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The Big Bash is doomed. And if it isn’t, well, it damn well deserves to be. The first problem is Twenty20 itself.
Wake up, Cricket Australia – this version of the game is fast becoming dull. Cricket is a viscous sport, one which, when given time, conditions and players of sufficient skill, ebbs and flows organically and unpredictably.
Occasionally it conforms to our predictions, frequently it defies them utterly.
It’s a game that can leave the observer gobsmacked, puzzling how we got from here to there when things seemed like a fait accompli a day, an innings, a session ago. Certainly, at times the longer form can seem to lead while the players follow.
Yet it’s exactly these periods – when the impatient and ignorant complain of drift or dawdle – that create the space for something breathtaking to erupt. The 50-over game is a compromise, but as the nail-biters over the years have shown, a day is still enough time for a drama.
In forcing an inherently gradual game into such a compressed time frame, Twenty20 strips cricket of its guile, subtlety and potential and reduces it to little more than a dull mechanical exercise devoid of charm.
T20 deletes the exposition, plot twists, and rising action of the longer forms, leaving little more than than climaxes – boundaries and wickets, yay, anything else, boo. It’s like reading a novel composed with nothing but full stops and exclamation marks – an ugly, repetitive nonsense.
Batting’s no longer a craft, but an exercise in industrial threshing. The bowling is dire. Executed in a context that only T-ball bests for bias towards the bat, Twenty20 bowling has degenerated into a desperately negative endeavour, a ceaseless diet of low full tosses, as painful to watch as a kidney stone is to pass.
Yet as if that weren’t enough, Cricket Australia has now thrust upon us the new look Big Bash and its city-based ‘franchises’. Woe is me – synthetic teams playing an artificial game over the prime months of summer.
Just when we should be a enjoying a rich diet of cricket’s choice cuts, we’ll instead be dished up two months of empty calories, as the Big Bash dominates media interest and swallows up the nation’s key talent.
Reports that CA will elevate this inane confection over the late-December Chairman’s XI tour match against India, by locking Test aspirants into competing Bash commitments, is the final insult to those of us who love cricket, played properly.
There will, however, be a perfectly sound alternative for those interested in three hours of competitive bat and ball action this summer. Baseball. The Australian Baseball League’s sophomore season, which gets underway in November, is far more deserving of the attention of local sport fans than the Big Bash.
For starters, it’s a legitimate contest, not a debased form of a traditional sport. While the reborn ABL is fresh, the game being played will be much as it has been for 150-odd years, give or take a few tweaks along the way.
It’s also a competition aimed at enhancing, rather than exploiting, potential.
Unlike the Big Bash, which in the name of ‘entertainment’ takes emerging players and asks them to corrupt themselves – bat horizontally, bowl negatively – the ABL offers up and coming locals the chance to test and develop their skills against big league expats and foreign ball-players seeking to fine tune over the northern winter.
Backed by Major League Baseball and watched by offshore scouts, the ABL asks its prospects to improve, not improvise.
The Big Bash? Witness the floundering inelegance of Steven Smith late in last year’s Ashes series, or Dave Warner’s long form struggles (Zimbabwe aside) – both the sad result of Twenty20s’s malign influence on inchoate talent.
So come summer, as ever, I’ll be all over the Sheffield Shield, the Test series and even the one-day fixtures. But when it comes to the Big Bash, well, take me out to the ballgame.
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