Aussies head back to the future in latest Test schedule

Such is the difficulty scheduling an increasing number of teams and formats into an ever-diminishing window of opportunities for bilateral global cricket, Australia's men's Test team is destined to compete at times and locations rarely visited over the past century.

As documented in Future Tours Program (FTP) released this week by the ICC – which outlines every Test-playing nation's bilateral commitments through until April 2027 – Australia's men's Test team will undertake overseas tours at the height of summer here and be engaged in home matches as late in the season as March.

That would represent a radical departure from scheduling Australia fans have come to accept over past decades when the men's Test summer habitually stretched from November to January.

But while the need to find more flexibility in a program that requires greater logistical dexterity than a three-dimensional Wordle requires innovative solutions, neither of the eyebrow-raising scenarios confronting Pat Cummins' team is unprecedented.

The decision to schedule January-February Test matches in Sri Lanka (2025) and India (2027) means Australia's premier men's outfit will be offshore in those months for the first time since 1970, although the practice was commonplace through the preceding 70 years.

Initially it was to accommodate Tests in South Africa – the first after Australia and England to become a Test nation (in 1889) – with teams breaking their ocean voyage to or from Ashes contests to play matches at Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

However, from 1935 to 1967 a standalone Australia Test sojourn to South Africa became a feature of the international playing schedule and, with those series played during southern hemisphere summer, cricket fans in Australia sometimes went without local Test cricket for years at a time.

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Test-free Australia summers were a regular event up until 1969-70 when Bill Lawry's team embarked on an epic tour to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), India (five Tests), Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and South Africa (four Tests) that meant they were away from late October until mid-March.

From that point, Australia has hosted at least one touring Test outfit every summer (although official records don't recognise the 1971-72 'Rest of the World' tour hurriedly arranged when South Africa were banned from international sport) and no away Tests have been scheduled during December or January.

That's despite the growing influence of limited-overs formats during the same period, with the first one-day international staged in 1971 and T20 added to the playing roster in 2005.

As a result of the squeeze that now sees 12 nations playing three formats on the latest FTP, as well as more than two months excised from the calendar to ensure player availability for the Indian Premier League, Australia are headed back to the future.

The two Tests in Sri Lanka are slated for late January-early February 2025 and immediately follow the first expanded Test series against India which (as was the case in the teams' inaugural meeting in 1947-48 and for numerous subsequent series) will return to five-match campaigns.

But it's the fixturing of another off-shore Test tour in the middle of Australia summer – to India for five Tests from mid-January 2027 – that heralds an even more historic shift in scheduling here.

In the wake of that India sojourn, Australia's Test men are due to return home to begin a two-Test series against Bangladesh that will be staged in March 2027, ending a 24-year drought between Tests here for the Islamic nation.

Not only were early autumn Test matches in Australia once de rigueur, the very first series of what would become the Ashes rivalry comprised two games staged at the MCG from March 15 to April 4, 1877.

Those historic encounters also represented the first and last time a Test match in Australia lingered into April, but there have been a couple of notable occasions over the past 50 years when autumn scheduling was employed, albeit under exceptional circumstances.

The first was the 1977 Centenary Test that was programmed to closely replicate the timing of the inaugural occasion 100 years earlier, and most recently during the World Series Cricket split of 1978-79 when the then Australian Cricket Board scheduled an eight-Test summer.

Following six Ashes Tests that season stretching from the start of December to mid-February and yielding England's most successful campaign down under (a 5-1 win), Pakistan arrived following their tour to New Zealand and played matches in Melbourne and Perth from March 10-29, 1979.

The glut of games scheduled by the ACB that summer – which also included four completed ODIs between Australia and England – came as the rival WSC troupe staged more than 20 one-dayers as well as five 'Super Tests', all but a handful of which were played as day-night fixtures.

Certainly administrators would have been readily convinced not to stage either of those Pakistan Tests in Sydney given the previous three March Tests held at the SCG – dating back to the 1930-31 visit by West Indies – had each surrendered at least one day to early autumn rain.

More pressing than weather concerns in recent years has been cricket's requirement to hand over its stadia in every mainland capital to Australian rules football which reclaims and reconfigures the venues for its winter competition prior to the start of April.

The other men's Test schedule details contained in the latest FTP offer greater familiarity.

Australia will travel to South Africa for three matches in October 2026, after a planned visit there in early 2021 was postponed over safety concerns relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While this series is mandated by the ICC under its World Test Championship programming and is not, therefore, a rescheduling of that postponed fixture, it highlights the planning issues that stem from South Africa’s preference to prioritise domestic T20 matches during January and the encroachment of IPL into the Proteas’ traditional March home Test match window.

It's also not unusual for Australia to play away Tests when the domestic home summer is already underway, with the most recent examples being the 2018 and 2014 series against Pakistan in the UAE, both of which took place during October.

In addition to next year's proposed World Test Championship final –at Lord's in early June next year, and with Australia squarely in the frame as they sit near the top of the current table – Cummins will lead his first Ashes defence in the UK in June-July 2023.

The early programming of that campaign, to enable the England and Wales Cricket Board ‘clear air’ in August to stage the Hundred, means it will be the first Ashes series in the more than 140 years Australia have played Tests in the UK to be completed by the end of July.

The 2023-24 Australia summer sees Pakistan playing three Tests with the West Indies also returning for two Tests towards summer's end, the second time in as many seasons they will have toured Australia which further underscores the complexities involved with modern scheduling.

Apart from two Tests in New Zealand in February-March, Australia faces no away Test matches between home summers during 2024, a period of the international calendar dominated by white-ball cricket including a landmark T20 World Cup jointly hosted by West Indies and the USA during June.

The home summer of 2024-25 sees India undertake its first five-Test tour to Australia since 1991-92, immediately followed by Australia's 'in-season' visit to Sri Lanka in late January-early February 2025 prior to the ICC ODI Champions Cup knockout tournament in Pakistan.

A further two Tests are then scheduled for the West Indies in June-July 2025 – what will be Australia's first such visit to the Caribbean in a decade – during a year that is also slated to host another iteration of the World Test Championship final. The series was scaled back from three Tests at the request of the Windies to accommodate three more profitable T20 fixtures.

The next home Ashes series will be held in 2025-26 before the T20 World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and the final year of the new FTP features the inaugural Test between Australia and Afghanistan (likely in Australia's Top End) after last year's proposed fixture in Hobart was postponed.

That historic encounter will be followed by Australia's three-Test tour to South Africa with 2026-27 home Test series against NZ (three in December-January) and Bangladesh (two in March) to be staged either side of the five-Test tour to India in January-February 2027.