England to begin ‘biggest year in a generation’ with Windies tour

The World Cup and the Ashes will be held in England later in the year, but before that, England tours the Caribbean for three Tests and five ODIs.

England is ranked second in the world in Tests.

England begins a 2019 that England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief executive Tom Harrison believes represents a “once in a generation” opportunity with a Windies tour that could yet prove uncomfortably awkward.

With both a World Cup — a tournament the England men’s team has never won — and an Ashes on home soil on the horizon, it will be a challenge for England’s leading cricketers in both the one-day and Test formats to maintain their focus on the challenge in front of them rather than be distracted by the bigger prizes ahead.

A three-Test tour and five-match one-day series in the Caribbean, which gets underway with a warm-up fixture against a West Indies Board XI in Barbados next week, should provide a good barometer of England’s progress.

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Joe Root’s Test side is second in the world rankings, while Eoin Morgan’s men top the equivalent one-day standings. By contrast, Windies is currently eighth in the Test table and ninth in the ODI list.

England, fresh from an emphatic away Test series win in Sri Lanka that followed a home success against top-ranked India, will be firm favourite. And yet, England has won only one Test series in the Windies since 1968, when Michael Vaughan’s team sealed a 3-0 victory in 2004.

Overwhelming favourite

It has toured the Caribbean twice more since then, losing 1-0 in 2009 and then drawing 1-1 four years ago after a build-up where ECB chairman Colin Graves had dismissed the Windies as “mediocre.”

Root’s men will have to cope with the pressure of being overwhelming favourite to beat a struggling Windies side which will be coached by an Englishman in the recently-appointed Richard Pybus. Yet for England, the stakes are even higher in what will be Australian coach Trevor Bayliss’s final year in charge before stepping down.

The ECB abandoned free-to-air television broadcast of its home matches after the 2005 Ashes (in picture). Photo: Getty Images

 

Following its miserable first-round exit at the 2015 World Cup, former England captain turned ECB supremo Andrew Strauss, made limited-overs cricket a priority. This year’s edition will prove the worth of that policy.

Massive opportunity

More than that, the fact the Ashes and the World Cup fall in the same season — something that hasn’t happened since the inaugural 1975 men’s World Cup in England — could provide the ECB with a massive opportunity to connect with a wider British sporting public which has lost contact with the game.

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Many casual fans, and potential cricket lovers, were ‘abandoned’ when the ECB decided to end live free-to-air television coverage of home internationals after England’s 2005 Ashes triumph in favour of more lucrative deals with satellite broadcasters.

But as Michael Atherton, the former-England-captain-turned- The Times -cricket-correspondent wrote, the absence of a major international football tournament in 2019 offers cricket the chance to “own” the summer in its birthplace. “Rarely, though, have the two biggest events in the English cricket calendar, the World Cup and Ashes — as well as the women’s Ashes — combined with so little competition for what marketing types term ‘eyeballs’,” said Atherton.