Cricket seasons are the times of the year when cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

 is played.

Because top-class cricket is almost always played outdoors, on uncovered pitches, and rain prevents play, the seasons in each country are geared to coincide with the driest months of the year. The hours of daylight and the temperature are also factors in some countries. For example, in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

the winter days are too short and often too dark, and the temperature is too low, for playing cricket to be practical.

When designating cricket seasons, the convention is to use a single year for a northern hemisphere summer season, and a dashed pair of years to indicate a southern hemisphere summer. Hence, 1948 for the English summer season and 1948–49 for the Australian summer that followed some months later.

In the UK, the cricket season starts mid-April and ends in September.