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The everlasting image of this summer, for me at least, will be a moustachioed, sleeve-tattooed Mitchell Johnson steaming in as an English batsman waits at the other end, wishing he was anywhere else.
Last summer? I love cricket but it wasn’t even on my radar. The image was Alessandro Del Piero, hovering over a free-kick in his wheelhouse zone outside the box at a crucial moment in a Sydney derby.
It’s funny how quickly things can change. In that is a lesson football, which not even five months ago looked set to become the undisputed king of summer sport, now has to heed.
A-League suits will say the competition is still building, attendances are up, it’s been good quality, the Asian Cup is coming, blah blah blah.
But a great mass of Australians have spoken through crowd figures, TV ratings and social media, the modern day watercooler. Cricket wins this round, folks. By a long, long way.
You know what – that’s completely fine. The last three A-League seasons have been unbelievable.
A trough was always going to come. Perhaps football wasn’t prepared for it to be such a harsh one, though.
The losses of Ange Postecoglou and Graham Arnold have hurt the broader on-field quality of the A-League, or at the very least the perception of its quality, which is arguably just as important when trying to attract neutral fans.
Recruiting, across the board, has been poor – a fact perhaps willingly swept under the carpet during the debate over whether the AFC U22 Championship was “degrading” the A-League by taking away its best young players.
And too many matches have been boring, usually all involving the same carousel of underperforming teams that can’t figure out if they’re Arthur, Martha or Barca.
The je ne sais quoi of season 2012-13 is gone. But that makes for an ideal time to take stock of everything, soak in a couple of tips from the winners and move on, bigger and better.
There are two main things football can take away. Lesson number one – star power is massive. Bigger than you think. Just ask Cricket Australia.
For the first time since the retirement of Warne, McGrath et al, there is now a full set of “characters”, if you will, in the national team. Characters in our summer sporting lives.
We know them well, their strengths and weaknesses, their tendencies and ticks. They feel a part of us. Nathan Lyon is the loveable goob, Peter Siddle eats like 25 bananas a day, et cetera.
There are few things more comforting than watching an Australian side you know intimately winning a Test match.
Compare with the A-League. The great Alessandro Del Piero is crocked, visibly frustrated and rumoured to be on the way out.
Shinji Ono is gone at the end of the season. Emile Heskey has barely been sighted, and when he has he’s been lumbering around in his own inimitable way to no real effect.
Harry Kewell, when not injured, has his hands full trying to fix the Heart. Fans are kind of over the remainder of the golden generation.
An ageing William Gallas spends more time talking about his Premier League successes on Fox Sports than he does trying to repeat them. Pablo Contreras, meanwhile, is flat out keeping his place in the Melbourne Victory team.
If it feels like the end of something, that’s because it could be – none of these names are likely to be in the competition next season. Even Besart Berisha and Youssouf Hersi might be overseas. Who’s left?
Big names got the ball rolling last season. With the current crop set to leave, the opportunity is there after the World Cup to bring in some fresh new marquees.
It’s an opportunity that has to be taken, if only to help mask the A-League’s nasty inconsistencies on field and stay relevant.
Which brings us to lesson number two – hype is great, but it has to be backed up.
For the non-committed sports fan, it could feel like the self-proclaimed “best A-League season ever” has promised the world and delivered Maps on iOS.
Too many coaches and clubs have flattered to deceive. They talk a big game but rarely produce.
Players on the rise are built up as potential internationals before they have even become a master at home, and inevitably stumble when taking the next step.
The A-League itself has clearly progressed over time but, as a spectacle, it is not quite as far along as some wish to claim.
The Ashes? It was everything it was billed to be and more. The Big Bash League? Once dismissed as novelty tripe, it seems marketing nailed the brief after all.
While it runs for only a fraction of the summer, it has taken the baton from the Ashes series and become a behemoth.
It is what it is, the BBL. It might be contrived and cheesy. But rarely does it fail to produce a mix of maverick cricket and guilty pleasure entertainment.
Can a similar claim be made about, say, any random Sunday afternoon game at Hunter Stadium this season? Of course not.
If a good game of football is Heston Blumenthal then, sure, the BBL is Huey’s Cooking Adventures.
But while the end product is smothered in oil and probably cooked incorrectly (bless you Huey), it feels really good when you’re eating it.
In reality that’s all that matters – that a whole bunch of people have been watching and talking about and enjoying cricket over football. It’s undeniably hampered the A-League’s mojo.
But here’s one last thing football can take from cricket. Things can change very quickly.
For instance, nobody expected a 5-0 Ashes whitewash. Nobody expected BBL03 to be this good, either.
The roles of football and cricket in this tale were essentially reversed little more than a year ago. WIth no Ashes in 2014-15, they could again.
It’s all on the FFA to see if it can do a Darren Lehmann and get the A-League back to the way it used to be.
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