Australia's Test players to have a two-week window to play in the BBL

Australia's Test players are going to have a rare uninterrupted two-week window to play in the BBL 2025-26 season following the home Ashes series, fostering hopes within Cricket Australia (CA) that the upcoming season could be one of the best ever following the fixture announcement on Thursday.

The BBL season will begin on December 14 in Perth with Perth Scorchers hosting Sydney Sixers, three days before the start of the third Ashes Test in Adelaide between Australia and England. The 40-game regular season will run until January 18 before the finals are played from January 20 to 25, with the tournament ending on the Sunday night before the Australia Day public holiday on January 26.

The fifth Ashes Test in Sydney runs from January 4 to January 8, meaning Australia's Test players will theoretically be available for the last ten days of the regular season. It is more likely that only select batters will be available following a gruelling five-Test series. But there remains a hope from the BBL that some of the bowlers and allrounders may play as part of their preparation for the T20 World Cup in February. However, CA's high performance team and the players themselves will have the final say on their availability.

Nonetheless, it is a significant improvement on the last three years, when Australia had Test assignments in late January and early February, which did not allow Test players to play many matches in the competition. Head of the BBL leagues, Alistair Dobson, was optimistic that this could be one of the best BBL seasons ever.

"We earmarked this season from a while back," Dobson said. "Anything we do around international summer is huge. But then to have a good, clear run of nights available from mid-December through to the end of January, where we can play the BBL every night, is one that adds up to a pretty strong season for us.

"Inevitably, at other times, there are things that don't allow that, whether it's different scheduling of Test matches, whether it's the Australian team having content at the end of the summer, which might restrict potentially availability of some of our Test players and Australian players. So all those things in the mix this year give us confidence this is as good a year as we've had almost ever."

The schedule has been designed to give every team a home game in the last week of the season, with the hope that the Test players will be able to play for their clubs at home in that week as well as in the finals. Nathan Lyon looks likely to play his first game for Melbourne Renegades in that period after being contracted for the previous two years without playing a game.

But a number of other Test players are currently uncontracted, including the three fast bowlers in Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. Travis Head is also uncontracted after not playing a game for Adelaide Strikers, while Cameron Green has not played in the BBL since January 2020.

"It'll ultimately come down to an individual case by case basis with players of how they've gone through the summer and what their recovery is like, and their availability," Dobson said. "But certainly we see a great opportunity there for a number of them to come and play the back end of the season and through the finals, so hopefully that's a way to finish off a big season."

The league wasn't tempted to move the season back one more week to give those players a chance to play more games and also allow for some of the overseas players like Sam Curran to play more games after the ILT20, which finishes on January 5.

"I think our season has found a nice spot where it is for now. In terms of that school holiday finish, we work really closely with our broadcasters and our clubs to find a window there that works for everyone," Dobson said. "I think we've found a good rhythm in the past couple of seasons, particularly around finishing around the long weekend that was always our footprint that we set down from day one, and we think with the players that we picked up in the draft from around the world, shows that there's still lots of interest and excitement about coming and playing in the BBL."

Once again, the BBL has opted not to play games on Christmas Eve (December 24) or Christmas Day (December 25) and will not play a game on Australia Day (January 26). Dobson said the prospect of a game on Christmas Day continues to be discussed and said it could still happen in the future.

"Never say never," he said. "I think it's one of the ones where each year, when we sit down to lay out how the season might look. We consider it, and ultimately, the interest and the demand from our key stakeholders probably isn't there right now, whether that's broadcasters or clubs to push into that particular day, albeit it's discussed regularly."

Dobson also wasn't concerned about the prospect of three games being played at Marvel Stadium after the surface was substandard during last year's BBL. Renegades will host three games at the venue, including a Melbourne derby, but their first two matches will be played in Geelong.