What do you say: should I give this BBL a bash?

Expert

14th December, 2011

2255 Reads

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Ben Pobjie

Expert

14th December, 2011

2255 Reads

These are strange and troubling times for Australian cricket. There are so many questions to be asked. What’s going on with the Test team? Who should be in? Who should be out?

Is the real Australian team the one that squeaked home in Jo’burg and crushed the Kiwis in Brisbane, or the one that fell apart like wet tissues in Cape Town and Hobart?

Are we on the way up, or still bottoming out? How do you hit a ball that is unsporting enough to actually move sideways before it gets to you? How do you mend a broken heart?

And so on, and so forth. Confusion and uncertainty reign.

But nowhere do confusion and uncertainty reign more than in the upcoming Big Bash League.

I’ve been thinking about this brave new world Cricket Australia is ushering in, and in thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know what to think about it.

It is not that I hate Twenty20 cricket. The last four Tests Australia has played have shown that Test cricket is without peer when it comes to skill, drama, tension, intrigue and excitement.

I am not one of those hidebound traditionalists who thinks that T20 cricket was spawned from the loins of Satan and essentially everything’s been going downhill since they legalised overarm bowling.

I quite enjoy a bit of T20 action, it’s good clean fun and it keeps the kids off the street. I fully accept its place in the modern game.

But this Big Bash . . . I dunno. I can’t quite get a handle on it.

I’m looking forward to it, I suppose? Kind of? It’s . . . exciting? A bit? Maybe?

I’m not sure, and I wish to goodness someone would tell me how to feel, because I simply cannot determine it for myself.

OK, first there’s the matter of the players. We all know Shane Warne is coming back for the competition, bacon rolls permitting _ and that is, frankly, weird and disturbing, especially since the BBL has been scheduled smack bang in the middle of his gradual physical transformation into a triffid.

But OK, we’ve processed it, let’s move on.

So . . . Matthew Hayden too? What? And Brad Hogg? Wasn’t Brad Hogg about 50 years old even when he was playing for Australia?

And Brett Lee is there too, probably still thinking he can get back in the Test team if he just relaxes and hits a consistent line and length.

Why are you doing this, Brett? Isn’t it time you settled down and focused on your music career?

But OK, so we’ve brought back a few great Aussie stars of the past to pep things up a bit. Fair enough. And oh, Paul Collingwood too. No, seriously, you are taking the piss.

But more worrying than the elaborate prank that is the BBL playing roster is the matter of the teams.

What is it that causes us to form an attachment to a team? Where, in essence, do teams come from?

They used to be defined by their place of origin: a team represented a town or an area, and the inhabitants got behind their local team.

And yes, if the team was successful, it expanded far beyond that area: Collingwood neither plays nor trains in Collingwood any more, and if all their members actually entered the suburb at the same time it’d look like a zombie apocalypse; but still the club comes from Collingwood: it has roots.

What are the roots of these Big Bash teams?

Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart, of course, are kind of OK _ they’re one-team towns, so residents can just get behind that one team.

But I have a problem.

I can support a team from my home town of Sydney, or my adopted home of Melbourne. But there are two in each city, and I can’t see the point of difference that allows me to pick which one to follow.

Of course, as a five-year-old I chose to follow the Balmain rugby league team for a very simple reason: I liked tigers.

But using that system now runs into two problems: it’s a really stupid way to pick a team; and the names of the BBL teams are even stupider.

The Sydney Thunder? What does that even mean? You’ve named a cricket team after a natural phenomenon that actually puts a stop to play when it occurs?

What are the individual players called? Thunderettes? Raindrops?

Or should I back the Sydney Sixers? What is a sixer? A player who hits sixes?

Well, that seems a bit redundant. Everyone’s going to be trying to hit sixes, aren’t they?

Maybe the Sixers guarantee sixes: maybe we can get our money back if they score in any other denomination.

Or perhaps the name is more esoteric, referring to the players’ height, or age, or the founding of the club during the San Francisco fire of 1906. God only knows.

So maybe I’ll have to back Melbourne.

The Melbourne Stars? Frankly, that just seems boastful. We will be the judges of whether you are stars, thank you very much.

You Stars are just as bad as the Melbourne Victory.

And like the Victory, you will play alongside another Melbourne team with no particular reason for existing, and confuse fans as to which Melbourne they belong to (and incidentally, “Melbourne Heart” is possibly the worst name any team in any sport has ever had anywhere – they sound like they were founded by Care Bears).

That team would be the Melbourne Renegades. What are they rebelling against? Whaddya got?

I don’t know if I can back the Renegades – I don’t know if their reckless disregard for authority is what I’m looking for in a sporting team.

What if they are so renegade-ish that they refuse to turn up to matches because they’re smoking behind the toilets? What if they quit cricket to ride a motorbike across the country, solving crimes?

What exactly does “Renegade” signify?

Do they play by different rules from the other teams? Will they hold their bats backwards?

It’s all just so odd and confusing and artificial.

Can we get behind these strange hotch-potch teams, drawing players from interstate, out of their state teams, which they left their original state to play for in the first place?

Ed Cowan is from NSW, he went to play for Tasmania, but for a few weeks he’ll play for Sydney, and oh, I don’t know. Whatever, I guess.

In the end, it probably doesn’t even matter.

There’ll be fast bowling, and people will hit the ball into the crowd, and there’ll be music and fireworks and dancing and some kind of competition where if you catch a six you win a romantic dinner with Andrew McDonald.

I guess we have to be content with the spectacle, which should be . . . spectacular.

But I don’t know. Will any of it be real?

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Ben Pobjie

Expert

Ben Pobjie is a writer and comedian whose promising rugby career was tragically cut short the day he stopped playing rugby and had a pizza instead. The most he has ever cried was the day Balmain lost the 1989 grand final. Today he enjoys watching Wallabies, Swans, baggy greens, and Storms.