Posted by There’s too much cricket. You have to prioritise. Below is our month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll (most likely) be focusing on in the coming year.
Essentials?
It’s pretty widely accepted now that the cricket calendar is oversaturated. You can either sit back and take what comes each day, or you can prioritise and bookmark certain events and disregard others, allowing your level of interest to wax and wane.
We’ve found that the former approach only really saps our overall enthusiasm and appetite while bringing no particular upside. We’ve therefore come to favour the latter way of going about things in recent years. This calendar is a tool to help us stay on track with that.
You may well have different priorities. Fair enough. Good on you. These are ours.
The 2024 King Cricket Essentials Calendar
January to March
- India v England, five Tests (men)
February to March
- New Zealand v Australia, two Tests (men)
April to May
- First seven rounds of the County Championship
- Maybe a dash of IPL as there’s a T20 World Cup straight after
May
- England v Pakistan, four T20s (men)
June
- T20 World Cup (men)
July
- England v West Indies, three Tests (men)
August
- The Hundred (women)
August to September
- England v Sri Lanka, three Tests (men)
September
- Last two rounds of the County Championship
- Also, just a note here to say that as they don’t lead into a Test series or either kind of World Cup, we consider England’s eight limited overs games against Australia decidedly non-essential.
September to October
- T20 World Cup (women)
October to November
- Pakistan v England, three Tests (men)
- India v New Zealand, three Tests (men)
November to December
- Australia v India, five Tests (men)
- New Zealand v England, three Tests (men)
Thoughts
A few things stand out here.
(1) We’ve typed out the word ‘men’ a lot. At the time of writing, we don’t believe there’s a single women’s Test match scheduled. (Update: Thanks to Ged for reminding us there is actually an Australia v South Africa Test in February, which we now remember spotting and excluding in favour of England matches later in the year that we later learned did not actually exist.)
(2) England are playing quite a lot of Test cricket this year, particularly in what cricket people for some reason these days call “the back end of the year” and which we call “the second half of the year”.
(3) Yes, The Hundred is on there. It rather passed us by last year, but there is nothing else on at that time. The women’s competition also measures up as a significant event given the relative paucity of international cricket, so that’s where we’ll most likely train our gaze.
We’ve stuck this page in the site’s main navigation so that everyone knows what to expect from the site in the year ahead.
Thank you for this valuable tool and thank you especially for sticking it on the main navigation. Being a gentleman of a certain age, I was brought up on the basis that such a piece of editorial was a “cut out and keep” feature. I was trying to work out how I might do that without damaging my screen, when your technological solution hove into view.
There is at least one women’s test match scheduled this year: in February, in Perth: Aus (W) v SA (W). Strangely, I know this because Olaf The Buddhist Viking told me just before Christmas that he intends to see some of that match live, when he visits Western Australia at that time.
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/a-new-fan-at-the-london-spirit-v-southern-brave-washout-a-match-report/2023/08/14/
I rather thought that you might fancy a match report by someone who had not seen live professional cricket before seeing The Hundred and was now going to try women’s test cricket on the other side of the world.
Your call, KC…and Olaf’s of course.
You know what, it’s possible we actually saw that as we were going through the fixtures and thought, “No, we’ll keep it to just the England Tests,” and then turned out that was the only one. Maybe we should reclassify it.
Great. Olaf has suggested that he would like to take up the challenge of writing a match report. Whether or not it transpires is a different matter.
Well we don’t know how he writes, but there’s not been many reports by Vikings so we’d be keen to take a look on that basis alone.
Eight Eng v Aus LOIs in September alone?
Jesus Christ.
Think the non-Ashes year white ball tours started in 2012. Could be wrong. Feels a lot longer.