Cricket’s international calendar will be placed under renewed scrutiny when Australia tour Scotland and England next month for a series of matches with no meaning or context whatsoever.

The Australian selectors will this week unveil the squad, set to be a strong line-up that retains the core of last year’s World Cup-winning team minus the retired David Warner. His place is most likely to be taken by Jake Fraser-McGurk.

But much of the players’ private enthusiasm for the tour revolves around its proximity to some of Scotland and England’s best golf courses rather than any wider sense of importance, as is the case with Test series to compete for the Ashes urn.

At the recent Cricket Connects conference hosted at Lord’s by the MCC, Cricket Australia’s chair Mike Baird and his ECB counterpart Richard Thompson were part of a discussion about the need to reduce the number of meaningless matches.

“The key discussion point was the need to take meaningless content out of the schedule,” Baird told this masthead. “So content which is not attracting interest in terms of attendance at stadiums, viewership, without any sort of context for qualification [for World Cups], those games need to be seriously considered.

“So I think it starts with making some hard decisions, looking at the content we have. If we can’t get to a position where that content has context and/or jeopardy, then we probably need to scale back some of those matches. That’s a decision that all countries have to look at and decide.”

The matches against Scotland were agreed as a make-up for the cancellation of a one-off game in 2020 during the previous Australian white-ball tour of England, which took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the series against England – now expanded to three Twenty20 internationals and five 50-over games – will have no meaning other than as a sort of warm-up for next year’s Champions Trophy tournament to be played in Pakistan, and as a booster for the ECB’s broadcast rights fees.

The previous such tour, by England in Australia immediately after the 2022 T20 World Cup, drew pointed criticism from visiting players after they won the global event, only to have to stay on and play more games. Australia’s players were put in a similar position after winning the ODI World Cup in India last year.