Addressing the cricketing cold shoulder of the Australian people

Citizens of this fine land, I have called this Roar summit to address the evil infiltration of plastic chairs in to our once-daunting coliseums.

This plague is subverting life in the outer as we know it, and dammit, something needs to be done.

Human attendance numbers for the start of the cricketing summer have been of the standard that usually calls for a Super League-style fudge. It’s reaching crisis levels, as now even forgotten Crushers fans are feeling better about themselves as they look down their noses at the deserted expanses on show.

Friday night at the MCG was another embarrassing gobsmacker, with only 14,177 showing up to watch Australia secure a series win against a bloody good South African outfit. Even the freeloading seagulls stayed away in large numbers, although there was reportedly an unmanned spring roll at St Kilda that could account for this change.

This poor turnout of Victorians continued on from another couple of crappers at Perth to start-up the series, a place usually known to be Class-A for producing a party atmosphere as it heaves with soused sandgropers in the western sun. This time, the only industrial-scale number of empties were in the bleachers, and the T20 matches preceding this weren’t much chop either.

So far, only those committed Canberrans have served with dignity and are immune from scrutiny thanks to a 150,000-strong crowd at Manuka on Wednesday- that being 11,000 public servants on long taxpayer-funded lunches and 139,000 moths.

So as for the rest of us, what’s the freakin’ problem, Australia? I haven’t been to a game yet myself, but shame on you all nonetheless. We should get it over and done with and just hand in our membership cards right now because we all might as well be New Zealanders on current form.

Okay, so that’s a little extreme. Let’s just cool it, and get our heads together for the good of James Sutherland’s investigation and pockets. What’s the solution to this global crisis? How do we stop the plastic chairs taking over our stadiums and eventually our schools, roads and water supply?

As a middle class male aged 18-35, I don’t do ‘solutions’, as I much prefer to just apportion blame. So with the help of The Roar people at this crudely-arranged summit, let’s try to identify the likely causes for the empty seat takeover so we can be fully informed when we whine about it together as we watch the cricket on the pub telly.

Overcrowding and unfamiliarity
The obvious and logical reason – the schedule is bursting like a fat lady’s stocking. Due to this, our teams are regularly diluted beyond recognition, meaning we don’t know who we are loving half the time. It’s left the Australian people knowing how Brad Fittler felt that time that he tried to chat up a gum-tree after lustily imbibing on tour.

On the other hand, an empty seat knows no better, as it possesses no pre-frontal cortex for decision-making, nor a brain for that matter. It will attend any event regardless of the quality on show. This is evident in their mass attendance at Nickelback concerts.

We humans are staying away as we struggle with a flux eleven that is just plain weird, and whether it be it rotation, other overlapping series, Maxwell quotas or Michael Clarke’s hamstring, you’d struggle to pick half of them out in a police line-up. Except for Kane Richardson though – I never forget a man who looks as plain dicey as he does.

Unreliable product
It’s true; Straya loves a winner, and to be fair, our program as a whole is hardly the Bad News Bears.

However, after a golden decade or so of destroying everything in our path, we’ve now got a batting line-up that habitually splutters like a Datsun 160B, a fleet of quicks with soft tissue of cobweb strength, and not a talismanic womanising spinner in sight.

Is it that we’d rather stay at home than brave sunburn for another crash of 6/15, a tall guy grabbing at his upper peg, or an off-spinner who’s true to his spouse? The answer is most probably yes.

However, an empty seat leads a banal existence, meaning any stimulation is welcomed with open chair-arms, no matter how depressing or lacking in Playboy-branded reggies it may be. As they are also an inanimate being without skin, they are also immune from the effects of the sun, meaning they can go the distance as well as garner big savings in SPF 15+. Which leads me to…

Fiduciary imbalance
Speaking frankly, the ticket prices for these ODI games are utterly inaccessible for everyone except Middle-Eastern oil sheikhs. In one of history’s greatest business clangers, Cricket Australia has doubled the price when demand has halved. They’ve really done their homework. (They haven’t.)

I contemplated attending today’s game in Sydney, but then decided that refinancing my house was a bridge too far to eat an antique hot-dog as I watched Shane Watson snick-off for another limp 20.

Consider these circumstances affecting us people, and then compare them alongside the financial powerhouse that is the chair movement.

Not only do they possess a condition-free, year-round, free-of-charge reserved seating membership to every ground on the planet, they are also heavily funded by a sophisticated trade deal with the school system involving the pensioning-off of their retired to the country’s classrooms for a generous fee per unit.

Unless we the people can save a nickel somewhere else, be it with a reduction in booze tariffs or a softening of fines incurred for nude laps due to Watson-incurred boredom, we are fighting a losing battle against the financial clout of the chair coffers.

Rebel recruitment
Australians are at the mercy of a gamut of highly attractive cults with greater grooviness levels than George Bailey, and many of the dismayed are leaving cricket in their droves for a new life of something else that keeps them from their family for eight hours a day.

Sega is apparently cool with the young ones, and I’ve heard that reading books has really taken off, as well as telling everyone on Facebook you are reading a book, as well as taking a photo of yourself reading a book and uploading it to Instagram.

However, the biggest threat to cricket’s following is coming from the magnetism of A-League football, and sensing an opportunity, the chair plague is already all over it.

Anticipating a shift in public interest, empty chairs have began uprooting their former strongholds held inside football stadiums and transferring the masses to anywhere that the Australian cricket team is playing. The revolution has already begun.

Common sense/Miscellaneous
To be fair, we’re probably just watching it on the idiot box. Alternatively, maybe we’re all suffering the usual footy season hangover and/or busking for rent after doing our backsides on the Melbourne Cup, so perhaps we are saving ourselves for the real Big Show of the Test series or the World Cup.

Alternatively, we could just blame the Carbon Tax, the property boom or ISIS. Whatever suits.

Now to open the floor at the Roar Summit. Well-educated citizens and disgruntled apostles of Australian cricket – what is the reason for the booming numbers of empty seats at games this summer?