And then there was one. The Perth Scorchers took out the BBL06 final on Saturday day in dominant fashion, claiming their third Big Bash League title in the six seasons of the competition.
It’s three titles in the last four seasons, in fact.
In terms of consistency, only the Melbourne Stars can also claim finals participation every season, but it’s there the comparison ends; when it comes to actually winning finals, the Scorchers stand alone.
The record now reads runners-up in BBL01 and 02, champions BBL03 and 04, semi-finalists BBL05, champions again for BBL06. They are the dominant T20 side in Australia.
The finalists
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Perth continued their late-season preference to bowl first, forcing the Sydney Sixers to do something they’ve gone to great lengths to avoid this summer.
After losing the toss, the Sixers never settled, and once again lost wickets in clumps: 3-8 at the top, 3-6 in the middle order, and another 3-24 at the end.
Mitchell Johnson and Jhye Richardson led the Perth attack, but all the Scorchers bowlers bowled well.
Sam Whiteman and Michael Klinger went hard early, and once they made it through the powerplay unscathed, the title was theirs. Whiteman fell for 41 in the eighth over, and Klinger (71*) and Ian Bell (31*) did the job with more than four overs up the sleeve. A long night of partying in the west started before the sky was even close to dark.
It was confirmation that the Scorchers were the most consistent team in BBL06. They won seven of their ten games, having good success posting strong totals and then applying pressure through their wonderful bowling attack. Two of their three losses came on the back of low totals batting first, and the third was at the hands of some exceptional hitting from Brisbane’s Chris Lynn and Brendon McCullum.
For their last three games, they switched to a bowl-first approach, and won by applying the screws up front; they restricted Hobart to 6-134, the Stars to 8-136 in the semi, and the Sixers to 9-141 in the final, and won them all with at least three overs to spare.
Six batsmen made more than 120 runs for the tournament, and four bowlers took nine or more wickets, highlighting a broader reliance on team, rather than individual, contributions.
The Sixers will be devastated at losing the final, but in reality, the squad they had and their relative lack of depth and true game-breakers means just making the semis is a remarkable effort.
I haven’t been particularly generous toward the Sixers this summer, because I really haven’t seen a lot to be generous about; they made the final on the back of winning half a dozen or so single moments in games, and several of them came after being well beaten for large parts of games they went on to win.
Yet they did keep winning, and this says plenty about the character within their squad. They used 20 different players in BBL06, and 13 of them played five or fewer of their ten games. The Sixers never bowled a side out this summer, but were twice bowled out themselves, and finished nine down in another two innings; one of them the final. Yet they kept winning.
Aside from Sean Abbott, Ben Dwarshuis and Nathan Lyon with the ball, and Daniel Hughes and Moises Henriques with the bat, they had few consistently good contributors, and this will surely force them to look at how they put their list together next summer.
Once the disappointment subsides, and the results are looked at more closely, the Sixers may come to recognise their season for what it was. They’re the over-achievers of BBL06.
The semi-finalists
Another season, another lost semi-final for the Melbourne Stars. Even knowing they would lose a few players to national ODI duty, the Stars looked to have a reasonably strong list going into the BBL, strong enough that I thought they looked good enough to take the title.
What eventuated was a stuttered, consistently inconsistent season that finished with the Stars leading the chorus on schedule conflicts, rather than looking at their own backyard.
And that made it almost funny when they lost a fifth semi-final in six seasons; in truth, their depth proved a mirage, and their main contributions came from unlikely sources like Rob Quiney and Ben Hilfenhaus. Kevin Pietersen, Luke Wright and Scott Boland all played their part, but that would’ve been expected. Their batting and bowling tallies don’t make for great reading, though.
The Brisbane Heat won through to the semis on the back of Mark Steketee’s bowling, Brendon McCullum’s batting, and mostly, Chris Lynn’s eye. Lynn made three of the eight highest scores for the competition before his national call-up and subsequent injury diagnosis, and he and McCullum were both finding the boundary one way or the other every fourth ball they faced.
And as entertaining as that definitely was, it was obvious that once you got Lynn and McCullum, there wasn’t a lot to follow, save for the likes of Alex Ross and Joe Burns.
Steketee was one of the surprise packets of the BBL, and it was really good to see Mitchel Swepson’s confidence grow as the tournament went on – even more so after he received the Shane Warne-endorsed ticket to India.
The other four
If there was a team who found new ways of losing close games this summer, it was the Melbourne Renegades. They lost to Perth off the last ball, to the Sixers off the last ball – which was actually a free hit – and then, after posting the biggest first-innings score in BBL history, watched on powerless as Ben McDermott and Hobart completed the highest-ever run chase.
If they won just two of those three games, they’d have topped the table. The difference between successful and disappointing seasons is that small. But that won’t help Aaron Finch sleep.
The Adelaide Strikers were probably the disappointment of BBL06, and I’m surprised Brad Hodge has been told he won’t be required next summer – more than a few players in the Strikers side could look at Hodge’s contributions alongside their own and run a distant second. Ben Dunk finished the leading run-scorer – securing his services was the great coup of the summer – and Hodge trailed him by about 80 runs, but there wasn’t another Adelaide player in the top 25 batsmen.
Their bowling isn’t much better and they had no-one in the top ten wicket-takers; New Zealand leggie Ish Sodhi and Ben Laughlin finished with nine wickets each, but Sodhi’s came in just three games. But sure, sack the old bloke…
I didn’t think Hobart had much chance of making the finals, and in hindsight I could’ve substituted out ‘much’ for ‘any’. They might have unearthed a possible gem in McDermott, but even he suffered similar inabilities to follow good scores up as the rest of the batsmen.
One thing’s for sure, the Hurricanes can thank the Australian selectors for dropping George Bailey from the ODI side; their batting could’ve been a whole lot worse without him.
Bowling wise, this is the key point that explains just about everything: 11 bowlers took just 40 wickets between them, with Dan Christian and Stuart Broad taking 17 of those.
That just leaves the Sydney Thunder. They were, in a word, terrible. It was always going to be hard to replace Mike Hussey and Jacques Kallis from last year, and it was highly likely they wouldn’t see much of Usman Khawaja. But they didn’t even try to replace them, and that’s why they reverted to type so quickly.
They got some good service from Eoin Morgan and Carlos Brathwaite as imports, and Shane Watson and Fawad Ahmed played very well for most of the tournament. But that was it, really. Too many passengers, not enough contributions. Andre Russell was a complete waste of money.
The only saving grace was the home crowd at the Sydney Showground. And it’s going to take a very different approach to BBL07 to ensure those patient fans keep coming back.
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