Australian cricket faces an unprecedented crisis with vaulting corporatisation reducing the status of Test matches to the point where Australian cricketers may soon have to seek permission from Indian Premier League owners to don the Baggy Green cap.
The IPL is effectively taking control of the international game. Able to lure the world’s best players courtesy of multibillion-dollar TV rights, the IPL is spreading across the world, investing in Twenty20 competitions in South Africa, the Caribbean and the US. Teams for a new Indian Women’s Premier League were snapped up for more than $800 million recently and, with newfound popularity across the world, there is talk cricket will be included in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. In Friday’s final instalment of his four-part series on changes sweeping international cricket, the Herald’s chief cricket correspondent Daniel Brettig reports that Saudi Arabia is also wooing the IPL and India’s Board of Control for Cricket to establish a Twenty20 game to attract a million cricket-crazed tourists from the subcontinent.
Test cricket will need to adapt to survive the growth of Twenty20.Credit: Illustration: Stephen Kiprillis
The IPL’s short and entertaining one-day games are squeezing out the Test matches loved by traditionalists. But change has been a constant in international sport since business realised a slice of the pie was there for the taking. Golf and tennis led the way but many sports followed. They all adapted. Australian cricket’s moment came in 1977 when Sydney media mogul Kerry Packer’s rebel World Series Cricket broke the then Australian Cricket Board’s hegemony.
Now, with more people watching cricket across the world, Test matches in Australia attract smaller crowds. But it is not a new phenomenon. Eleven years after World Series Cricket rocked Australia, the Herald lamented that daily attendances at Test matches in the summer of 1988 were shrinking. “The popularity of the one-day game has been maintained while the popularity of Tests, in terms of the number of people turning up to watch each day’s play, is diminishing each year,” the editorial said.
Recent Test match attendance statistics underscore the problem facing Cricket Australia in keeping that form of the game relevant: about 130,000 people watched the series against the lacklustre West Indies side last summer, compared with 488,004 who attended the four Tests against England in 2020-21 despite COVID-19 restrictions. In 2018-19, 564,886 people watched the India and Sri Lanka Tests against Australia.
In IPL’s world, the sport has been married to a Bollywood reality where spectacle augments the limited-over Twenty20 game against which the often staid pace of Test cricket simply cannot pay the bills. The five-day format takes up too much television time and research suggests young people have lost interest in the long game; young players prefer to concentrate on the short-format game in hope of securing lucrative franchise contracts.
Neil Maxwell, one of Australia’s most influential player agents, said the next phase of the IPL revolution would have players asking for permission from their Indian owners to represent Australia, not the other way around. And it does not stop there. Manoj Badale, owner of the Rajasthan Royals in the IPL, predicted only Australia, India, England, New Zealand and South Africa would be playing Tests by 2030. Others believe only Australia, England and India will play the purists’ game.
The challenge facing Cricket Australia is to avoid being run over by the IPL juggernaut. It will not be easy. The IPL comprises a diverse collection of clubs with ownership models that will make negotiation difficult, if not chaotic. That said, the somewhat archaic Test format carried the game to its current rude health and its sustainability will require compromise on all sides.
