The announcement by Cricket Australia this week to put the Big Bash League smack bang in the middle of the Australian summer, interrupting the Sheffield Shield season for two months, has caused quite a stir among purists.
They claim Twenty20 is a scourge to Aussie cricket, that Gen Y batsmen place no value on their wicket, they have no technique, the game is going down with a flurry of sixes, fluro garbs, and million dollar contracts.
We need to fix the Shield, the production line in broken, or so goes the argument.
But why must the Big Bash and Shield be divided, the general public on one side, the purists on the other?
The last time I watched any Shield cricket, I remember empty stands, discarded chip packets blowing listlessly across the uninhabited rows, and a polite smattering of a few dozen hands clapping as a bunch of domestic players I’ve mostly never heard of came together with no great enthusiasm to celebrate the fall of a wicket.
On the other hand, the punters love T20. The Big Bash can fill a stadium. I’m pretty psyched about the upcoming season, and you can count on me tuning in this summer.
It’s not the T20 format itself I prefer, I will happily sit and watch international Test cricket; it’s the sense of theatre, the spectacle, the fact that it’s on TV, that there are big names playing, the retired legends, the international stars, the sense that it matters; that it’s not just an audition league for the national side.
Is it that outrageous to suggest that there might not be the immense gulf between T20 and Test Cricket that some make out there to be?
Look at India, whose players managed to negotiate flogging Australia 4-0 in a Test series, play two months of IPL, and back it up with a win in 50-over Champions Trophy.
The IPL didn’t ‘ruin’ their form. It’s still cricket, after all. It uses the full gamut of skills, save for, perhaps, leaving and blocking the ball. It certainly resembles ‘true’ cricket more than a gym program.
What if, instead of Queensland and Brisbane Heat, NSW and Sydney Sixers, being two separate teams in different leagues and formats, the two combined? That a kid could actually get behind their team and follow them across a range of first-class, 50-over, and 20-over games which all count towards a league points table.
Much like the English County system, drawcard international guest players could come over and do a stint, playing in both our first-class matches and T20 matches, as well as key Australian players, giving spectators a reason to watch the longer form on a domestic level.
The champion side at the end of the season would have had to perform in all three versions of the game. After all, any modern player has to make this transition from month to month anyway.
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