Cricket tour preparation: how a touring side gets ready

Six weeks before the first Test, an analyst in an office several thousand miles from the venue is watching footage of a groundsman rolling a square, and a strength coach is already building a heat protocol for players who have spent the last month in an English autumn. That is where cricket tour preparation actually starts. By the time the squad lands, most of the decisions that will determine how the series goes have already been taken, and the fortnight everybody watches on television is the smallest and least influential part of the process.

The short version is this. A touring side prepares in four separate streams that run at different speeds: reconnaissance and analysis, which begins months out; selection for the conditions, which happens weeks out; physical acclimatisation, which needs one to two weeks on the ground and rarely gets it; and skill-specific practice against the ball and the surfaces the series will produce, which is what the arrival period is really for. Warm-up fixtures used to hold three of those four streams together in a single competitive week. The modern calendar has largely removed them, and everything a touring party now does is a set of substitutes for a fixture that no longer exists.

• 5Days of play in a Test match
• 80Overs before the second new ball is available
• 6Balls in an over
• 2Innings each side may play

Structural features of the Test format itself, which do not change from tour to tour.

The reconnaissance that happens before anybody is selected

Long before a squad exists, a coaching staff is trying to answer one question: what will this series demand that our players do not currently do well?

The raw material is enormous and mostly public. Every venue has a scoring history, a first-innings distribution, a record of how much the ball seams on day one and how much it turns on day four, and a pattern of when wickets fall in a day's play. Layered on top is the opposition: which bowlers they will pick at which grounds, the lengths those bowlers hold, the fields their captain sets to a left-hander, the phases in which they attack. The methods behind that layer are the subject of the piece on how cricket teams use data, and every touring side now arrives with a version of it.

The output is not a dossier. It is a small number of decisions, and the useful ones are almost always about technique rather than about tactics. If a country's surfaces produce a ball that skids on rather than bouncing, the batters need to play later and straighter, and that is a change that takes weeks of repetition to embed. If the ball there swings for longer, the top order needs to leave more accurately outside off stump. If the pitches turn from the first session, the side needs a plan for sweeping and a plan for not sweeping, and it needs to have practised both.

The second output is a list of what the side cannot fix in time. A coaching staff that identifies six weaknesses and tries to address all of them arrives with six half-solved problems. The ones worth choosing are those where a specific, repeatable adjustment exists.

Selecting for conditions rather than for form

Home selection and touring selection are different exercises, and boards that treat them as the same one tend to lose abroad.

Domestic form measures a player against the conditions she has been playing in. A touring selection has to project a player into conditions she may not have played in for years. So panels start weighting attributes that a home season does not reward: a fast bowler who hits the pitch hard rather than one who swings it, if the tour is somewhere the ball does not swing. A second spinner, if the venues turn. An opener who leaves well, if the new ball moves for twenty-five overs there. A wicketkeeper who is comfortable standing up to spin on low surfaces.

The squad also gets larger, and it gets larger in a specific shape. A home Test squad can call up a replacement in a day. A touring party cannot, because visas, flights and quarantine arrangements take longer than the gap between matches, so cover has to be carried. That produces travelling reserves: players named in the party who are not in the squad for a given match but who train with it, bowl in the nets, are assessed by the coaching staff and can be promoted immediately if somebody breaks down.

29%25%13%25%

• Specialist batters7
• Wicketkeepers2
• Fast bowlers6
• Spin bowlers3
• Travelling reserves and net bowlers6

One illustrative allocation of a touring group. Actual numbers vary considerably by board, by series length and by format, and this is not the squad for any particular tour.

Show the numbers

How a touring party for a long Test series is typically composed

Item	Value
Specialist batters	7
Wicketkeepers	2
Fast bowlers	6
Spin bowlers	3
Travelling reserves and net bowlers	6

The reserves are not padding. On a long tour with three or four Tests in six weeks, a fast-bowling group will lose somebody, and the difference between a side that replaces him with a bowler who has been in the country for a month and a side that flies somebody in on forty-eight hours' notice is usually visible in the following match. The workload arithmetic behind that is set out in the article on managing fast-bowling loads.

What a proper tour match used to give a side

For most of the game's history the touring fixture was the preparation, and it is worth being precise about what it provided, because the substitutes each replace only one part of it.

It gave batters time in the middle against unfamiliar conditions with something at stake. Nets do not replicate that. A batter in a net faces a series of unconnected deliveries with no scoreboard, no fielders, no consequence for getting out and no requirement to build an innings. A tour match gives her three hours of judgement calls about which balls to leave, which is precisely the skill the new conditions will test.

It gave bowlers overs in match rhythm. A fast bowler needs to have bowled long spells recently to bowl a long spell well, and the difference between a bowler who has bowled twenty overs in a fortnight and one who has bowled none is not fitness but control.

It gave the coaching staff information they could not get any other way: how the ball behaved in the hand, whether the batter's trigger movement was working here, which of two spinners looked more at home. Selection for the first Test was made on evidence rather than on assumption.

And it gave the squad a competitive fixture in which to make its mistakes. A side that discovers its plan is wrong in a warm-up game has a week to change it. A side that discovers the same thing on the first morning of a Test has already lost the session.

Why the calendar squeezed the warm-up fixture out

Tour matches have not been abolished. They have been outcompeted for space, and by four different pressures at once.

The first is volume. There is more international cricket than there was, and franchise competitions now hold protected windows in the calendar as well, so the gaps between commitments have narrowed. The structural problem is described in the article on how the international fixture calendar is assembled, and the tour match is simply the lowest-value item in a schedule that has to lose something.

The second is money. A tour match generates almost no broadcast revenue and sells few tickets. A board choosing between a warm-up fixture and an additional limited-overs international is choosing between a cost and an income, and boards under financial pressure make that choice quickly.

The third is quality of opposition. A useful tour match requires a host side strong enough to test the visitors, and host boards are reluctant to interrupt their own domestic competitions to assemble one. What often gets offered instead is a scratch team, and a match against weak opposition can be worse than no match at all, because it produces false confidence and no useful information.

The fourth is risk. A frontline bowler who breaks down in a practice fixture has been injured for nothing, and management increasingly prefer a controlled training environment to a competitive one they cannot regulate.

The result is a pattern that recurs across the game: touring sides arriving days before a series with a single practice fixture, or with none, and playing themselves into form during the Tests themselves. Coaches and former players have complained about it for years, and the complaints have not changed the schedule, because the pressures listed above have not gone away.

1. 1Fixture list is confirmedAnalysts begin assembling venue histories, ball behaviour, opposition footage and previous touring records for the same country, often many months before departure.
2. 2Conditions plan is writtenThe staff decide what the series will demand that the players do not already do, and choose the small number of technical adjustments worth attempting in the time available.
3. 3Squad is selected for the conditionsAttributes that the destination rewards are weighted above recent domestic form, and travelling reserves are added to cover the injuries a long tour will produce.
4. 4Home-based skill work beginsBatters and bowlers rehearse the specific adjustment on surfaces prepared to imitate the destination, using the correct make of ball where it can be obtained.
5. 5Advance party or A-team travelsSome players arrive early, or are already in the country with a second-string side, absorbing the time-zone shift and the conditions before the main group lands.
6. 6Squad arrives and acclimatisesHeat, humidity, altitude and the body clock are worked on deliberately in the first days, with training load managed around adaptation rather than against it.
7. 7Pitch and venue reconnaissanceThe captain and coaches inspect the square repeatedly, watch the preparation, and adjust the intended eleven as the surface reveals what it is going to be.
8. 8Final practice is built around the planNet bowlers replicate the opposition's specific threats, batters rehearse the chosen adjustment under match-like constraints, and the eleven is settled.

The usual order of the work. The later stages compress or disappear when the schedule is tight, and the earlier ones expand to compensate.

The A-team tour, and what it replaces

The most common substitute for the tour match is the second-string tour: an A side sent to the same country a few weeks ahead of the senior team, playing multi-day fixtures against the host's A side.

It does several jobs at once. It gives fringe players competitive cricket in the exact conditions the senior series will use. It lets selectors watch candidates perform there rather than guess whether they would. It puts a group of replacement players already in the country, adjusted and match-fit, so an injury in the first Test can be covered from within the time zone. And, where the schedule allows, a few members of the senior squad join the A side for a fixture, which is a tour match by another name.

The limits are real. An A tour serves the players on it, not the eleven that will play the first Test, and those groups overlap only partially. It costs money that some boards do not have, so the countries that use the mechanism most are the ones that already tour best. And it is itself vulnerable to the calendar: an A tour scheduled against a domestic competition, or against another national commitment, ends up drawing from a thinner pool than intended.

Acclimatisation, and the four separate adaptations it involves

Acclimatisation is usually discussed as one thing. It is at least four, they run on different timescales, and only one of them can be rushed.

Time zone. The body clock shifts at roughly an hour a day, so an eight-hour move takes about a week to settle. Sides manage it by shifting sleep and meal times before departure, by controlling light exposure on arrival and by scheduling the first training sessions at the time of day the matches will be played rather than whenever is convenient.

Heat and humidity. The physiological adaptation, involving plasma volume and the sweat response, takes one to two weeks of actually working in the conditions. It cannot be obtained by sitting in an air-conditioned hotel between sessions, and it is the adaptation most likely to be curtailed by a short arrival window. Sides increasingly do part of it at home in heat chambers, which produces some of the effect without the travel.

Altitude. Slowest of the four, and relevant to a small number of venues where the thinner air also changes how the ball swings and how far it carries. A side arriving two days before a match at altitude will be short of breath in the field and will also find its bowlers getting less movement than they expect.

The light and the ground. Underrated, and specific to cricket. Sightscreens, background, the colour of the sky at that latitude, the hardness of the outfield underfoot and the way a red ball looks against a particular stand all affect a batter's judgement of length. Fielders misjudge high catches in unfamiliar light for a week. None of this is trainable in advance; it simply requires time on the ground.

Net bowlers, and why a squad takes six people who will never play

The net bowler is the least visible member of a touring party and one of the most useful.

The basic reason for taking them is arithmetic. A frontline attack cannot bowl at its own batters in the nets without spending exactly the workload it needs for the match. Every over a fast bowler sends down in practice is an over he cannot send down on the first morning, and on a tour with matches close together there is no spare capacity at all. So the batters need somebody else to face.

The second reason is specificity. If the series will be dominated by left-arm seam over the wicket, or by a leg spinner bowling into the rough, the batters need to face that particular problem hundreds of times, and the touring squad may contain nobody who bowls it. Boards therefore select net bowlers to imitate the opposition rather than to represent the squad, and a group of them will often be assembled precisely to cover the specific types the host side picks.

The third reason is developmental, and it has become the significant one. Net bowlers are usually young domestic players, and a tour puts them in a professional environment for weeks: the same warm-ups, the same analysts, the same recovery protocols, the same dressing room. Several have converted the role into a debut. It is now a recognised rung on the ladder rather than a favour to a local club.

The role has an obvious tension inside it. A net bowler is being asked to bowl well enough to test international batters and to bowl what he has been told to bowl rather than his own best ball, and those two requirements pull against each other. The good ones understand the assignment and are asked back.

The ball, and the weeks spent learning a different one

Test cricket is played with three principal makes of ball, and the differences between them are large enough to reorganise a bowling plan.

They differ in the prominence of the seam, in how the leather is finished, in how long the shine lasts and in how the ball behaves once it is fifty overs old. One holds a hard, pronounced seam and rewards a bowler who hits the surface with an upright wrist. Another goes soft earlier and pushes an attack towards reverse swing and towards spin. The construction differences behind that are covered in the article on how a cricket ball is made, and the late-innings consequence in the piece on why an old ball starts to reverse.

A touring bowler therefore has to relearn a feel he has spent a whole domestic season building against a different object. That takes repetition rather than instruction, which is why sides obtain the correct make of ball weeks before departure and use it exclusively in preparation. Batters have the same problem in reverse: a ball that stops swinging after twenty overs and one that keeps going for forty demand different decisions about when to start driving.

Where the series includes a day-night fixture the problem multiplies again, because the pink ball behaves differently from either and behaves differently at different times of the evening. That is a preparation subject of its own, set out in the guide to the pink-ball Test.

Pitch reconnaissance, and the limits of what can be learned

A touring captain will walk out to the square every day for several days before a Test, press a thumb into it, look at the grass length, ask the groundsman a question he will not get a straight answer to, and walk back none the wiser than an experienced observer would be.

That ritual is not theatre, but it is more limited than it looks. What a side can genuinely establish beforehand is the venue's general character: the typical amount of seam movement in the first session, whether the surface holds together or breaks up, how quickly it slows, whether the ball keeps low by day four. The taxonomy is set out in the article on the main types of cricket pitch, and the preparation process itself in the piece on how a square is actually made ready.

What cannot be established is the specific surface being prepared for this match. Grass cover changes in the two days before a Test. Rolling schedules change. Weather in the week before does more to a pitch than anything a groundsman intends. And a home board that wants a particular kind of surface will get one, which is entirely within the rules and is one of the oldest advantages in the sport.

The practical response is to keep the eleven flexible until the last possible moment. Sides name twelve or thirteen, hold back the decision between a third seamer and a second spinner until the morning, and accept that the reconnaissance is a probability rather than a plan. A side that commits to its eleven four days out has committed to a forecast.

Travel, logistics and the size of a modern touring party

The playing group is now a minority of the people who travel.

A modern party includes a head coach and assistants for batting, bowling and fielding, a physiotherapist, one or more strength and conditioning staff, a doctor on longer tours, a team analyst, a masseur, a media manager, a security manager, a logistics manager and often a throwdown specialist whose entire job is to deliver high-speed balls from a side-arm. Add the players and the reserves and a long Test tour moves a group the size of a small company between cities on a fixed schedule for two months.

The logistics have direct competitive effects. Internal flights on the day after a Test cost recovery time. A hotel with a gym is a different preparation environment from one without. Training grounds have to be booked far in advance, and the quality of the practice pitches at those grounds varies enormously; a side that gets three days on surfaces nothing like the match pitch has effectively not practised. A good logistics manager is worth a place in the eleven, and this is the least romantic true statement in the sport.

Then there is duration. Long tours away from home are hard in ways that do not appear in any dataset, and boards now manage them explicitly, with family visits scheduled into the itinerary, breaks written into the schedule and rotation used to send players home between formats. Rotation is unpopular with supporters and is a straightforward response to a calendar that would otherwise keep a fast bowler abroad for four months.

Why touring records differ so much by country

Away records vary far more between destinations than raw quality would predict, and the reason is that the size of the adjustment is not the same everywhere.

Three factors set it. The first is the distance between home conditions and the destination's. A side whose domestic cricket is played on surfaces broadly like the ones it is touring has a small adjustment; a side moving between opposite extremes has an enormous one. The steepest version is a team from seam-friendly conditions arriving somewhere the ball turns sharply from the first hour, where the problem is not that the batters play spin badly but that they have almost never had to play it as the primary threat. The mechanics of that surface are set out in the piece on what a turning pitch actually does.

The second is preparation time, and this is where the disappearance of tour matches shows up most clearly in results. The larger the required adjustment, the more preparation is needed to make it, and the modern calendar allocates preparation time by convenience rather than by difficulty. Sides frequently get the least preparation for the hardest tours.

The third is squad depth. A long series produces injuries, and a country with three international-standard replacements in each discipline absorbs them where a country with none does not. Depth is a domestic structure question rather than a touring question, and it is decided years before the plane takes off.

There is a fourth factor that is not about cricket at all: the accumulated psychology of a particular fixture. Some tours carry a weight of history that changes how they are played, and the long record of one of them is set out in the article on the history of the Ashes. Sides that have not won somewhere for decades arrive knowing it, and so does the home crowd.

Designing a net session against a specific opposition

A net session looks like a generic activity and, done properly, is nothing of the kind. It is built backwards from a list of the deliveries the series is expected to produce.

The design starts with the opposition attack. If a side expects to face a tall seamer who bowls a heavy back-of-a-length ball at the ribs, the batters need that ball repeatedly, from a bowler who can produce it, on a surface with enough pace to make it behave. If the primary threat is an off spinner bowling around the wicket into the rough to left-handers, somebody has to scuff up a length spot outside leg and bowl there for an hour. Neither of those happens by accident in an ordinary net.

Then come the constraints. Coaches increasingly impose match conditions on practice: a batter is given a target number of balls and has to survive them, or is out and stops batting, or has to score at a fixed rate against a field described out loud. The point is to reintroduce consequence, because the absence of consequence is exactly what makes an unstructured net a poor substitute for a fixture.

Bowlers get the same treatment in reverse. A fast bowler preparing for a series does not simply bowl; he bowls the specific plan against a specific dismissal, to a batter standing in the stance of the opponent he will face, with a marker where the fielder will be. He also bowls in spells of realistic length rather than in a continuous stream, because rhythm across a spell is a separate skill from accuracy in one over.

The last element is the throwdown specialist. A side-arm delivers a ball faster and from a different release point than most net bowlers can manage, which lets a batter rehearse the pace of the series without a bowler paying for it in workload. It is imperfect, because the ball comes from an arm rather than an action and gives none of the usual cues, and every batting coach knows it. It is used because the alternative costs overs a squad does not have.

The limited-overs leg is a different preparation problem

Most modern tours are not one series. They are a Test series with white-ball matches attached at one end, often with a partly different squad, and the preparation for the two halves has almost nothing in common.

The white-ball leg rewards a shorter list of skills practised at higher intensity: hitting to specific regions, bowling at the death, running between the wickets, and fielding under pressure inside a restricted phase. Conditions still matter, but they matter differently. A slow, low surface that would demand patience in a Test demands a completely different scoring plan in a fifty-over match, and the plan can be assembled in days rather than weeks.

That asymmetry has scheduling consequences. Boards routinely place the white-ball matches first because they sell better and because the venues are available, which means the Test squad spends its acclimatisation period playing a format that will teach it very little about the one that follows. Placing them afterwards protects the Test preparation and costs the host board money in the weeks when interest is highest. The choice is made commercially, and the touring side's Test record absorbs the consequence.

1. 1Land and shift the clockSleep, meals and the first light exposure are scheduled to pull the body clock towards local time at roughly an hour a day.
2. 2Move early, lightlyThe first sessions are short and deliberately unambitious, because heat and humidity adaptation requires working in the conditions rather than training hard in them.
3. 3Get eyes used to the groundCatching practice under the local sky, batting against the actual sightscreen background, and fielding on an outfield of unfamiliar hardness.
4. 4Face the correct ballNet sessions use the make of ball the series will use, against net bowlers chosen to imitate the opposition's specific threats.
5. 5Inspect the square repeatedlyCaptain and coaches look at the pitch on successive days, watch the rolling and grass cutting, and revise the likely eleven as it changes.
6. 6Play the practice fixture, if there is oneBatters get time in the middle, bowlers get spells of realistic length, and the staff get evidence rather than assumption for selection.
7. 7Name the eleven lateThe final call between an extra bowler and an extra batter is held until the surface has stopped changing, often until the morning of the match.

A typical sequence for the first week on the ground. Compressed schedules remove the middle stages rather than the last ones.

What to watch in the fortnight before a series

Four signals in the build-up tell you more than any prediction.

Who arrives early. A board that sends its top order out a week ahead of everybody else has decided the adjustment is technical and needs time. A whole squad landing four days before the first Test has decided, or been forced to decide, that it will play itself in.

What the net bowlers bowl. If a touring side has assembled a group of left-arm seamers and wrist spinners, it has told you exactly which opposition bowlers it is worried about, and the composition of that group is public information hiding in plain sight.

Whether the practice fixture is competitive. A three-day match against a proper first-class side is preparation. A one-day hit against a local invitational team is a training session with spectators, and the difference will show in the first session of the Test.

How late the eleven is named. A side naming its team two days out is confident about the surface. A side holding the decision to the toss is telling you it does not yet know what it is playing on, which is usually the more honest position.

The tour is largely decided before the first ball, and almost none of that is televised. More on the formats, conditions and calendar that shape it is collected in the cricket section, and the rest of the explainers are on the blog.