Cricket Seasons by countries

December is cricket season in the Southern Hemisphere. Waking up early to watch test matches in Australia had been ritual for many in India. It’s much easier to watch them in the US as matches start in the afternoon/ evening. This is also the time when there are matches in New Zealand and South Africa (and Zimbabwe this time). I was wondering if this is indeed the busiest time for test cricket and went into the rabbit hole thanks to this amazing dataset of the test cricket on Kaggle.

Looking at the test matches after 2000 (excluding Zimbabwe and Ireland), December is indeed the month with most matches (157) over last 25 years. As expected, the number is dominated by Australia, followed by South Africa and New Zealand. September is the month with the least number of matches.

Few interesting observations.

• Test matches are played in all countries in November (except England of course). January is also such month.
• Test matches in India are played from October to March. But for some reason, there have been only one test match in January in India in the past 25 years. That was in 2024 against England. One match in June is the debut match for Afghanistan.

• May to August as expected is dominated by English summer. But most matches in Sri Lanka are also played in this season. I had not expected this considering this is monsoon season in the South Asia.
• Rather Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are the only countries where a test match has been played in the every month of the year.
• When I first looked at 4 matches in July in Australia, I thought this must be some data error. But they are 2 series which Australia had played against Bangladesh (2003 — Hayden 380) and Sri Lanka (2004). These matches were played in Cairns and Darwin on the North coast of Australia where weather is tropical! Australia also has a all test matches concentrated in only 3 months of the year.

The dataset is pretty comprehensive and will be interesting to explore player level data in the future. For now, here is the notebook, if anyone want to explore further.