Analysis: How our overworked cricketers compare with the schedules of Australia’s best athletes

Cricket’s global player union has announced a review, yet hours later BBL clubs were announcing signings of already overworked international stars. DANIEL CHERNY compares cricket’s workload conundrum with the rest of Australian sport.

Australian Captain Pat Cummins played 92 days of cricket from June 2023 to June 2024. Picture: Sarah Reed/Getty Images

Within hours of cricket’s global player union announcing its review into the game’s global structure, Big Bash League clubs were spruiking the signatures of a handful of the nation’s most famous cricketers despite knowing that they were unlikely to feature for large chunks of the seasons for which they are freshly contracted.

Herein lies the conundrum for the World Cricketers’ Association working group, which features AFL Players Association chief and former Australian Cricketers’ Association head honcho Paul Marsh.

The dog’s breakfast that is the current calendar – a combination of global ICC events, bilateral series and domestic franchise cricket – has been years in the making. This freshly assembled panel has to clean up after Fido.

A generation ago it would have seemed inconceivable that Australia’s Test captain would skip a tour of England only a few weeks after playing in a competition in the US, and yet it has reached a point when barely an eyebrow is raised about Pat Cummins’ choices, given how utterly forgettable bilateral white-ball international series have become.

And Cummins can hardly be accused of shirking responsibility to his nation. From the start of June 2023 to the end of June 2024 he played 13 Tests, 13 one-day internationals and seven Twenty20 internationals, as well as 16 matches during the Indian Premier League season.

In addition to Australian duties Pat Cummins played 16 matches in the IPL over a 12 month period. Picture: R.Satish BABU / AFP

Even with a glut of early finishes to Test matches, this still meant 92 days of cricket for Cummins across that 12 months period, not to mention the months on end away from home.

This is comparable to the 99 games played by Josh Giddey across the 2023-24 NBA season and Boomers last year, but way more than leading players across the football codes. Matildas star Steph Catley played 43 matches across the 2023-24 season across Arsenal and the national side, while top AFL players would play 27 bona fide games plus two or three practice matches at most.

NRL veteran Daly Cherry-Evans played 29 times across Manly, Queensland and Kangaroos commitments last year.

Australian wicketkeeper Josh Inglis chose to play at the recent Major League Cricket tournament in the US, and told this masthead that he’d needed to be discerning with his choices.

“It's an exciting thing that there's so much cricket on and there's great opportunity for guys to go and play different franchises, different tournaments, and visit new countries and places to expand your game,” Inglis said.

“It's only going to make everyone better player in the end, and it's obviously great fun doing so. But I'm playing both white-ball formats at the minute. On the away tours, they usually take a spare keeper, so I've been doing all three. It's just a lot of time on the road. So you’ve just got to maximise the time that you have at home and pick out the right tournaments to take on.”

Self-interest, as ever, is king. Cricket Australia reasonably paraded Shamar Joseph’s BBL draft nomination on Monday, with a list sent to clubs indicating that Joseph would be available for the whole of the season. This could yet change, but should the Gabba hero keep his nomination as is, he would miss a West Indies white-ball series against Bangladesh and at least part of a Test series in Pakistan, less than a year after declaring that he would always be available to play for the Windies.

New West Indies sensation Shamar Joseph has nominated for the BBL draft. Picture: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images

And who could blame him if he did, given the chasm in cash on offer between the franchise circuit and central West Indies commitments.

These are the calls increasingly being made by top New Zealanders, including Finn Allen, who at just 25 has already effectively pigeonholed himself as a white-ball globetrotter, signing a two-year deal with the Perth Scorchers and turning his back on any Test cricket aspirations.

These are decisions for players, but then there are the calls administrators need to make. There is a lot of rhetoric around trying to protect the primacy of Test cricket, but to do so there are going to have to be sacrifices.

CA, the ECB and BCCI all talk a big game of wanting to keep Test cricket viable, but they also prey on the weaker nations, poaching players like Allen to bolster their respective franchise leagues.

The panel is stacked with administrative experience, but it will be one thing to make recommendations, quite another to convince power-craving boards, billionaire private owners and millionaire players to make the sacrifices necessary for a schedule that caters to the most important group in all of this: the fans.

Originally published as Analysis: How our overworked cricketers compare with the schedules of Australia’s best athletes