Ashes to Ashes: Scheduling to blame?

The pain hasn’t gone, but it has begun to fade at least. Now instead of the empty sense of sheer loss and shock, it is now a panging that aches through every sinew, and occasionally completely overwhelms us. The Ashes are gone, and they’re not coming back (for a while).

The recriminations, the what-ifs, and how-do-we-fix-its have begun, and almost ended again. Alec Stewart, Michael Vaughan, Steve Harmison, Jonathan Agnew (and me, of course – Ed): they have all been filling their column inches with potential starting XIs for England’s next Test match against Sri Lanka in May. While this is indeed a valuable thought, and worthy of consideration, it does not challenge a major issue with England’s planning even for the next Ashes series. We have seen what mental degradation can do to a cricket team, and the current scheduling does nothing to help that.

England will have a break from Test Match Cricket now until that game in May. Those involved in the shorter formats will fly to the West Indies in March for 3 ODIs and 2 T20s, while the English summer season will be composed of 7 Test matches and 12 white ball games. The side will then tour Sri Lanka (although significantly with no Test matches involved), before a series in Australia followed by the World Cup down under in February / March 2015. The schedule then crams 5 Tests and 6 shorter games into just three months in the run-up to the Ashes series.

England’s tour to Australia had many problems; there were many mistakes. However, perhaps the most major one was that immediately after an emotionally draining, intense Ashes series, came another one. An England side which had built up to this home series as the pinnacle of a three year plan flew to Australia tired and jaded due to a build-up that had been too much and too short.

The England management have clearly seen the need to rest players. There are no Test matches in West Indies in March, or Sri Lanka in October. However, to cram a mini-tour to the West Indies, and to host New Zealand for two months before that series, smacks almost of panicking about players finding form. Add into the mix that many of those Test players (Trott, Broad, Cook, Bell, and potentially others) will be involved in the World Cup, and you’re looking at fielding a team in the first Test, half of whom have played more than forty games of international cricket of the highest intensity in just five months.

The Jonathan Trott Saga should have highlighted the dangers of overstretching international cricketers, nonetheless, we all wish him the very best. I would like to think that we have learnt from his woes, but Harmison, Trescothick, Yardy and many others before them have yet to red-flag the issues with scheduling. I hope that it doesn’t take another cricketer’s breakdown to make the ECB rethink their planning.

Picture courtesy of The Guardian