Two cricketing worlds collide next week. Australia and India meet on Friday in Perth in the opening Test of what promises to be an epic encounter – the first five-match series between the two great rivals since 1991-92. Five-match Test series used to be the norm. However, with the exception of England v Australia, they have become rare. One‑day cricket, and especially Twenty20, has eroded the time available for the longest form of the game, forcing series to be shortened to three or even two matches. What used to be a novel lasting all summer has become a novella, over in a trice. But in this Australian summer, something like tradition again rules. Five Tests spread over a month and a half, with the Christmas and new year Tests in Melbourne and Sydney in their time‑honoured place.
The new cricket world, however, won’t let tradition dominate. Just two days after the Perth Test begins, the Indian Premier League (IPL) “mega-auction” will unfold in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, underscoring the desert kingdom’s growing influence in global sports. Ten IPL franchises will bid on 574 players competing for 204 slots, alongside 46 already retained. In total, 250 players will take part in the two‑month 2025 IPL season next spring.
Each player sets his auction base price, and the sums are eye-watering. Even 42-year-old Jimmy Anderson, who recently retired from Test cricket, has put himself on the slab for £115,000, a snip compared with the £2m-plus that proven Twenty20 match‑winners command. It is sport meets high finance and a vision of the future: a stark and dystopian one if the traditional Test action in Perth is more to your liking, though IPL aficionados seem to find the auction process as compelling as the games themselves.
Soon, fully fledged franchise cricket on the IPL model will come to the UK. The eight teams involved in the Hundred, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s even shorter-form answer to the IPL, are in the process of being sold, with Indian franchise owners eager for a piece of the action. When that process is complete, there will be two rival structures in the English game: traditional counties trying to keep alive the long-form (at present, in the county championship, four-day) cricket beloved of purists, and newly revamped franchises devoted to the whizz-bang version of the game, awash with money and unashamedly offering mass entertainment.
The ECB argues that the cash generated from the sale of equity in the Hundred to mega-corporations will boost cricket at all levels and help reverse a perceived decline in recreational cricket. But will the patient survive the cure? It is far from clear that the counties and the franchises can coexist, and entirely plausible that a competitive structure that dates back to the late 19th century will be marginalised or even destroyed.
Long-form cricket will increasingly have to fight for the right to exist, perhaps becoming a partly amateur (and certainly second-tier) pursuit while handsomely remunerated pros play the big-money, short-form game for interlinked franchises around the world. Tests are already under threat in some major cricket-playing countries, and they barely feature in the women’s game. So make sure you savour the traditional Test opener in Perth next weekend. If, that is, you can divert your eyes from the high rollers in Jeddah.
