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The melancholy that is our system of cricket showed how broken down it is with the loss to New Zealand. While you may be inclined to think that is the worst of it, the biggest current issue lurks quietly in the dark, hidden by the pomp of the Big Bash League.
From now until the end of January, there will be no Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia as the pumped up but horribly awful Big Bash League takes centre stage.
In this time there are four Tests to be played against cricketing powerhouse India, that despite a hammering from England retains a healthy arrogance about its position in cricket.
Ergo: there is no chance for Australia’s in-form or out of form players to reassure themselves or push for selection.
For the four Test series against India, Australia will bank on either the current team discovering an abundance of form or a Twenty20 blaster having the ability to go the distance.
If Australia was to stack up against Zimbabwe, Scotland or France, we may just get away without Sheffield Shield cricket, but to employ this ludicrous scheduling in the middle of a major Test series is a death sentence for the competitiveness.
While Cricket Australia and its Big Bash League will be promoted like an Ashes series, I am willing to bet that 95 percent of cricket fans will remember and talk more about how calamitous the Aussies were in the Test series than who won the Big Bash League.
Surely the Big Bash would be better suited to October-November when Australia is (a) generally playing a series outside of Australia, and (b) the gigantic monsters of AFL NRL and rugby union finish, leaving an open sporting period for four to six weeks.
Cricket Australia continues to say that Test Cricket is at the forefront of planning and development in this country. But like a benevolent dictator clinging on to power, what Cricket Australia says isn’t necessarily happening.
Imagine if we had no Shield cricket before our current Test World Championship (The Ashes)?
What this whole incident shows is that there is a complete lack of direction coming from within the Cricket Australia management team.
It shouldn’t matter whether there are 14 or 10 or even 258 directors/managers. That debate means nothing when there is absolutely no vision and direction coming out of an organisation.
Shield cricket is the barometer of whether we judge our system as working or not. To truncate the Shield and mess with it only sends everything else that is Aussie cricket out of place.
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