Crammed Test cricket schedule risks leaving Australian summers unrecognisable | Geoff Lemon

Four matches in four weeks for the men’s team compromises the quality of the sport – and makes the Test season a contradiction in terms

This has long been on the way, and here it is. Test season, the centrepiece of Australia’s summer, will next time around consist of four matches played over four weekends, not starting until the second week of December and done a week into January. Cricket Australia will instead claim to have expanded the schedule to seven Tests, but their tropical excursion against Bangladesh is in August, and the pink-ball sideshow masquerading as the 150th anniversary Test will have half its overs in March darkness. Both are distant islands to the summer mainland. Unlike most cricket countries, Tests are still Australia’s most substantial earner and site of interest. Yet in a world of sports trying to claim more of the calendar, Australian administrators are in voluntary retreat.

Even as recent decades have squeezed the format into shorter series, while tour matches are euthanised and preparation is eroded as an outdated luxury, there still has to be time within a series itself. Two matches could run back to back, maybe three, but any longer and there has to be space built into the tour, gaps of a week or 10 days to offset the physical demand. Those pauses also gave the audience time for breath; they let players rest and storylines compound. Much of the rhythm of cricket is in waiting.