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A few games into the Big Bash League and Cricket Australia will be wondering where they have gone wrong.
It seems people aren’t flocking to the revamped league. While they will ponder, the answer comes from a fatal error of judgment.
Australian sport fans don’t like being taken for a ride and they respond by not attending sporting events. The last few A-League seasons are a perfect example, as the FFA stopped being interested and the crowds who felt they were being duped walked away.
Quite simply, if there is no passion in sport and everything feels neglected, Australians stay away.
Also, cricket is a game that is either loved or hated by people. Unlike AFL, rugby union, league, and football, the game cannot be followed casually. Only dedicated people will be infected by the cricket bug.
I bring this up because while watching the Twenty20 comp, reading reports on The Roar, and generally looking around, the soft BBL figures took me back to an interview in the latest edition of Inside Sport with the Modi of Australian BBL, Mike McKenna.
When questioned on how fans would react to the elimination of state rivalries, McKenna responded in way which I felt was smug: “Let’s get real. How many people are passionately committed to their state team? Sure there a plenty who follow the scores, check out the points table and are delighted when their state wins the Shield.
“However, only a few very loyal and passionate fans attend more than the occasional match. We average less than 1500 fans to state cricket clashes.”
While McKenna uses credible evidence to prove his points, using just crowd figures to measure state cricket passion is like measuring the tip of an iceberg. Ninety percent is below the surface.
Chief McKenna and his loyal deputies at Cricket Australia are like the captain of the Titanic; they misjudged the iceberg.
There is a huge level of state passion existing in Australian cricket. Whether New South Wales gloats after another Shield win, or talkback and newspapers in Adelaide are scathing of the Redbacks, state cricket plays is important and followed thoroughly.
Attendances have and will be soft due to a number of other factors that deserve another article. In my opinion, it is followed more closely than ever as Australian cricket fans look for the next big thing that can lift the baggy green team out of their current malaise.
McKenna and his BBL were not created organically like other sporting clubs. Instead of just fitting in, the BBL has made Cricket Australia, in my opinion, look terribly fake.
If McKenna thinks that passion can be transferred over to the BBL, he has rocks in his head. The BBL in its current form will never be more than casually followed by those who love the game. To them it is the baggy green first and the states second.
Those young and women that dislike cricket, being the BBL’s target demographic, will never attend a match because they don’t have that cricket bug.
What the BBL has done in New South Wales and Victoria has effectively split the 35-40,000 patrons of the BBL into two.
In the other states, fans feel that that these BBL teams aren’t theirs; rather they are a property of Cricket Australia.
Effectively, a good organic competition has been torn apart and replaced with a nothing contest in a ridiculous part of the year.
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