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Australian sports fans should take a bow for ignoring the launch of the Big Bash League this weekend. By forcing this farce into failure we can make sure our beloved game is protected from the dangerous forces of marketing stupidity.
The league had some great promotion over the last week. Star batsman David Warner nearly grabbed his country a miraculous Test victory, the big footballing codes didn’t announce anything major, and Shane Warne’s festy finger was all over the news.
Furthermore, there was a non-stop parade of respected cricketing heroes keen to talk about how great this was going to be. Stuart Clark, Matthew Hayden, Brett Lee, Stuart MacGill all got in on the act spruiking the new competition.
We shouldn’t be too surprised that none of them are annoyed about getting thousands of dollars to come out retirement for a few hours of work a week.
Hopes were high in Cricket Australia that the opening games would be in front of huge crowds at both the SCG and MCG.
Instead the competition was treated with the contempt it deserves. The opening games all failed get close to their hyped-up pre-match targets as a nation of cricket fans shrugged their shoulders and thought about Boxing Day.
This is the best possible result for Australian cricket and indeed Australian sport, since the Big Bash League’s failure will strengthen all the games we love.
There is nothing inherently wrong with T20 cricket as a game. It is certainly a smash-and-bash affair compared to Test matches, but our American cousins have a game just as short as T20 which they treat with a reverence nothing short of religious.
The first generation of the T20 Big Bash League was growing into something special. By its final year it had built to huge levels of support for our State squads playing the short game.
Cricket Australia decided that for the new generation of the game they would scrap the existing structure, so that the game could immediately have two teams in Melbourne and Sydney, and then have a second team in the other capitals at a later point.
This is cynical and risky, but not without precedent. The A-League did exactly the same thing, establishing brand new teams where existing teams were already in place.
However the A-League teams were allowed the dignity of being sensible grown-up sports teams with satisfying identities.
The geniuses at Cricket Australia have made eight identical groups of players, all of whom have two foreigners, one old timer, two current stars and ten blokes you have never heard of.
They then arbitrarily gave them a bright shirt, a random capital city and a stupid name.
The consequence of this is that as a sports fan, there is nothing about the Sydney Thunder to make you want to support them over the Sydney Sixers. You could follow your favourite player, but they could quickly get called up for Test match duties and then be off to another team next year.
Last year there was a reason to watch your home state run around. Cricket Australia has destroyed that link and asked us to get pumped about the Sixers squaring off against the Scorchers before playing the Stars and finally the Strikers.
Sports fans are rarely sports fans, they are team fans. For everyone with a Sherrin tattooed on their back there would be a thousand blokes with a Collingwood, St Kilda, or North Melbourne crest inked up. State of Origin is popular not because it is high quality rugby league, but because the good people of New South Wales and Queensland desperately want to see the opposition get smashed.
If this competition succeeds, it will send a message to sports administrators that the fans’ support can be chopped and changed to fit the greater good. They will have justification for the ridiculous ideas of merging Sydney NRL or Melbourne AFL teams since they are too close together.
Thankfully, this farce of a competition has failed to resonate with sports fans, and audiences are unlikely to build as the competition builds. Cricket Australia chased hard for easy inoffensive kiddy appeal, and when a teen idol doesn’t find an audience they don’t hang around until it builds, they get shafted for the next big thing.
The easy appeal of T20 cricket should have been a once-in-a-lifetime gift for Cricket administrators. Instead, they decided they should sever our link with the teams and get us all to support an arbitrary group of blokes in bright shirts.
We don’t even get to cheer for New South Wales in sky blue.
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