{"id":367444,"date":"2026-01-13T13:32:26","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T13:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/367444\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T13:32:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T13:32:26","slug":"england-ruthlessly-privatised-cricket-australia-embraces-it-with-constant-public-displays-of-affection-ashes-2025-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/367444\/","title":{"rendered":"England ruthlessly privatised cricket \u2013 Australia embraces it with constant public displays of affection | Ashes 2025-26"},"content":{"rendered":"

The drive to Bowral in New South Wales takes you through some of Australia\u2019s most English countryside. Pastoral hills roll right up to the roadside and finish in grassy verges, flecked with yellow and white wildflowers. Alliums stand sentinel around vibrant lawns. Even the eucalypts are cosplaying as beech and oaks. You might be in Hampshire, if it weren\u2019t for the dazzling sun.<\/p>\n

Just a few roads from the high street \u2013 storefronts full of fancy cookware and country casuals \u2013 is the Bradman Oval. This small ground, with its pre-loved outfield, has become a pilgrimage stop for the Australian cricketing faithful. Head out to the middle and you\u2019re walking across the sacred turf where Sir Don honed his skills. Stand at the crease, look past the white picket fence, and you can see the family homes where he grew from boy to man, on Shepherd Street and Glebe Street respectively.<\/p>\n

The village feel gives the ground a surprising charm and familiarity \u2013 especially to the England fan. We grow up with the narrative that Australian cricket has always reflected its red-rock interior: a place where hard men toil on hard wickets, Bradman being the hardest of the lot. But an Ashes trip \u2013 if you can spare some time from the gladiatorial Test grounds and Barmy Army beer joints \u2013 is an excellent check and challenge to images conjured solely from the imagination, and a landscape seen purely through the lens of a remote rivalry.<\/p>\n

For me, travelling solo across four states, cricket has proven a constant companion, meaning this large continent has never felt lonely. Beneath the pink-granite mountains of the Gawler Ranges, a six-hour drive from Adelaide, I checked into an empty motel expecting a lonesome evening in its dining room and instead found myself immersed in the joyous family atmosphere of a Wudinna Cricket<\/a> Club post-match hang.<\/p>\n

In the parks and pubs, cricket remains the dominant summer pastime and subject of conversation. In the Grampians of western Victoria, whose peaks are better known for their world-class climbing, I constantly witnessed pick-up games in the backyards and paddocks of the cafes and restaurants, or mums and dads tossing up hit-mes to tiny toddlers holding miniature bats. There was beach cricket in the Perth suburbs, and on one Melbourne city beach I even saw a game played waist-high in the waves.<\/p>\n

These constant public displays of affection are matched in the stands and on the airwaves. Channel 7, the terrestrial broadcaster of the Ashes, had the entire series available on demand for repeat viewing, session by session, a gesture offering significant added value for matches that ended too quickly. The Big Bash, which overlaps with the international summer, creates a festival atmosphere around the sport: rather than cannibalising attendances, it has contributed to them. Last week, a combined 105,767 spectators added up to a record crowd<\/a> for the new year\u2019s matches at the MCG and Optus stadium.<\/p>\n

The Bradman Oval in Bowral, glimpsed through trees. \u2018The Don\u2019 grew up in streets around the ground and played his formative cricket there. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Cricket\u2019s truly public nature in Australia is perhaps epitomised by their major Test grounds, which are owned by state-appointed trusts, government agencies or, in the case of Adelaide Oval, the people of South Australia itself. They are not run for the benefit of venture capitalists, nor for the members of private clubs, but for the very people who enjoy (or might one day enjoy) the sport they host.<\/p>\n

It all throws England\u2019s ruthless privatisation of cricket into sharper focus. The hiving off of a common and popular field game by the elite is, after all, one of the foundational moments in its history, thanks to the aristocrats who formed Marylebone Cricket Club and immediately copyrighted the laws of cricket. The English game\u2019s far more recent retreat behind televisual paywalls, its disappearance from state schools and its eager adoption of \u201celastic\u201d market pricing for tickets \u2013 which only ever stretches one way \u2013 has yet to be mitigated.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Australia becomes a land of counter-envy \u2013 a place where English cricket fans travel\u00a0to experience a cricketing culture that the \u201cold country\u201d once believed to be a major marker of its identity, and vital bond with its colonies. There\u2019s an inherent irony in this reversed nostalgia. Perhaps it\u2019s how\u00a0French winemakers feel about the cuttings of vines that were planted here in the 19th century, and\u00a0ended up being the rare survivors of that ancient viticultural legacy when the phylloxera blight raged through Europe\u2019s vineyards. Like cricket, they still thrive here. The wines they make are, similarly, big winners.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible, in this country, to travel four hours into the Victorian countryside to a town with a population of just over 100, and find locals so passionate about their local sporting hero, Johnny Mullagh, that they have transformed the old bank into a charmingly child-friendly museum about the 1868 Aboriginal XI tour of England. Even here, space is set aside for a quick bowl in the front yard \u2013 or you can head up the road to the ground where Mullagh played, and where a small cairn halfway up a hill across the road marks the spot to which he hit his longest six.<\/p>\n

As for Bowral\u2019s Bradman Museum \u2013 incorporating the hallowed Bradman Oval \u2013 it hasn\u2019t stopped striving for excellence since it was founded nearly four decades ago. To be fair, you\u2019d expect nothing less from somewhere that celebrates a man with a Test average of 99.94. Its most recent new addition is an impressive permanent exhibit celebrating the women\u2019s game, and a female hall of fame. Like the Johnny Mullagh Interpretive Centre, it is majority-staffed by volunteers. And yet it remains open 364 days a year, and sees visitors arrive from far and wide on every one of those.<\/p>\n

It may be no surprise to see Australians taking cricket seriously, but it is an education to travel through a country where the game is so readily\u00a0available and publicly embraced. English perceptions of Australian cricket may often have been distorted by distance and prejudice but, up close, there\u2019s plenty to learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The drive to Bowral in New South Wales takes you through some of Australia\u2019s most English countryside. Pastoral…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-367444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}