It's just not (about the) cricket

It’s day one of the first international Test match of the season. Excitement is at fever pitch. The best players in the world have congregated, and the faithful have packed the stadium to cheer on their team.

Moments before the match begins, a roar jerks the stadium out of its hushed excitement. It is not the crowd’s response to the players entering the pitch, why, it’s not even the crowd at all.

It’s the sound of motorbike engines hooning around the ground. There’s a ramp at third man, and all that protects the outfield from damage is a long, narrow piece of hessian material. The motorbikes jump the ramp, fireworks go off in droves, and the players are left to congregate on the field as the novelty is being deconstructed.

All of a sudden the match has begun, and the excitement that had been naturally building has been replaced by a confused acceptance that the crowd can now settle in and watch it.

An over is bowled, but during the next there is a break in play for a breakdancing troupe that has inexplicably appeared in a section of the stands. They finish, there are fireworks, the game continues, and the same confused acceptance that the interruption is now over drifts throughout the crowd.

This sounds bizarre, right? However, replace ‘international Test’ with ‘Big Bash League’ and it’s what we have been subjected to for the past month.

I will put my cards on the table right now and gladly admit I enjoy the Twenty20 form of the game and the quality of matches the BBL has produced, especially in its second season.

As I write this, though, the third Melbourne derby is taking place at the MCG, on a beautiful Melbourne evening, and I’m not there. When it starts, I’ll turn on Fox Sports and enjoy the match, hoping the Stars beat the Renegades.

There has been plenty of talk about the BBL’s performance, and the paradox of sharply declining attendance but higher ratings, and I think I have an explanation. While the BBL is great to watch, attending a match is fast becoming something that must be endured.

The example I gave in my opening stanza was exactly what happened at the first game of this season, the Renegades playing the Stars at Etihad Stadium.

Amidst the motocross and ‘official’ dance troupe (the leader of whom kept referring to the crowd as ‘Sydney’), there was a cricket match, and the gravity of a sublime batting performance by Aaron Finch was largely lost in the haze of a poorly-managed, ‘let’s do whatever the kids are into’ match day experience.

A few weeks later, in Perth, Lasith Malinga took 6/7 off his four overs, in some of the best limited-overs bowling I have ever seen. You would think that no amount of giant flames or people in orange latex bodysuits could dull the slinger’s efforts, but boy, did they try.

Tonight, the key selling point of the MCG derby has not been the match itself, but the fact Jessica Mauboy and some X Factor contestants are performing. The obvious question being, who does this appeal to?

I don’t know many cricket fans who would base their decision to attend on whether The Collective would be there, nor any Collective fans (whom I assume exist) who would base their decision to attend on having to sit through a cricket match to see them.

Watching the match on television, I don’t have to see all of that. All I see is the cricket, and analysis of the cricket – and that’s all I want to see.

My worry is that even though the quality of play is improving with every match, the adjoining ‘entertainment’ is causing the BBL, and by extension T20, to become the cricketing parody we all feared it would.

Let us contrast the BBL’s situation with its summer colleague, football’s A-League.

Just like the BBL, the A-League’s product has grown substantially in quality this year. Unlike the BBL, attendance is booming, especially in Melbourne and Sydney – cities where both leagues have two teams.

I believe this is, in no small part, due to the fact the A-League are selling their improving product as the match-day experience, rather than the BBL route of trying to append foreign activities to it – and the punters are eating it up.

The case in point for this was the weekend of the 21st – 23rd December. The Stars played the Sydney Sixers on the Friday at the MCG, and the Renegades played the Brisbane Heat on the Saturday at Etihad Stadium.

There were fireworks, singers and dancers galore, the same T20 songbook that Cricket Australia had sung from all year – and in the end, there were two decent cricket games, and two wins for Melbourne.

That same day, over at AAMI Park, the eighth A-League Melbourne derby between the Victory and Heart was taking place – a match almost universally praised as a cracker. It had everything: an unmatched atmosphere, heroes, villains, a later equaliser and an even later winner.

There was no half-time act, and the only trace of pyrotechnics were two flares lit by either active supporter end when a goal was scored.

In the end, football won, in both atmosphere and crowd size. The two BBL games combined saw 19,289 show up, whereas the A-League Derby hosted 26,457.

After every ICC World T20, cricket fans have the same discussion – do we take T20 seriously enough? Given how seriously Cricket Australia takes the presentation and advertising of its domestic product, in my opinion, the answer has to be no.

The A-League’s call to arms this year is ‘We Are Football’. It invites people to see themselves in every part of the game, as the atmosphere, the proverbial 12th man. It makes no qualms in saying that not only is our product good, but that it is good because of those who support it.

With the tagline ‘It’s Showtime’, the Big Bash League sells itself as just that, a show, a work of fiction, not unlike a movie or a TV program – and while that occurs, it will always be hard to take seriously.

If they focused on the great, cricket-related features of their product – the batting of Aaron Finch, the bowling of Lasith Malinga, and the incredible fielding of Kane Richardson – they may be able to deliver on the considerable attendances they promised at the start of the season.

At the very least they might not forget – in this ‘showtime’ they’ve created – what the headline act was supposed to be.