THE curtain falls on Ireland’s home program at Malahide today. The summer of 2025 will be remembered for an embarrassingly slim fixture list further thinned by the weather. Today is Ireland’s ninth home match, but four have already been lost to rain and another cut short. It is the fewest home games played by the side since the amateur days of 2001.

At a meeting with the players on Thursday, Cricket Ireland chairman Brian McNeice expressed his own frustration: ‘I opened the meeting by saying, you know, that as far as I'm concerned, the amount of cricket that we're playing in 2025 isn't good enough to prepare you guys to play international cricket and to be competitive at ICC tournaments.

‘I'm not hiding from it.’

McNeice went on to give a rough outline of the shape of next summer’s action, which should involve visits from Bangladesh, New Zealand and Afghanistan, while recently departed CEO Warren Deutrom hinted in an interview with the BBC that India could also visit in 2026.

This week, Deutrom was announced as Director of the European T20 Premier League and Chair of Rules X, its parent company. The ETPL has been around in various guises since 2019 and each summer has promised to deliver a world class franchise league based in Dublin, Rotterdam and Edinburgh, and each summer failed to deliver.

Deutrom’s involvement may ensure the event has a better chance of happening, but for Cricket Ireland to allow the ETPL to dictate its summer again is a recipe for disaster. Clearing the summer schedule for eight weeks for the T20 tournament is the main reason Ireland has played so little this summer.

Already there is talk that the ETPL will take place in August/September next year, squeezing the calendar for what McNeice promised would be a ‘very exciting schedule’ in 2026.

Cricket Ireland needs to keep ETPL at arms’ length until it actually delivers something but it also emerged this week that McNeice has been appointed chair of ETPL and CI’s chief financial officer Andrew May will be a board director.

It is unknown whether the CI board has given its blessing for its members to assume such roles with an organisation that has up to now done only harm to Irish cricket and failed its players.

Those players will hope the skies stay clear today and they can give a good account of themselves on the field and collect just their fifth match fees of a forgettable summer.