It’s not Thatcherism or Reaganomics, but bills have to be paid. With TV, cricket has the skills to pay the bills, but there’s a fork in the road on the way to the venue, which the decrepit WACA signifies.
You need stadiums to play in to put the game on TV, and you need those stadiums to be half decent so people turn up and make it a better spectacle.
How many times have you heard people wonder why the grounds in the United Kingdom are so small?
In Australia, if cricket was to be the sole tenant of a stadium there’d be a struggle to justify even the garden-variety 20,000-seat stadiums in the UK – the WACA is proof.
The sport is dependent on others for its survival beyond television. For all the romanticism about the individuality of pitches and grounds there’s a bigger picture at play with a decision on the lesser of two evils – lose character or lose people.
People are more important than the WACA pitch for the future of the sport.
Cricket never utters these words, but without AFL cricket wouldn’t have a hope in hell of having modern stadiums to play in. An upgraded WACA would be a white elephant, you just can’t justify public or private money when the return is so low. Only diehards turn up to outdated stadiums. And the amount of cricket diehards has dwindled.
Look at the MCG – Melbourne Cricket Ground in name only – where 46 AFL games were played in 2015 and anything under a crowd of 25,000 is seen as a disaster. Meanwhile, in an average cricket season there would be a maximum of one Test, two ODIs, an international Twenty20 and five Big Bash League games (Sheffield Shield games don’t count because there isn’t a crowd).
Thirteen days of content where only four or five days could be guaranteed to pull a crowd of more than 25,000. It’s precisely the reason why Cricket Australia would desperately like to expand the Big Bash League, because in the case of many states it keeps the sport relevant in a stadium sense.
Cricket doesn’t pay stadium bills like other sports do, and other sports are more willing and conducive to sharing.
The same thing happens on a smaller scale across the country, and the poor WACA is the victim of time and economics now – ever since AFL went full-time to Subiaco it’s been a slow death for the WACA.
When phoney wars erupt between the codes about access to venues, simple economics and certified public passion come down on the side of AFL. That may be a hard pill to swallow for cricket but pragmatism must rule if you want the best result for your sport, not just a comparison with the little brother who has turned into a big brother.
Pragmatism won the day in Adelaide and the future of both sports will be infinitely better for it. Cricket complains about Australian football eating into the season, but crowds simply don’t watch cricket in October or March so it’s a thin argument. Our national team are usually in India at that time anyway.
Despite a few celebrated examples the talent clash is not a major issue, kids play both sports until the age of 15-16 and in 99 per cent of cases any choice that has to be made is clear-cut. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between grassroots participation in the sports, and now is the time to be closer and not bickering.
This cold war runs deep between the sports, it can be petty and illogical. The sad thing is that the two sports should be the greatest of allies when it comes the fighting their shared ‘enemy’ of soccer.
Cricket has structural difficulties as a sport, but the demise of the WACA is another example where being resistant to the benefits of partnering with its natural bedfellow – as ego-deflating as it may be – is cutting off one’s nose to spite its face.
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