England add warm-up matches ahead of South Africa, Bangladesh and Australia winter tours

England have altered their pre-tour programme by scheduling warm-up matches ahead of their winter tours of South Africa, Bangladesh and Australia, a change revealed on 6 October 2026. The shift is particularly marked for the Test side under Stephen Fleming.

Last winter’s preparations began in New Zealand, where England’s build-up to their first game in any format comprised two relaxed training sessions and a cultural welcome ceremony involving local Māori elders, followed by a team-bonding break in Queenstown. Harry Brook described that trip: "Obviously there was a bit of golf played and a few drinks here and there and team meals and whatnot," adding that "it was just about trying to spend a bit of time together." He said the players "had a lot of fun." The way England prepared for tours subsequently became a defining issue.

After Queenstown Brook was in the Perth suburb of Caversham when England staged their only Ashes warm-up against the Lions at Lilac Hill, a club ground and public park. Their next team-bonding trip to the Queensland beach resort of Noosa preceded a two-day first-Test defeat. Those episodes underpinned questions about the balance between social cohesion and match readiness.

The relaxed approach was explicit in remarks from Brendon McCullum after his 2022 appointment as Test coach: "You’ve got to make it enjoyable, not just on the field but off the field, too," he said during his first winter in charge. The article notes he curtailed a warm-up fixture in New Zealand to take his squad to watch one of his racehorses in action, and he added: "We want guys to know that, when they board a plane to head overseas, they’re going to have a great time. The results will hopefully follow. I always felt when I was playing that everything was based around the cricket and sometimes you forgot to enjoy yourself. We’ll see how it works out but it’s worth a crack."

Following the Ashes sequence, McCullum was removed from responsibility for the red-ball side in July. "There is a lot that was learned," Richard Thompson, chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, said on Monday, admitting mistakes in the previous approach and saying they had been corrected. McCullum subsequently said late last month he was "trying to include a number of warm-up games" to make up for the fact that "a lot of these guys just haven’t played a lot of white-ball cricket."

On the white-ball front, England will play a Western Australia XI at the Waca as a warm-up before their ODI series in Australia next month, the first time in six years they have scheduled a warm-up match before a white-ball series. The article points out an irony that this preparation will occur in the same city where earlier choices drew criticism; it notes the pitches at both the Waca and Optus Stadium are overseen by the same curator, Isaac McDonald, whose ambition to nail "the characteristics of pace and bounce" made the decision to warm up on the low, slow surface of Lilac Hill "most puzzling."

For the red-ball team, England will stage more conventional preparatory fixtures ahead of each foreign assignment. A Cricket South Africa Invitation XI is lined up in Durban in December; the traditional Prime Minister’s XI fixture moves from Canberra to Melbourne’s Junction Oval and will be played with a pink ball as part of the buildup to the 150th anniversary Test at the MCG in March; and the two-match Test series in Bangladesh in February and March will have its own preparatory fixture. It means "in the space of a year England have gone from playing no significant warm-ups at all to scheduling a warm-up game at the end of a warm-up series preceded by a warm-up game."

The immediate measure of the revised plans will be results on the field, and England’s next confirmed engagement is the warm-up against a Western Australia XI at the Waca ahead of their Australia ODI series next month.