Australia will not play any warm-up matches ahead of this winter’s Test tour of England, with the squad again prioritising mental and physical freshness for the highly-anticipated World Test Championship final and Ashes series.
Partly due to Covid-19 restrictions and the sport’s crowded calendar, the Australian Test side has not played a warm-up tour match in nearly four years.
Pat Cummins’ men prepared for this year’s Border-Gavaskar Trophy in India with a training camp in Bengaluru, a decision former Test captain Michael Clarke branded “ridiculous”. Australia also didn’t play any warm-up matches before last year’s historic Test tour of Pakistan, which the visitors won 1-0.
“We value freshness at the back end of the tour,” Australian coach Andrew McDonald explained at the time.
“We’ve seen teams go there before and spend a lot of energy at the front end … hopefully it pays dividends at the back end, not expend too much energy early.”
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Cummins talks Aussies gearing up for UK | 05:44
In 2019, Australia played an internal warm-up match in Hampshire before the Ashes opener, also facing Derbyshire between the third and fourth Tests. Four years earlier, Australia played games against Kent, Essex, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire during their 2015 tour of England.
However, the growing prevalence of T20 leagues has made it increasingly difficult to schedule warm-up matches for Test tours. To ensure England’s Test players were available for The Hundred competition in August, the ECB crammed the five-match Ashes series into a six-week window from mid-June to late July.
Subsequently, Australia will embark on an Ashes tour without playing any county opposition for the first time in history, which national selector George Bailey confessed was becoming the “norm”.
“It feels like this is becoming the norm for Test tours, around tour games,” Bailey told reporters last month.
“It feels like there’s more tours that you don’t have one than when you do, so our team’s reasonably well prepared in terms of knowing what you need outside of those.”
According to The Telegraph, Australia will prepare for the World Test Championship final and Ashes series with a golf trip to Merseyside and a training camp in Beckenham, where they will have centre-wicket practice and net sessions. However, former Australian coach Darren Lehmann believes this isn’t adequate preparation ahead of a marquee Test series.
“You need games to acclimatise first and foremost,” Lehmann told SEN this week.
“To get used to the ball and wickets and pressure. No tour game is not a good idea. I hope it works but if it doesn’t, who made that decision will be asked.
“I think we win the Ashes anyway 3-1, but if we don’t, wow.”
Speaking to WeAre8’s Get Real with Rio, Cummins opened up about the relentless cricket calendar, confessing to feeling burnout throughout his professional career.
The 30-year-old elected to miss this year’s Indian Premier League, sacrificing millions to ensure he was rested before a busy six-Test tour of England. Cummins, who was named ODI captain last year, has also missed several international white-ball fixtures over the past couple of years due to workload management.
“Cricket, it’s basically 12 months of the year. There’s always a cricket game going somewhere,” Cummins said.
“I played non-stop for a year or two, and I was just spent, burnout. I was thinking, ‘Geez, I’m 25 here. If I want to do this until I’m 35, I’ve got to find a way to balance all these different things’.”
Most of Australia’s Test squad will touch down in the United Kingdom later this month following a brief training camp in Brisbane, while Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne and Marcus Harris have already been acclimatising to English conditions in the County Championship. David Warner, Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Marsh will join the Test squad following their Indian Premier League stints.
The World Test Championship between Australia and India gets underway at The Oval on June 7.
