England are planning to play a pink-ball warm-up match before the 150th anniversary Test against Australia in Melbourne next year.<\/p>\n
The Ashes rivals are playing a one-off day-night Test from 11 March 2027 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to mark the 150th anniversary of the first Test match between the sides on the same ground in 1877.<\/p>\n
England were heavily beaten 4-1 in this winter’s Ashes series and their preparation was heavily criticised<\/a>.<\/p>\n They played one in-house warm-up against England Lions before the series and did not play a match against the pink ball before the day-night second Test in Brisbane.<\/p>\n Coach Brendon McCullum admitted<\/a> England may have made mistakes with their preparation after they conceded the series at the earliest opportunity with defeat in the third Test in Adelaide.<\/p>\n The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) have held talks with Cricket Australia (CA) over a reciprocal arrangement that would mean touring teams are provided with better preparation before Ashes series.<\/p>\n Melbourne’s Junction Oval is one possible host of the warm-up before the anniversary Test, though nothing has been confirmed and England have plenty of time to change their mind.<\/p>\n England have lost all four of their day-night Tests in Australia and there is unlikely to be such a match in the next Ashes series down under<\/a>. Batter Joe Root questioned whether the pink-ball matches were necessary<\/a> during the Ashes.<\/p>\n The 2026-27 winter is set to be particularly busy for England’s multi-format players.<\/p>\n After the home summer concludes on 27 September, they will play a 50-over tri-series in Pakistan, possibly also including Sri Lanka, from mid-October before travelling to Australia for a white-ball tour in November.<\/p>\n In December they have a three-Test series against world champions South Africa. That is scheduled to be part of a multi-format tour but the T20 leg, in particular, is in doubt because of a potential clash with South Africa’s franchise T20 competition, the SA20.<\/p>\n England will also play two Tests against Bangladesh in February, after which their players will likely travel directly to Australia.<\/p>\n Warm-up matches are also likely before the South Africa and Bangladesh tours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England are planning to play a pink-ball warm-up match before the 150th anniversary Test against Australia in Melbourne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-422574","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\/422574","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=422574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}