Re-imagining the Sheffield Shield

The Sheffield Shield Final kicks off today. The culmination of thirty matches of domestic cricket sees New South Wales host Western Australia at Manuka Oval in Canberra.

Or do they? Do the Blues really have the home ground advantage?

“There’s not a great deal of an advantage, especially since [it] probably took them as long to travel [to Canberra] as us,” said Moises Henriques.

Err, okay, Moises… I guess it’s true that the SCG and Manuka Oval are not within walking distance, but… Isn’t Perth three thousand kilometres away?

If you’re a Blues supporter, it’s a bit disquieting to hear a senior player admit that they have lost their home advantage just three hours drive away from their home ground down the best maintained highway in Australia.

Actually, scratch that. If you’re a Blues supporter, you’re probably fuming, anyway.

It’s no secret that plenty of Sydney fans are unhappy to find out that a Shield final that NSW has earned the rights to host is to be held at Manuka Oval in Canberra.

This after six long years of waiting for that final to be played again at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Oh, excuse me, did I say that they’re ‘unhappy’? They’re disgusted.

All week, virtually every post and update on the NSW Blues Facebook page that mentioned the Shield final has been loyal supporters chastising the Blues for daring to play outside of Sydney.

But that can’t be right, can it? The team represents NSW, after all, not just Sydney.

Even if Canberra isn’t their home, this is supposed to be in their territory.

Okay, okay, strictly speaking, Canberra is not part of NSW. But this technicality hides a larger truth; Canberrans spend their summers at Batemans Bay, do their skiing at Perisher or Thredbo, go to Sydney to do their shopping, and stop in Goulburn to have lunch on the way.

Plenty of others from the wider area live the same way.

Is it too much to ask that for once in the competition’s one hundred and twenty one-season history, that these people can face a reasonable commute to a Sheffield Shield Final?

Maybe they won’t turn up, I hear you say.

Maybe a two-hour drive isn’t so much of an improvement over a four-hour drive that we can realistically expect people from far-flung regions to attend the final of one of the most notoriously under-attended domestic competitions of a major sport in Australia.

Damn. You’ve got a point.

But hold on a minute, that tells me that the problem isn’t with the consumers, it’s with the marketing.

If Manuka doesn’t pull a big crowd on Saturday, the reason won’t be because Blues fans are too lazy to make the trip. It will be because there aren’t any fans.

Not outside of Sydney, anyway. And that’s the problem I want to talk to you about. Market urbanisation.

This isn’t a problem confined to Sydney, by the way. Every state in the Shield has the same problem. The further you venture from the centre of the state’s major city, the harder it becomes to find any devoted supporters.

This might be acceptable if there were still plenty of fans left in the cities. But attendances for Shield matches have been dropping for years.

Why, you could turn up to a Bushrangers fixture at the MCG and demolish half of the stadium without hurting anybody these days.

To me, this is a tragedy. I understand that people don’t have a lot of time to attend these games in the middle of the week, but this competition is where we breed our talent for the Test team.

And it is not earning its keep.

Now, I know that the powers that be are testing day-night fixtures in the hope that this will suddenly fix every problem and flood the gates with fans fighting to buy Shield tickets, but in my opinion, I think we need to reconceptualise the Sheffield Shield.

Namely, we need to accept that it will never be Cricket Australia’s main breadwinner. But it can make itself useful in other ways.

Let’s consider this: the logic behind hosting matches in big stadiums is that you can fit more paying customers in and make more money.

But if only a few thousand are turning up, it doesn’t really matter what the capacity of the stadium is like.

In fact, it would be to your advantage to play at a wider variety of smaller grounds in different towns. You don’t suffer the embarrassment of playing before an empty stadium, and you expose a greater number of Australians to the higher levels of the sport – even if most of them only see one match.

If you ask me, I think the Shield matches played before Christmas would be a perfect opportunity for the states to try to get back in touch with their roots.

Each state gets three home games in this period before the Big Bash. Why not schedule these Shield fixtures to be played in some of the other towns?

Granted, this would require fans in the cities to lose the first few games. But the Shield starts around the same time as the season’s first Test matches, anyway.

People in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and so on aren’t watching the Shield then. They won’t miss it much.

This brings the opportunity to come to the fans living in Townsville and Ballarat for a change, rather than forcing them to come to you. People living in country areas would appreciate having that opportunity.

This article can’t really be long enough for me to include every one of my impassioned arguments to spread the cricket gospel outside of the cities, so I will sign off with a list. In my estimation, these locations would be a great fit for expanding the Shield’s frontiers.

Now, I understand that not all of these places currently have the facilities to host a Shield match, so necessarily there would need to be some upgrades. But this list is just supposed to get you thinking.

Spread the game, I say. It would be good for cricket’s soul.

NSW: Tweed Heads, Canberra, Dubbo, Coffs Harbour, Newcastle, Wollongong
VIC: Mildura, Warnambool, Bendigo, Wodonga, Ballarat, Geelong
TAS: Burnie, Ulverstone, Devonport, Launceston, Glenorchy, Kingston
SA: Port Pirie, Port Lincoln, Port Augusta, Whyalla, Murray Bridge, Mount Gambier
Queensland: Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast.
WA: Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Albany, Esperance, Bunbury, Mandurah