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The average crowd at Big Bash League game in 15-16 was 29,443 including a monster crowd of 80,833 for the Melbourne derby between the Stars and the Renegades.
That was just over 2000 more people per game than attended One Day International fixtures in the same season.
It’s no surprise really, when you think about the type of cricket fans in Australia, you can categorise them in one of two categories – the purists and the easily bored.
The purists, like me, prefer watching Test cricket. They like well-timed cover drives, good patient line and length and full slips cordon.
The others are much more inclined to bright colours, fireworks and actually being able to plan daytime activities without it clashing with the cricket.
That’s not to say all purists hate T20, or all T20 fans won’t occasionally check how Adam Voges is going, but point is ODI cricket kind of sits awkwardly in the middle.
Which kind of begs the question, should we start caring about T20 cricket?
It’s become more apparent with Australia’s departure from the World T20 that CA, The selectors, the media and the fans are really missing out by not placing some importance and bringing some attention to the Australian T20 team
The state of the team at the moment is not idea. Most of time playing at home, they’ll pick Aaron Finch, Dave Warner, Glenn Maxwell and a group of young players that performed well in the BBL.
When playing away, they tend to pick the worst nine or ten of the touring party and fly in an overachieving youngster or two.
When the world T20s come around they sprinkle in a few additional Test players in with the kids, such as Steve Smith and Peter Neville this time around. But the problem this causes is those players don’t play a lot of T20, and the team doesn’t have enough time together to develop the strong team culture that the Test team appears to possess.
The perfect example is when they replaced Finch with Smith as captain of the team, which would have been fine at the start of the Australian summer rather than a month out from the tournament.
You don’t hear as much about Australia’s tilt at the World T20s as the World Cup. This might be because Cricket Australia knows that T20 cricket is Australia’s lowest priority behind Test and 50-over cricket.
And the media picks up on this too. Up until a few weeks out from the tournament starting. a deal still hadn’t been signed with an Australian TV network to show the world T20.
In the end Channel Nine and Foxtel came to the party but initially they thought the price was too high.
There’s too much cricket to have the best players playing all three forms of the game. That’s a fact, it’s been proven by many sides in the past.
India and Pakistan are obvious examples, but more recently the West Indies tour of Australia showed perfectly that a number of their players couldn’t balance Test and T20 commitments at the same time. These players chose the latter option leading to an truly embarrassing series for the Windies.
Now the Windies have qualified for their final and will face England looking to be the only two-time champions of the competition. England will be looking to do the same thing.
The Windies obviously have Twenty20 at the top of their list of priorities. Should Australia do the same?
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