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The Roar exclusive: With a big year ahead in both rugby and cricket, it’s been a priority of ours to hear from those actually making the decisions that we all debate so passionately on The Roar.
We heard from John O’Neill a few weeks back on the state of Australian rugby. Today we have a Guest Column from James Sutherland, the CEO of Cricket Australia.
The Australian cricket season is more or less at the half way point, with one Test, the KFC BBL finals, and the ODI triangular series looming, along with the Southern Stars women’s international cricket against New Zealand and the second half of the Bupa Sheffield Shield and Ryobi One-Day Cup.
The Ryobi will be on TV, as will a number of the women’s Twenty20 games, with three of them on ABC TV and two, played as double headers with the men’s International T20s, on Channel 9.
The Imparja Cup indigenous carnival is also only a few weeks away in Alice Springs and the business end of that tournament will be on NITV, which can be accessed on Foxtel.
And local club cricket is well and truly back on the park after the Christmas-New Year break. There are more Australians playing formal, organised cricket than there are in any other sport.
The new KFC BBL competition has literally jumped out of the starting blocks and the eight new teams have established their identities quickly. Crowds and TV ratings have been good. Importantly, crowds at evening BBL games have included a lot of families.
Anecdotally, kids are now chasing the autographs of 150 or so cricketers playing in Australia this summer, not just the 15 or so top names who feature most prominently in international cricket.
I was interested to hear a story about one hardened Test purist cricket writer who said he poo-pooed the new BBL team names and colours when they were unveiled some months ago but told us he has now changed his mind.
He mentioned how he had rung his five-year-old son back on the east coast after arriving in Perth for the Test there and was told by the excited boy: “Dad, the Scorchers won and are top of the ladder”. Another colleague told of seeing a primary school boy in Melbourne arrive at the game dressed in the full Renegades uniform, including batting helmet!
This is great, but we are not going to measure the success of failure of BBL for a few years yet.
The real test will not be this year’s ratings and attendances. It will be whether the two boys mentioned here, and the other kids of Australia, have become permanent cricket fans in five years from now. Because that is what BBL is all about – attracting the attention of new fans for cricket, particularly among children, females and non-traditional followers.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Bank series ODI cricket starts at the MCG on 5 February, culminating in finals at the start of March.
Globally, ODI cricket continues to attract a huge following and the return of the tried and true tri-series format this summer offers Australian fans a contest that culminates in a finals series of up to three finals in Brisbane and Adelaide.
ODI cricket has driven cricket’s growth as a world sport.
Having three viable formats might see some rebalancing of how much of each we play over the long term but I am convinced that offering three successful formats will continue to be one of cricket’s distinctive successes compared to other sports.
Coincidentally, the start of this summer’s Commonwealth Bank tri series coincides with the Australia-New Zealand 2015 ICC World Cup Local Organising Committee’s new CEO John Harnden moving into his new World Cup role.
We will be taking a long-view on ODI cricket as we move into February, with our selectors thinking about who we need to have a tilt at winning the ICC World Cup when it is contested in Australia/NZ in three years while cricket administrators will be rolling up the sleeves to start the nitty gritty detailed planning on staging those games.
This article appears as part of a 2011 / 2012 Australian Sports CEO series, exclusive to The Roar.
In this series, John O’Neill (Australian Rugby Union), James Sutherland (Cricket Australia), David Gallop (NRL), Andrew Demetriou (AFL), and Ben Buckley (FFA) all share with The Roar their thoughts on the year that was, or will be, for their respective codes. Read the full series.
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