Wellington: Over the past decade or more, Australian cricket’s leaders have bet most of their figurative chips on the health of Test matches.
As far as marketing and promotion goes, the five-day game has been at the top of the tree since 1993. That’s when the then Australian Cricket Board escaped a one-sided broadcast deal with Kerry Packer and went on to make a largely successful commitment to fill grounds and build TV audiences for Tests.
Test cricket is the only form of the game that truly captures the attention of the nation.Credit: Getty Images
In 2011, the Argus team performance review focused the national system very much upon identifying Test cricket as the game’s pinnacle. Non-World Cup white-ball series were more or less relegated to research and development.
That change was followed in 2018 by the decision to sell broadcast rights to Seven and Foxtel for $1.2 billion. Those same white-ball games were pushed behind a paywall and big audiences directed towards Tests and the Big Bash League.
On one level, these decisions have reaped Cricket Australia and the states a succession of big broadcast rights windfalls, helmed primarily by its departing head of broadcast and commercial, Stephanie Beltrame. That ground was hung onto in the wake of COVID-19 by a consolidating, $1.5 billion deal with Seven and Fox last year.
They have also helped the men’s team rise to the top of the international standings with some panache. Pat Cummins’ team holds the World Championship and bilateral trophies against every opponent other than India, who are due to tour next summer.
But they mean that Test cricket’s global health has never been more important to Australian cricket than it is in 2024.
This has been underlined by contrasting crowds for bilateral white-ball games either side of the Tasman in recent weeks. A paltry 16,342 spectators turned up to the MCG for an ODI against the West Indies earlier this month, following on from a mere 10,406 filing in to see another 50-over game against England in November 2022.
In New Zealand, a tiny country by comparison, spectators have queued up in relatively vast numbers to see the national white-ball side in Twenty20 games against Australia. Nearly 20,000 turned out in Wellington (total population 422,000), before almost 30,000 rolled into Eden Park in Auckland (population1.5 million). All international cricket in New Zealand is broadcast free-to-air and to stream.
Should teams such as New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka or the West Indies cease to exist as Test match competitors, Cricket Australia will start to face huge holes in the heart of summer. India and England cannot tour every year, much as Cricket Australia and broadcasters would like them to.
Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins with Mike Baird.Credit: Getty
This masthead’s publication of details from an International Cricket Council briefing document brought pushback from Cricket Australia. Chair Mike Baird argued the report’s findings had not been “left on the shelf”, and would be looked at a strategic growth committee to be led by the England Cricket Board’s chair Richard Thompson.
There is consensus among representatives from other nations that if things are to change, the game’s richest nations will have to take the lead in doing so.
Baird, meanwhile, has joined the ICC’s influential finance and commercial affairs committee. That roundtable is led by India’s cricket supremo Jay Shah, with discussions ongoing ahead of the next round of ICC meetings in Dubai in March.
It will be primarily up to Baird to convince the BCCI that some more collective decisions, such as the use of broadcast rights pooling, will be the best way to ensure Tests are played by more than four or five countries beyond the end of the current schedule in 2027.
In the words of the West Indies chief executive Johnny Grave, the game’s boards need to start thinking like competitors in a league, rather than entirely independent entities.
“It’s really whether the world game can think like a league, and that for me is the biggest hurdle,” he told this masthead. “Self-interest still rules. It’d be like the Premier League trying to sell Sheffield United or Luton Town home games to Sky Sports individually, versus what they get by selling all the Premier League games broadcast rights collectively and then sharing the revenue.”
For Australian cricket, that outcome is arguably more imperative than for any other country. Test cricket is the only form of the game that truly captures the attention and imagination of the nation – the only form that can regularly fill the MCG.
After 30 years of building up the game within its borders, Cricket Australia must now take the lead on the international stage to ensure other nations also remain capable of nurturing Tests in their own backyards. Time is running out.
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