When do Australia play England next? If you said the coming summer’s Ashes series you’d be wrong, by nine months.
The traditional foes meet on Saturday in Lahore for the fourth match of the largely unnoticed Champions Trophy, and they’re both playing one-day cricket as badly as each other. Changes are afoot.
That Big Bash star Matt Short and the over-hyped Jake Fraser-McGurk continue to fail at the top of the order, despite a growing number of opportunities, calls for a rethink.
Certainly Fraser-McGurk, 22, is all swat and no substance despite a handful of swashbuckling knocks as an IPL injury fill-in.
Has an Australian top-order batter in any format ever had a worse set of numbers? He averages 14 from seven one-day internationals, including scores of two and nine in Sri Lanka last week, 16.14 in seven T20Is, 19.16 in 17 first class matches, 26.09 in 27 state one-day matches, and 18.56 in 44 BBL matches.
Matt Short, 29, has more serviceable domestic figures and can bowl occasional off-spin as a sixth or seventh option, but averaging 17.9 in 13 ODIs, with two wickets at an average of 113, is hardly a compelling case. And Travis Head can also bowl part time off-spin.
So despite Josh Inglis now Australia’s white-ball gloveman, Test keeper Alex Carey is one of the few form batters and should also play, either opening with Head at the expense of Short or at No.3 ahead of a struggling Marnus Labuschagne.
The good news is England have lost six of their past seven one-day matches, including all three badly during their recent series against India. Saturday night’s match could be a good contest, with batting and bowling flaky on both sides.
If the start of the Champions Trophy passed you by, don’t worry. Most of Australia missed it. The tournament began on Wednesday night Australian time, with New Zealand soundly beating hosts Pakistan in Karachi.
Josh Inglis. (Photo by Matthew Lewis-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)
Being shown on Amazon Prime, the International Cricket Council’s current broadcaster, the latest relaunch of the 50-over tournament is a long way off Broadway with the AFL and rugby league seasons are about to kick off.
And if Australia’s performances in the two one-day games which ended their Sri Lanka tour last week are any indication, the 15-match competition is hardly worth signing up for.
Already without five players from the World Cup team which triumphed little more than a year ago, playing all 16 players in the current squad across the two games in Sri Lanka offered nothing for the immediate future. Australia suffered losses of 49 and a record 174 runs.
It looked more like the start of a rebuild for the 2027 World Cup, not a concentrated focus on a tournament a matter of days away.
Grandiosely labelled a mini World Cup when it began in 1998, the tournament has never really registered in the Australian cricket psyche. How many people remember that Australia won it in 2006 and 2009? Me neither until I looked it up.
It has only been played twice since 2009 following the explosion of Twenty20 cricket and the introduction of the World Test Championship final in 2021.
However, despite a T20 World Cup and WTC final every two years and a 50-over World Cup every four years, the ICC, made up of the 12 so-called Test nations, found themselves without ICC events in 2025 and 2029.
So the marginalised Champions Trophy was dusted off, and the competition has already done its job as part of a $4.7 billion television rights deal for the ICC from 2024 to 2027.
Of course, if the fabulously wealthy Board of Control for Cricket in India hadn’t demanded such an outrageous share of those television rights, the Champions Trophy may not have needed to be played at all.
Despite raking in billions from international cricket rights and the ever expanding IPL, now out to 74 matches, BCCI heavy Jay Shah, recently elected the ICC’s new chairman, insisted that 40 per cent go to India. That left crumbs for the lesser countries that needed help the most.
India are ranging hot favourites given their recent form, with even captain Rohit Sharma, who stood down/was dropped for the last Test in Australia seven weeks ago, scoring a rapid century against England.
And having refused to tour Pakistan since 150 people were killed in Mumbai by muslim extremists in 2008, India have an enormous advantage, playing all three first-round matches in Dubai, along with the semi-final and final should they make it.
Despite a first-round loss, there is something to cheer about for the home side. The Champions Trophy is the first ICC event in Pakistan since the 1996 World Cup, when Sri Lanka beat Australia in the final at Lahore.
But how much cheering will there be even if the unfancied Aussies win this Champions Trophy during the early rounds of the footy season?
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