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After reading yesterday about the two new franchise name and colour combinations for Sydney’s 2011-12 Big Bash League teams, I don’t want to do what the advertising and marketing men want. I refuse to “trust pink and forget stains” when it comes to the way Cricket Australia is running the domestic level of the sport.
They may prize their new BBL product as something that will “vanish” the more traditional forms of the game in a single white-wash of the schedule, but I’m not buying it one bit.
According to the ads for the aforementioned laundry detergent, “it works on all types of stains, from the ones you can clearly see to those tiny ones you might miss”.
Stains like Australia’s recent record in Test cricket – vanished!
The public’s fondness for well-structured one-day series – vanished! The fact that most people seemed perfectly happy with the state-based Twenty20 format – vanished!
As reported yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald by Andrew Wu, it’ll be the Sydney Thunder – in bright green at the Olympic Stadium in Homebush, while the Sydney Sixers (I can hear Adelaide’s basketball fans already choking on their breakfast cereal) will play at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
What else was considered? The Rocks and the Edge, apparently. In orange and yellow. Sounds like a cross between the World Wrestling Federation and a U2 concert.
“Certainly, when these two teams play each other you’re going to have to get your sunglasses,” Cricket New South Wales chief executive officer David Gilbert was quoted as saying. Yikes. Talk about trying to talk up something that already sounds unsellable.
Thankfully, the two Sydney sides were banned from using the official New South Wales state colour of blue.
Of course, as has been mentioned already, the green is nicked from the Surrey Lions while the pink recalls the Middlesex Panthers in the English county competition, despite Cricket NSW’s commercial operations manager Christina Matthews’ assertion that both clubs will have “an identity all our own rather than copy someone else”.
“When you’re picking colours you’re looking at what’s going to be looking good for merchandise, uniforms and things like that,” she added.
So before you even start selling the new shirts, people will find out that they aren’t that original. Perhaps Englishmen living in Australia next summer can just block their ears at the ground and imagine it’s really a T20 game from the other side of the world?
For the purely statistically-minded out there, the bright green of the Surrey Lions may work. It won one T20 Cup in it. The same for the Middlesex Panthers (or the Crusaders, until complaints by both Jewish and Muslim groups encouraged the County board to have a re-think).
However, both finished outside the top eight in the 2010 edition. Middlesex has been at the T20 Champions League, though. Maybe there is something to thinking pink, after all?
Steve Wells of The Guardian knew it back on June 20, 2007.
“Real men wear pink!” he wrote.
“Sports stars should embrace pink,” he went on.
“Of course pink was once as butch as it comes. Any half-decent sociologist will tell you that right up to the 1930s, girls wore virgin blue and boys wore rugged pink.”
The best argument Wells can come up with for pink working?
“The England football team have never lost while wearing pink shirts,” he wrote.
“Partly because they’ve never worn pink shirts. Imagine if they did. And they beat Argentina wearing them. How good would that feel?
And we’ve probably all heard the theories that certain colours can play on the mind of the opposition (red is best for footballers because it makes the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool appear aggressive, apparently – although orange hasn’t exactly helped the Dutch at the top level very often).
Ultimately, though, it’s not the colour pink itself that bothers me about the oncoming BBL promotional storm – whether people think it promotes metrosexual pride, breast cancer awareness or intensive care wards exclusively devoted to caring for baby girls – but about what it says about Cricket Australia’s approach to the game.
If Cricket Australia really think this is what the majority of the cricket fans in this country want to see, it’s playing the wrong game and if sanity prevails, it should lose. Big time. Pass me a bottle of bleach to drink – I think I’m going to be sick.
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