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The main problem holding cricket back in this country is the mediocre club season. Whilst the Sheffield Shield might be millions of years old and originally handed down by God to Moses on a mountaintop, today it has little impact in the lives of the average cricket fans.
Looking forward to the year 2020, here’s some thoughts on what Cricket Australia should be doing to address a restructure of the spring-summer season:
Sheffield Shield Test matches:
Played during late July to early October in country towns in their respective states – 10 matches home and away and a final held from October 8th to 12th. Note: there is no Sheffield, one-day or Twenty20 series.
Test matches:
There should only be five Test matches – sorry Hobart, you miss out but you’re compensated elsewhere. Tests are arranged either as two series of two; three games or a five-game Ashes series. The dates remain as per traditional scheduling except for the fifth Test which would avoid the Australia Day holiday and instead wrap up on January 18th by the latest.
New Zealand should arrange their Tests to shadow the Australian date where possible. This means that there would be two touring teams down under over late November through to January – this is important to note for later on.
One dayers:
Gone. Australia and New Zealand should man up, take leadership and be the first countries to opt out of this format. The reason being is as follows:
International Twenty20:
Rather than a pointless 15 game three-way 50 overs tournament that fizzles with four irrelevant matches, the international short form contest can be reworked into the Twenty20 formula.
Australia and New Zealand would participate in a four-way series every summer along with the two touring teams who would also bring their Twenty20 specialists. Each team would play each other twice meaning there would be 12 matches. However, there would be six games involving Australia and six games involving New Zealand.
There would only be two games without them and those matches could be played as the first game as a double header. Because there are four teams in the tournament and no byes the round robin portion can effectively be played over six official match days rather than the 12-15 we’re currently subjected to.
These matches would be scheduled to fall in between the Test matches with the best two teams playing a final decisive match the week following the final Test match.
In all there would be 13 short form internationals played but they would have a greater appeal in Australia and New Zealand than the current somewhat illogical schedule.
Club Twenty20:
The missing component of the cricket empire: a well-supported club competition. The club Twenty20 competition should be expanded to 15 teams broken into five conferences:
Conference A: Perth, Adelaide and Hobart
Conference B: Geelong, Melbourne 1 and Melbourne 2
Conference C: Canberra, Sydney 1 and Sydney 2
Conference D: Newcastle, Gold Coast and Brisbane
Conference E: Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch
Each team would play their own conference twice – four games. Each team would play two team from each of the other conferences – eight games. Total is 12 games per team, so six home games each, two of which are derbies.
The club Twenty20 season would run from the second/third week of October through to the final weekend in February – approximately 20 weeks.
The 12 games of the round robin competition would be played over a 17-week period. This means that teams have five bye rounds. The byes would be scheduled in such a manner that although teams may lose players to internationals that the impact of this would be even to all clubs.
The aim for scheduling matches most weeks would be to have Friday night, Sunday afternoon and Sunday night timeslots with two games in each. This means that two games can be aired simultaneously and shown over the main channel and a secondary channel, the game selection varying from state to state.
This means that four markets can be serviced in any time slot – so a Friday night could see games appealing to Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia – maximising television returns. Obviously when there are Test matches on Sunday afternoons and international Twenty20 there would be adjustments for this.
The end of the season would be a top six knockout finals format with the five conference winners plus one wildcard played over three weeks with the grand final on the last weekend of February.
So to recap. Five Test matches in Australia and five more simultaneously in New Zealand; 13 international Twenty20 featuring four teams; 94 domestic Twenty20 featuring 12 Australian and three New Zealand teams.
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