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Australian cricket team captain Ricky Ponting, left, talks with the chief selector Andrew Hilditch right, during a team training session at the Gabba Cricket Ground in Brisbane, Australia, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006. AP Photo/Mark Baker
The good:
Keeping the Sheffield Shield intact, including the final. Phew. How anyone could even conceive of dropping any Shield games from the schedule is beyond me. It’s the reason why Australia has been so consistently great at Test level, for goodness sake!
Trimming the One Dayers in the Ryobi Cup is also fair enough – but administrators may be surprised to find the public now actually wants to watch both it and the first-class format more often, because of…
The Bad: Scrapping the generally fun Twenty20 Big Bash state competition and putting in its place a virtually identical (but entirely different) Big Bash League is a stroke of utter ineptitude in marketing terms and tediously short-sighted.
The six state sides will be replaced with – hey presto – eight city sides, six of which just fancifully happen to be located in the exact same venues as always. And the other two new ones are in two of those same six cities as well. How on Earth will this junk be sold to the average punter now, with no clue as to the identity of any of the teams, let alone half the players. But there’s one potentially saving grace among the irritation…
The Brialliant: The World Series returns. You little beauty. I can’t be the only one who absolutely loved living off a diet of three-games-a-week for a month every January.
Like the good old days, Australia/India/Sri Lanka, plus presumably three stand-alone games against New Zealand for the Chappell/Hadlee Trophy. Whether the World Series is a nine or 12-match format before the final(s) is uncertain, but who cares? Neutral-team cricket is back!
And with Hobart now also floodlit, let’s make Canberra the new Hobart: India v Sri Lanka at Manuka. Those two words are gold, I tells ya, gold!
Say them again. World Series. Woo-hoo!
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