‘Feels really sad’: Perry calls out glaring hole in Australian cricket summer

Cricket great Ellyse Perry has called for Australia’s women to be given a permanent place in the heart of the home summer, lamenting the absence of international cricket around Christmas and the new year.

Australia begin their international season on Friday at Allan Border Field in Brisbane with the first of three one-day internationals against Bangladesh, before three T20s against New Zealand.

Australia will play six white-ball matches in 14 days, finishing on October 22, but will not play another international until an ODI series against New Zealand in March. After that comes the Women’s Ashes in England in June.

It means Australia, the world’s No.1 side in both white-ball formats, will not play an international fixture during the traditional home summer.

“Our exposure of playing at home is fairly limited,” Perry told this masthead. “I think it would be amazing for us to continue to grow the game in Australia by playing in front of home fans at the height of Australian cricket summer.”

Scheduling is becoming complicated in the women’s game. The Women’s Big Bash League [WBBL] runs from October 29 to December 5, while the Women’s Premier League [WPL] – the female equivalent of the Indian Premier League – is scheduled from January 14 to February 7.

Meanwhile, Australia’s men return from their three-Test tour of South Africa to play three ODIs and five T20s against England from November 13, before a four-Test series against New Zealand from December 9 until as late as January 8.

Last summer, Australia’s women began a multi-format series against India in mid-February. While Cricket Australia would like to stage more women’s internationals during the summer, it is also reliant on the availability of other nations.

“The WPL has crept into the January window, which for me is the height of the Australian summer,” Perry said. “For there not to be an opportunity for the Australian team to play in that window feels really sad in a lot of senses.

“It’s an amazing privilege to play overseas in different countries … but I don’t think anything resonates quite the same as being able to represent your country in front of your own fans.

“It’s going to be really important going forward to be proactive about how we see the game, how we schedule it, and not going down the same path or follow the same blueprint as men’s cricket.

“The entire Australian [women’s] team would love to play in the height of an Australian summer. It’s when everyone turns their mind to cricket. There are some annual features there that people always looking forward to - whether that’s a Boxing Day Test or New Year’s Test.

“Something like that doesn’t exist for the women’s team … and so it’s really increasingly hard year-to-year if it’s a little bit patchworky as to when we play. That’s not to say there isn’t effort to do that. It’s just such a convoluted schedule.”

Perry also believes the WBBL has significant potential as Australian cricket remains divided on the merits of privatisation in Big Bash franchises.

“The opportunity that [privatisation] presents is one that I really hope we’re able to make the most of,” Perry said “Women’s cricket represents a relatively untapped source of revenue for the sport. It’s not unreasonable to say the WBBL is probably the leading franchise competition in the world for women. I think sometimes that potentially gets lost on the Australian public … because we probably haven’t had the platform or the ability to really market and grow the competition in a way that it potentially deserves.

“Privatisation and investment in that gives us a tremendous opportunity to be creative and to do things differently to innovate for the WBBL.”

At 35, Perry has been an international cricketer for more than half her life. She was part of Australia’s recent T20 World Cup-winning side and was named by ESPN earlier this year as the greatest women’s cricketer of the 21st century.

Her form remains excellent and she is enjoying the game as much as ever.

How long can she keep going?

“I find so much joy and fulfilment in what I do,” Perry said. “For as long … as I am contributing to the team, I’d love to be involved. I guess everything’s finite and impermanent, so it will come to an end at some point. But yeah, I’m not really sure when.”

Tom Decent is the chief sports writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.