BBL Weekly: The fairytale edition

The Sydney Thunder winning BBL05’s Big Final last night was just one of a handful of fairytales that played out on a crazy Sunday of cricket.

The first one was a quite remarkable game of cricket in the WBBL Final. The Sydney Sixers and Sydney Thunder played off in a very low scoring affair, and an incredible sequence of events unfolded in the final two overs as the Thunder got their hands on the inaugural trophy for this emerging tournament. Head over to the live blog of the game for the full story – I can’t do it justice here.

In the men’s final, between the Melbourne Stars and Sydney Thunder, lots of magic happened.

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First and foremost was the Thunder’s winning of the title, after being anchored to the bottom of the league since it began five years ago.

They were the darkhorse of the tournament, and after winning their first three games on the trot – convincingly, I might add – they were near-certainties for the finals. But after four consecutive losses, most notably to the Melbourne Renegades in the final week of the regular season, their hopes were hanging by a thread.

It took a Sydney Derby win last Saturday, and a Melbourne Renegades loss this time a week ago, just to get them into the finals. Even then, the Thunder had to break through the impenetrable batting line up that was the Adelaide Strikers, on their home deck, to make the big dance, and by virtue of their fourth-place status would have to travel to play either the streaking Stars or dour Scorchers.

Just quietly, the Strikers loss in their semi-final means in four of the five iterations of the BBL the top seed has been knocked out in the semi-final stage. Most seem to think this isn’t a problem, but I think it is. More on that in a moment.

The Thunder came into the final as underdogs. That’s when the third fairytale came into play. More precisely, the third fairytale is Usman Khwaja’s batting tableau, where very good bowlers go to be turned into a puddle of mush.

His innings of 70 from 40 balls in the final was his lowest individual innings tally in his four outings for the tournament, which says more than superlatives can. He is Australia’s willow-wielding maestro right now.

He wasn’t in my team of the tournament by virtue of his absence for more than half of the regular season (which I set as my qualifier for eligibility) – but he was probably the player of the tournament in the end.

A man who gave him a run for his money, at least in the finals, was Australia’s own Kevin Pietersen. We should claim him while we still can I reckon. KP’s 79 from 39 in the final was what allowed the Stars to move into a decent defensive position – if he’d have been more middling, the Thunder would have won with overs, not balls, to spare.

The best fairytale, though, was that Michael Hussey who was sent off with a victory in the last game of the season, completing the rescue mission he started at the Thunder in BBL03. Hussey joined the Thunder after a couple of years with the Perth Scorchers, tasked with resuscitating a team (more particularly a playing squad) that had been in full cardiac arrest in the first couple of years of the competition.

It took a couple of years, but heading into this edidtion of the tournament it was evident that the turnaround was past its most difficult point, and the Thunder were primed to become a successful franchise.

Hussey announced his Australian domestic retirement in the middle of last year, at which point it wasn’t clear that the Thunder were going to enter BBL05 with the team that they eventually assembled. His standard of play hasn’t diminished: he made it into my team of the tournament, and most other teams of the tournament that I’ve seen published. And his team won the whole damn thing. That’s certainly the stuff of fairytales, even in a relatively contrived and condensed competition.

So ends BBL05. There is no doubting now that the tournament is here to stay as a central fixture of the Australian summer. The commercial success of the five week tournament is only part of reason why; in the main, its that everyone, from five to 95, is thinking about and talking about cricket again.

One-in-20 Australians watched the Sydney Thunder and Brisbane Heat slip and slide on a drizzle-afflicted deck in the first week of January. 80,000 people rolled up to the MCG to watch the Melbourne Stars and Melbourne Renegades go to battle. The Perth Scorchers sold out each of their four home games at the Junkyard Furnace. Adelaide did their bit to keep Melbournians on their toes as to who is the best sporting city in the world. The Hobart Hurricanes and Sydney Sixers played host to the biggest domestic cricket crowds in their respective States’ histories.

Every club looks set to be in the black, an outcome that justifies the continued State association ownership of the franchises (although how long until the WACA and SACA complain that the New South Wales Cricket Association and Cricket Victoria are getting two bites of the cherry?).

Before long, the Big Bash League will grow to a point that each State will be in a position of rude financial health, allowing for greater investment in first class, next tier and grass roots cricket. It’s the utlimate cross subsidy, and one story that I hope will eventually be told in great depth by Cricket Australia.

That’s perhaps the best fairytale to emerge in this edition of the tournament, except it’s real.

As I said last week, we’re now some 300 days away from the first game of the next season, which seems so far away because it is. Its a good time to pause and reflect, though, on what the league can, and perhaps should, do from here.

We’ve been told numerous times this season that while things are well in the land of Bash, administrators are not seeking to pilfer the growing pile of golden eggs that their goose is laying. There won’t be any new teams for at least five years, which seems a logical move in a competition that’s only five years old as it stands. Just ask football fans what happens when you go a little too hard, too early, on the team front.

The talent pool is probably stretched as thin as is acceptable, regardless. As it stands, for every Travis Head and Andrew Tye there is likely to be a Josh Lalor and Mark Stekete (sorry, Brisbane fans, those two names came to mind first).

As the league continues to grow, and grow richer, so should the talent levels available in the domestic ranks. I would also think the league would increase the international player quota to three or four in an expansion scenario, to reduce the pressure on those second tier competitions that have been called upon to provide some players to this point in the BBL’s life.

But there has been talk of a small increase in the number of games played in the round robin phase of the tournament. At this stage, it seems like there will be at least one more regular season game played by each team in BBL06, which would take the tally to nine per side.

Nine is not a very nice number, because it will mean that some sides play five home games and others four. In a league that is becoming immensely profitable, according to reports, that might not sit so well with the State cricket associations that get duded by the draw. It may force the League’s hand, and mean the schedule increases to 10 games per side.

When the Big Bash first started, it was a genuine round robin tournament, with each side facing off against each other side once during the regular season for a total of seven fixtures. This was quickly expanded to eight in BBL02, as the two Sydney and Melbourne sides respectively began to form their rivalries (and Perth-Adelaide and Brisbane-Hobart became quasi-rivalries). That’s where we’re at now, with the league expanding and then contracting the window in which those games are played in BBLs 3, 4 and 5.

Right now, the 32 games of the regular season are spread over a 32-day window, which this season began on 17 December and ended on 18 January. I hope I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway: that averages out to a game a day.

This season, there were five non-match days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the 12th, 15th and 17th of January. To squeeze all of the games into the window, it meant five double-up weekend days.

It’s a pretty cramped slate, making growth in the number of games quite challenging unless the competition window is widened a touch.

A nine-games-per-side tournament could be squeezed into the current window, but it would be incredibly tight. There could be games played on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the latter of which seems likely according to an interview in the Herald Sun over the weekend.

A third game could be placed on the second Sunday of the tournament, which was the only weekend that didn’t have a double up fixture included. The fourth game may need to be appended to the start or end of the regular season, or the league could be bold and schedule a double header to open the tournament.

That could prove challenging, given it would have to kick off at 6:15pm on the east coast to allow a game to be played in the west that finished up before midnight on a school night, but it’s possible.

If the Christmas Eve game doesn’t get up, which seems the least likely option that I’ve presented above, then the only option may be to finish the regular season a day later than is currently the case. Extending the season out to 10 games each would absolutely necessitate that the window be opened by a few extra days, so the competition could be fit in without crazy travel schedules and the like.

And in what I think is a genius move, the league has been making noises that this extra game will be played in a regional area, rather than at the home ground of the team in question. This is excellent, because it means cricket can spread its tentacles farther and wider in the summer, and the near-million plus eyeballs that are watching each game will still be glued to their boxes. It’s also an elegant way to test the market for expansion.

We’ll watch and wait to see what happens here.

One area absolutely ripe for reform, ahead of next season, is the finals system. As above, the Strikers semi-final loss means that the top seed has been knocked out of the finals stage in four of the five editions of the BBL.

Adelaide have won 14 of their 16 regular season games in the past two BBLs, but didn’t play in the grand final in either season. That doesn’t sit right with me. T20 cricket can be driven so much by luck that the current finals doesn’t seem to do the top seed justice.

Fortunately, I think there’s a no-brainer change to be made here: introduce a tiered finals system, like so.

– Seed 1 hosts Seed 2 in a qualifying final. The winner moves straight to the grand final, the loser plays in a semi-final.
– Seed 3 hosts Seed 4 in an elimination final. The winner moves through to a semi-final, the loser is out.
– Qualifying final loser hosts elimination final winner in a semi-final. The winner moves to the grand final, the loser is out.
– Qualifying final winner hosts semi-final winner in the grand final. You know the rest.

That system gives the top two seeds something more than a faux home-field advantage (which I think is over-ridden by the luck factor in T20), it gives them a double chance; the winner getting a bit of time off to relax, the loser another shot at making the final.

It also creates an extra final, which would be good for everyone concerned. The qualifying/elimination finals could be played as a double header, to keep the timing of the tournament the same as it is now.

It almost seems too easy to me, but then again, I’m in the peanut gallery for a reason.

That’s it for the BBL Weekly column for this season. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in 300 days.