England's Test and white-ball teams will face competitive opposition in warm-up matches before their winter tours of South Africa, Bangladesh and Australia, marking a significant shift from the relaxed preparation methods previously favoured under coach Brendon McCullum.
Last year, England's winter began in New Zealand, where preparation for their first game in nearly a month consisted of two relaxed training sessions, a cultural welcome ceremony with local Māori elders and a team-bonding mini-break in Queenstown.
“Obviously there was a bit of golf played and a few drinks here and there and team meals and whatnot,” Harry Brook said of that trip. “It was just about trying to spend a bit of time together. They’ve got some amazing golf courses and we were lucky enough to get on a couple of them. A couple of the other lads managed to get out and enjoy Queenstown. Everybody had a lot of fun.”
Mistakes admitted
Brook was not aware at the time that England's preparation approach would become a defining issue of the tour. A month later, England played their only Ashes warm-up fixture against the Lions at Lilac Hill in Perth, and their next team-bonding mini-break in Noosa was just a humiliating two-day first-Test defeat away.
This was the master plan McCullum had initiated after his appointment as Test coach in 2022. “You’ve got to make it enjoyable, not just on the field but off the field, too,” he said during his first winter in charge, after curtailing a warm-up fixture in New Zealand to take his squad to watch one of his racehorses in action.
“We want guys to know that, when they board a plane to head overseas, they’re going to have a great time. The results will hopefully follow. I always felt when I was playing that everything was based around the cricket and sometimes you forgot to enjoy yourself. We’ll see how it works out but it’s worth a crack.”
On Monday, Richard Thompson, chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, admitted the approach of eschewing warm-ups and embracing drinking sessions was a mistake. “There is a lot that was learned,” he said. “The reality is in those decisions, mistakes were made and we’ve corrected that now.”
New approach
The correction was revealed when McCullum said late last month that he was now “trying to include a number of warm-up games” in their schedule to make up for the fact that “a lot of these guys just haven’t played a lot of white-ball cricket”. As a result, England will preface their ODI series in Australia next month with a game against a Western Australia XI at the Waca, the first time in six years they have scheduled a warm-up match before a white-ball series.
The Waca is the venue many thought England should have used to ready themselves for the Ashes, just over the river from the Optus Stadium, where as in last winter’s Test series the first competitive game will be played. The pitches at both venues are overseen by the same curator, Isaac McDonald, whose ambition to nail “the characteristics of pace and bounce” made the decision to warm up on the low, slow surface of Lilac Hill most puzzling.
Test side changes
For the Test side, now coached by Stephen Fleming, the change is starker still. The red-ball team will play at least vaguely competitive warm-up games before all three foreign assignments this winter. A Cricket South Africa Invitation XI is lined up as opposition in Durban in December and the traditional fixture against a Prime Minister’s XI moves from Canberra to Melbourne’s Junction Oval, and is being played with a pink ball, in the buildup to the 150th anniversary Test at the MCG in March.
The two-match Test series in Bangladesh in February and March will have its own preparatory fixture. In the space of a year, England have gone from playing no significant warm-ups at all to scheduling a warm-up game at the end of a warm-up series preceded by a warm-up game. The real test is for results to change with them.
