In what would have been the first-ever men’s bilateral series, the Ireland-Australia Bilateral Series 2024 was indefinitely postponed following the confirmation from Cricket Ireland that they cannot “afford” to host Australia later this year.
Cricket Ireland’s chief executive, Warren Deutrom, made confirmations a few days back. Australia were scheduled to play a lone T20I and three One Days with Ireland in August.
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The reason why the Ireland-Australia Bilateral Series 2024 postponed
Not having a permanent stadium at home and the extremely high cost required to stage international cricket with temporary infrastructure are why Ireland could not host the series.
They held their last two bilateral series, against South Africa and Bangladesh, which were hosted in England.
“The simple fact for us was that because we have so few pitches here in Ireland that can host international cricket, we had to make a fairly difficult decision. It required us to have to open up Malahide Cricket Ground and if we were going to do that, we estimated it was going to be a very, very significant six-figure loss for us, to have to open up Malahide.”
– Warren Deutrom
While disappointed, this also gave CI a requirement to keep pushing their government to build a permanent stadium and said to have plans in place to build a high-performance centre at the new Sport Ireland campus.
“The fact is, broadcast rights wise, Australia would probably be the fourth-largest of all the various [opponents] that we would have… it wouldn’t even have covered the cost of production, opening up Malahide and bearing in mind it’s an entirely green-field site. Those, unfortunately, are the difficult decisions we have to make.”
– Deutrom added
Ireland will be playing 46 international matches this year, including hosting Pakistan (next month for three T20Is), Zimbabwe (one Test, three ODIs, three T20Is) and South Africa (three ODIs, three T20Is). The two series with the African nations are expected to be taken out.
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