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“It’s enough to break my heart, but I sense that just as one may have hoped the Hyundai A-League was gaining a piece of media turf, along has come a new summer sports phenomenon destined to usurp it”. With these words, Les Murray portrayed the possibility of a gloomy future for the A-League.
Cricket recently revamped its domestic T20 series, and despite misgivings from the traditional wings of the game, it seems to be taking off quite successfully.
After years of falling crowds and dwindling television coverage, cricket has finally got a product that is family and television-friendly, and you might say is the empire striking back.
Against this backdrop, we have the A-League which moved to summer, at least partly to escape the all-pervasive presence that is the dominant football codes at the elite level, the AFL and the NRL.
One wonders where they can turn if the BBL continues to take off.
Murray complains about the media attention awarded to the BBL, and claims it’s a mystery. It is not.
Cricket has a huge number of advantages here. It has been in the national awareness for longer than any other sport in this country. It has long been seen as the ‘Great Unifier’, that one sport that bridges the divide between the NRL, ARU and AFL.
Growing up, it was not strange to think of the year as being split into the cricket and football season.
Indeed, many major stadiums in the country are utilised along the same lines. Cricket has lent us some of our greatest heroes, all household names.
It is credited with bringing us out of the depression, bringing hope to the masses after World Wars.
It has had enormous political and media support. It has given the country the legend of Bradman.
The A-League hasn’t given us so many heroes. Yes, there are the guys who made their names in Europe and have returned, but these guys perform far too rarely in the national team here, and most people will never see them play live, especially if you live outside of Melbourne and Sydney.
The BBL has the backing of Cricket Australia, and its state associations are all shareholders in teams. This means that the BBL automatically benefited from stadium arrangements, and the Cricket Australia marketing machine.
The A-League has to contend with expensive stadiums they don’t own and some of which are unsuited to professional matches. With T20, Cricket was able to pull star power in the likes of Shane Warne and Matthew Hayden, as a neat counterpoint to the A-League recruitment of Brett Emerton and Harry Kewell.
If anyone pulls a crowd in Victoria, its Warnie. Hayden carries a similar mythology in Queensland.
In T20, cricket found a match of family-friendly length, not much longer than a standard football match, and this for me is why it will persevere. No longer do you need to spend an entire day at the cricket, there is now time to mow the lawn, do some housework and then you areoff to an evening at the BBL.
The convenience factor of this should not be underestimated.
In T20, cricket has found a television-friendly format, no longer requiring a day or several days of broadcast time.
This is going to be key when broadcast rights come up for bids in 2013. For the present, both association football and T20 are on PayTV platforms, and the BBL is streaking ahead. ASTRA ratings shows the BBL is slaughtering the A-League.
A-League supporters would have us believe that the Socceroos are the biggest national team, but nothing compares to the Australian cricket team for national awareness. It is the unstoppable juggernaut that dominates the summer, as it has since before Federation.
Where the A-league does get an advantage is that it has a longer season, but what happens if Cricket Australia simply extends the BBL season? They are already talking about expanding the competition, and with that comes an inevitable increase in the number of matches.
Murray’s assertion that the BBL is a new, summer sporting phenomenon, ignores the century and half that cricket has been around for.
The success of the BBL coverage and crowds is also interesting when you consider that A-League proponents use its mere six-year existence as a reason for crowds and TV being what they are, yet the BBL in its first year, is trouncing it for coverage, in both TV and news coverage.
Its food for thought in any case.
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