people they can persuade to tune in and watch them.
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