A Broken Cricketragic
Peter Langston | December 27, 2025
I have been saying this since the First Test in Perth (lest anyone think it’s just because England won in Melbourne) but this has been a very disappointing Ashes series. I never could see the point of having the BBL playing along side Tests in the Australian summer but all has been revealed.
Four complete matches in 13 days. Dreadful batting, that collapses at any slight challenge, such as a seaming wicket or accurate bowling. No patience, all hit and giggle and another $10 million lost by CA.
Exciting? Well on a very basic level that is already the purview of the short form game but none of the complexity or resilience that keeps you hanging over four or five days just reckless risk taking, chancing of arm and dice rolling.
Don’t blame the wicket, blame the players.
Even the barren summers of the late 70’s or the second half of the 80’s had more appeal than the rubbish thrown up this summer.
It’s all too easy to label me a bitter old fogey trapped in the past but cricket, like all sports, is best served by variations on a theme. Alan McGilvray has been countermanded - the game is ALL the same. Dull, one dimensional and without character.
Can’t see the point of watching the New Year Test. Glad I couldn’t get tickets.
This evening, I am a very disillusioned cricketragic. The game has died in a final flurry of irreverent flamboyant arrogance, marketed to extinction and handed to reckless vandals in management and those at the coal face lauded for their loud, bombasticity, numbered and applauded for brevity.
The irony being that the froth and bubble of commercial revolution, made in order to revitalise Test cricket to make it even more, has lost tens of millions instead.
No seats left for cricket tragics. Their invitations revoked, offered instead to the short attention span of the beer-snake makers, whose screams are only for sixes, flying zing bails and rapidly stolen and then wasted endorphins.
Shakespeare eviscerated and recast with a retinue of Ted Bullpits.
