The end is nigh for our summer of discontent

 
Adrian Musolino Columnist

By , 16 Feb 2010 Adrian Musolino is a Roar Expert

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As the winter football codes launch into their seasons, Australia leaves behind what many are bemoaning as a forgettable summer of sport. A summer that Sport & Style labelled as the ‘Summer of dud’ .

Across all of the summer sports, off-field talking points overshadowed on-field performance – and what happened on the field wasn’t always of the highest quality.

The summer saw the following in each sport:

Cricket
Pakistan and the West Indies did little to entertain on their Australian summer sojourns. Their woeful and inconsistent performances shone the spotlight away from what was happening in the middle of the park and onto how the game could balance its three versions.

With the Big Bash Twenty20 comp making serious inroads this summer, and the debate on the impact Twenty20 will have on the game as a whole growing, the fifty-over form of the game suffered most with woeful crowds – only 8,378 turned up to Adelaide Oval, the lowest crowd ever for a one-day international involving Australia on home ground.

But before we condemn the fifty-over game, consider the mess of the summer calendar. The calendar had no semblance, jumping between the three forms of the games throughout the summer. The game has confused its audience, and off the back of Twenty20 fixtures, it’s hardly surprising the fifty-over format failed to entice crowds – particularly after such a congested and overloaded summer of fixtures.

Few classic moments on the pitch, lots of question marks off it.

Tennis
Make no mistake, Channel 7 stifled the summer of tennis with its Australian Open coverage, with the controversy around their coverage developing into the talking point of January.

In the absence of a gripping story arc – think Alicia Molik, Jelena Dokic comebacks or an Aussie bolter – the media seemed disinterested in events at Melbourne Park, running out of adjectives for Roger Federer’s brilliance. But it was Channel 7’s coverage that saw ratings plummet, and the Open was the innocent victim of their waywardness.

A-League
While the two biggest clubs in the country fought out a great Premiership battle, attention was never far from crowd figures across the league, not helped by the saga involving Gold Coast United owner Clive Palmer and his crowd capping saga.

With the FFA’s attention on the World Cup bid, the absence of significant promotion and advertising for the A-League – combined with the limited reach of Fox Sports – is costing the domestic game badly.

The A-League will continue to exist in the shadows if it cannot find a way to breakthrough the public disinterest and expand beyond its hardcore base of football fans.

Golf
Remember the fanfare of Tiger Woods’ Melbourne visit? It was soon swept away in a wave of sexual depravity and infidelity.

Basketball
Remember the NBL? Few can, it seems.

Hamstrung by its non-existence in major markets such as Sydney and Brisbane, and struggle in the strong sporting market of Melbourne (a 2,912 average for the Melbourne Tigers), the NBL’s presence in the Australian sporting psyche is, sadly, negligible – despite some strong support from regional centres such as Cairns.

It has become the forgotten summer code.

Each of these sporting codes faced their own dilemmas and questions this summer, and these undoubtedly overshadowed what was happening on the field and distracted the media.

It’s little wonder the media has been crying out for the return of footy, while filing their cricket obituaries together with their tennis ones.

And as Richard Hinds points out , albeit in an unusual way, the media has more than ever filled the summer void with any sprinkling of news from the winter codes.

While the media’s been quick to write-off the Australian summer of sport just past, it hasn’t been as bad as they’ve portrayed, except for Pakistan’s fielding.

The summer codes are merely in a state of flux and development.

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