Expanding the Big Bash League slowly

Roar Guru

10th January, 2016

1327 Reads

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Wayne

Roar Guru

10th January, 2016

1327 Reads

This season of the Big Bash League is one of the biggest yet for Australia, pulling in record attendance numbers and great ratings. The inaugural Women’s BBL is also travelling well, so now seems like a good time to expand the competition.

But how can it be done without breaking the well-oiled machine Cricket Australia currently has?

First up, this expansion thought bubble is not about new teams. There won’t be any new teams introduced, and there won’t be a full home-and-away season.

The finals are staying the same for now, although a first versus the winner of a second versus third playoff would still be a better concept. That’s for another day, however.

To expand slowly, the BBL teams should increase their current games played from eight to eleven. Now, before you reach for your poison keyboard (still doesn’t sound as good as pen), hear me out.

Each team currently plays each other once, with one double-up game against your rival team. I propose expanding that out to playing double-up games against groups of Perth-Adelaide, Hobart-Brisbane, Magenta-Green Sydney, Red-Green Melbourne.

This is how it would work, using the Sydney Sixers as an example.

The Sixers would play everyone once, and double-up games against the Thunder, the Renegades, Strikers and Hurricanes in the first season 2016-17 season. This then gets reversed in 2017-18 with the double-ups changing to Thunder, Stars, Perth and Brisbane.

This way, everyone still keeps their rival game but there are also more games played throughout the season. The additional games could easily slide into double or even triple-header games using Perth time zone to the east coast to televise every game live.

Now, this obviously means that with 11 games, four teams are getting an extra home game. To work around the uproar of this, the extra home games will be rotated between the teams. So within a two-year period you play 11 home and 11 away games. So the extra match will mismatch for one year before it balances back out.

The other part of my expansion plan is to use this extra ‘home’ game and send it to regional areas. So each team keeps five home games in their CBD stadiums, and the four additional matches go to regional centres.

This means the likes of Geelong, Canberra, Wollongong, Riverland in Sout Australia, Alice Springs etc. can get a game without the franchises losing a home game and subsequent memberships.

So there we go, Roarers, a simple expansion that gives the punters extra games without having to stand up new franchises.

I honestly don’t see Canberra, Geelong or Wollongong getting a franchise anytime soon, so perhaps introducing more matches is the way to get the BBL out to these places.

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