Wisden Cricket Monthly Australia correspondent @collinsadam
Australia haven’t won an Ashes series in England since Steve Waugh’s side won 4-1 in 2001
When padding up to write this column, consecutive tweets jumped out from my timeline. One was from the new South African T20 competition, the mini-IPL, expressing excitement about its opening day – hashtagging a betting shop, of course. The next was a piece from The Age newspaper in Australia quoting ICC chair Greg Barclay with his low-key concession that “not everybody is going to be able to play Test cricket” in the future.
The link here should be obvious to anyone who was paying attention through 2022, as IPL owners set about seizing pretty much any asset going – a pattern we can expect to continue, for instance, when the ECB eventually sells The Hundred to the highest bidder. These transactions put the form of the game that soaks up the most time in the calendar in the firing line and, with the exception of Australia and England, who make their millions from TV deals underpinned by Test cricket, act as a drag on the balance sheet of many Full Member nations.
It seems so incongruous that this latest existential threat is emerging at the very same time that Test cricket is giving us so much – not least from England. To think that sentence comes so naturally when, only a year ago, Joe Root’s desolate men were wandering the streets of Hobart after a three-day hiding to end the least competitive Ashes series of my lifetime.