Despite ‘bad for business’ pitches, Cricket Australia to continue allowing local curators to prepare home Test surfaces
3 min readUpdated: Mar 23, 2026 04:22 PM IST
Despite its recent home Test pitches in the 2025-26 Ashes series marking “bad for business”, Cricket Australia (CA) has decided against taking control over the playing surfaces across the country.
Last year, the Ashes matches in Perth and Melbourne ended in two days, costing CA about AUD 15 million in revenue. Despite the monetary setbacks, the CA has maintained that a one-dimensional approach will not work for the varying conditions across the vast country.
CA’s head of operations, Peter Roach, recently told the Australian Associated Press that it would be imprudent to overlook the pitches from a central standpoint.
“It’s inconceivable that we could ever control much more than we do now,” Roach said. “In England, you could put in a central curator to go around or New Zealand, or South Africa, because the wickets and the clays and the climates are so similar.”
“In Australia, because they’re so different, you could put the best curator in Australia to a different venue and all of a sudden they’re an also-ran for a while. Because they wouldn’t know the characteristics and the climate and how those pitches respond to that.”
CA maintains a target of requiring pitches to generally last at least four days and provide balance between bat and ball. The cricket board currently deploys consultants to help local staff and curators at the respective venues, but does not pass a tough verdict.
“The difference of our pitches across from west to east to north to south is so pronounced and it’s something that we don’t want to change,” he said.
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“We think it’s a really good competitive advantage that we don’t want to make our wickets all too similar like we see in some other countries.”
While freedom for local curators could also occasioally lead to polarised pitches that can cause two-day finishes, Cricket Australia maintained that the unpredictable nature would protect the interest factor.
“Giving curators the chance to explore their unique characteristics is really important. But with that comes a reasonable amount of risk,” Roach said. “It does mean that occasionally we go wrong … But I think our history is pretty good in terms of working with venues to improve them.”
