Which sport is Australia's weakest link?

Its pretty obvious that the Big Bash is the reason why Australia has set two of their lowest scores ever recently. Its not like its an incompetent batting line they can belt big scores at a high run rate on flat wickets. To demote the Sheffield Shield to a nothing competition by splitting it between the Big Bash jokathon has made batting to the conditions a lost skill. Australia never got to the top of world cricket by virtue of talent it was through hard work,planning and the right strategies. All that went out the window when instead of planning for performance when Cricket Australia became cheap marketing gimmicks central .

You have missed out on one of the worlds great sporting and fashion moments in 2016, and those yellow tights you will have to fight the urge to order a set of those for the whole family. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNEFfFvma3M Buying oneself a F1 grand prix is something that any tin pot regime can do with a fistfull of dollars. However even a tin pot regime would provide better backing and faciltiies for its Athletes than they get in Victoria. Even the horses would have better digs in Melbourne than the athletes. The pecking order in Melbourne seems to be F1, AFL clubs, horses then athletes.

Despite the success

dont worry about soccer rookie it is only (officially in its current format) 12 years old

How about comparing apples with apples? I liken BBL to a few weeks of exhibition matches. You need to compare the A-League with Sheffield Shield which spans the whole season. How are the crowds at Sheffield Shield lately? Poor cricket.

I think soccer is the weak link. Cricket is a summer sport. The football codes are winter sports. Soccer ran off to the summer to seek refuge from the juggernaut that is Australian Football and to a lesser extent League. Poor soccer. They run off the summer, but then along comes T20 cricket which soccer simply can't compete with. BBL ratings are literally 10-20x higher than that of the A-League. Cricket is without dispute Australia's summer game. Soccer is a distant second by any metric.

Nope, on, like the bloated corpse its management resembles.

The geographic divide between AFL and NRL means that both sports can co-exist with minimal interference. Fans can follow the NRL as their primary winter sport, and the AFL as their secondary winter sport, or vice versa. If Aussie Rules did not exist then would we have a 34 team NRL competition playing 400+ regular season matches ? Probably not. The current arrangement of AFL + NRL co-existing generates more revenue and provides more variety for fans.

"You have a desperate town in Melbourne trying to big note itself"?! You then follow up that tripe with some incomprehensible blather about a taxi driver dominating a popular Australian sport that you obviously hate. To top it all off, you've given yourself the moniker "Brains Trust". Amazing.

On the world's stage AFL is the weakest link. People that would otherwise be playing sports with an international presence improving Australia's competitiveness and standing are instead playing a game marginalised in the southern states. NFL also fits into this category.

no need to blame soccer it is a good game

Why would kids spurn cricket to play football,they are in different seasons ,my kids play both along with most of his team. The wallabies made the final of the last world cup.

Some interesting comments. The truth is that the fortunes of Australia's cricket and rugby union teams has declined at the same time that soccer has flourished in Oz with the introduction of the a league in 2005. Since then the once pretty decent rugby union and cricket teams have been fairly average and have suffered numerous thrashings which were previously unthinkable. Particular lowlights that spring to mind are repeated losses by the wallabies to teams like Ireland and Scotland (the wallabies often lost to England in the past but rarely to their Celtic neighbours) and being bowled out by the English at Trent Bridge for 60 and by South Africa at Cape Town for 48. In addition Australia's cricket team has lost 5 of the last 7 ashes series since 2005. The rise of soccer is largely to blame- kids are spurning rugby and cricket and playing soccer.

they will all survive, cant believe i bothered to comment

3 wins in only a few World Cups! Give it time, Football hasn't been around for long enough in a significant way to accumulate more wins in Australia. Portugal, the European Champions, have only 13 wins in their entire History. Belgium 14. They have been getting those wins since the 70's or before. It is possible with the right football investment to become World Cup winners, or competitive at the finals. Look at Greece 2004, Leicester City this year, punching above their weight. If you get a golden generation of footballers anything can happen. Hungary. Holland. Portugal. Uruguay. South Korea 2002. Turkey. All examples of this. Its possible to have many successful sporting teams. The real enemy to sporting potential is less active kids and obesity...

Kiwis and South Africans were better at rugby for years. Australia were the first to really exploit foreigh players in rugby union, using Topo for the Grand slam, then the Pacific islanders. Now England have discovered that trick rather than improving. Australia could have won the world cup in 2006 and 2010.You can't say what will happen in the future. In 2006 it took a dive for Italy to beat them and they were the winners, in 2010 the poor start against Germany was just because of pensioners in the squad, once the pensioners were taken out they outplayed Ghana despite a send off and being 11 against 10, and then beat Serbia. Ghana remember outplayed Uruguay who resorted to a handball to fluke beating them. Australia would still be dominating in cricket, the only reason England got a look in was Ponting made captain followed up by stuffing up the Sheffield Shield season for the Big Bash jokathon. England have made enormous strides though in Olympics following their billion dollar lottery funding though so give them that.

What? You didn't bother writing an article and thought you'd just leave it up to the comments section lol???

The growth of soccer has led to less kids playing rugby union and cricket and the test teams has suffered hugely as a result. The Socceroos have improved but they will never win the FIFA World Cup and have only won 3 matches at the World Cup in their entire history!! This situation is great news for me though as well as many Kiwis, English and South Africans as it has led to us regularly beating Australia at rugby union and cricket.

*in

Sport is about being able to play it, not having a big population. India is not totally dominating cricket because they are interested in the sport and have a big population. Out of their billion population very few will get the opportunity or leisure time to become a top level cricketer. If they took the best street cricketers and gave them a scolarship to train full time and adapt to a cricket ball they might totally dominate. I think the biggest problems with AUstralian sport are this obsession with events and attracting them, and not being able to support those who want to be compete in them. Great Britain went from zero to hero with their sports funding lottery.They will be getting close to 2 billion a year to fund themselves. Australia is spending a lot of money on hosting the Commonwealth games, 2 billion it will cost, yet our athletes that will compete in it will only get about 100 million a year funding spread across a very wide range of sports. I would say the grand prix in Melbourne costs about 100 million a year. with a lot of grand prix races in Asia its no longer attracting foreign tourists, you have a desperate town in Melbourne trying to big note itself, at the same time it handed over the Lexus center its center for athletes to Collingwood an AFL club. This is a sport where a taxi driver can compete with their best athletes and they get beaten by an amateur, surely its a waste of time giving them such a facility. Motor racing we have to stop investing in family sedan racing promotion to help a car industry that is no longer even manafacturing here. You notice how much motorcycle racing attention got in the media even when Australia had world champions, because its the media trying to flog cars. Each V8 race is subsidised though not as much as the F1 circus. F1 is also a joke, you will pay a fortune but they will always give the easy winning drive to someone from Great Britian if they can get away with it.Easy way to produce a lot of motor racing drivers fund smaller tracks for cart racing where the greats got their start in. Commonwealth games its time to dump this, notice Australia will be hosting it almost every second time because no one else is interested. Great Britain are the only other one and they have all that lottery funding. The whole selling point of the Olympics is that you will get a huge influx of tourists, the truth seems to be though outside of the media, and the athletes family is no will bother with the travel and the expense. The Commonwealth games I am not even sure people will travel interstate to watch it, they had to give away the tickets to the opening ceremony.