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Split your eights, Cricket Australia

Shane Warne celebrates a wicket for Australia on the way to conquering South Africa in the 1999 Cricket World Cup semi-final. (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Roar Guru
26th June, 2018
5

Criticism of Cricket Australia’s desire for content over context has become a regular occurrence.

Whether it be the cancellation of Bangladesh’s tour, the existence of the current ODI series in England and Wales or the expansion of the BBL, there has been enough to keep the fingers of the disillusioned hard at work.

Usually, however, these criticisms all share the common theme that CA’s mistake is in the name of profit.

Here, perhaps, is where CA’s new format for the JLT One-Day Cup is at its most interesting, as the finals system cannot be argued to have been designed to maximise profit when compared to its predecessor.

Every team will play at least one final. In the absence of the CA XI, that ensures each team will play six matches, even if the total number of matches will go down by three from last year, from 23 to 20.

And, in the words of Tim Whittaker, CA’s Head of Communications: “We did not want our state teams to play less [sic] matches.”

To offset that problem, CA picked what they saw as the lesser of two evils. What they perceived as a bigger evil was an uneven draw.

Before the introduction of the CA XI, that was the evil they had chosen in 2014, with each team playing seven matches. Before the introduction of the stand-alone competition for 2013, that was also the option they took for the BBL’s first two seasons, with each team playing eight matches. Before the BBL, the format was a complete double round robin.

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That season, the season of 2010-11, is notable in two important respects. Mercifully, it was the only season where it was a split-innings format.

Even then, as a player whose ambitions in the game were by no means sated, Ed Cowan offered encoded criticisms in his diary.

Now free from the bonds of a cricket contract that restrict a player’s ability to offer fearless comment on cricket without financial penalty, he has been much more strident against CA’s latest changes on Twitter.

“The single most ridiculous scheduling idea I have ever heard of,” he called it.

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I put Cowan’s criticisms to Whittaker, whose reply, in part, was to argue that winning from sixth would be harder than what might be anticipated.

“The team finishing third would need to be very much off their game to lose that match.”

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As someone who broadly agrees with Cowan’s view, I was surprised at just how far back I had to go to find an example of sixth defeating third in an Australian one-day domestic match. Just to be clear, I’m talking about the teams that were third and sixth when the season was over, not when the game was played. It hasn’t happened since February 2011, when Queensland beat New South Wales. Good old James Hopes.

So, teams would be wise to avoid the temptation to be slowpokes. But there is a principle here: no multi-team competition in the world, that I can think of, allows its worst team to participate in a finals competition, outside of knockout competitions.

Finals are a way of drawing a distinction: this team is good enough to be here, that team isn’t. Excluding the CA XI can be interpreted as a tacit admission from CA that they were not good enough to be there in the first place and can be safely abandoned now that the national team will be away on overseas duties and the states are playing more younger guys.

Fair enough. They were perennial cellar dwellers. But that should surely apply to more than just one team. For all their faults, the CA XI was not informed that they were playing in a final for their survival in their last game.

While extinction is an inappropriate penalty for any of the other teams, the smell of one’s own blood from the first match is perhaps a necessary experience. This is where CA’s possible salvation may lie.

For ODI cricket, and Australian ODI cricket, this is an anniversary year. For ODI cricket as a whole, it is the 20th anniversary of the 1998 ICC KnockOut Trophy – what is now known as the Champions Trophy.

Australia's Shane Warne (right) encourages South Africa's Herschelle Gibbs (left) to leave the field after dismissing him.

Australia plays South Africa in the 1999 Cricket World Cup semifinal. (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)

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For ODI cricket in Australia in particular, it is the 40th anniversary of the country’s first World Cup, by the women in 1978. Dig a little deeper, and it becomes obvious that CA have mixed two good ideas together, and that it may well be worth separating them.

That World Cup has the honour, or otherwise, of being the smallest World Cup. While we have become conditioned to seeing the shrinking of the Men’s World Cup, as measured by the number of teams participating, happen by reasons of design, 1978 was a different matter.

The boycott of apartheid South Africa put paid to the idea of them as hosts and as mere participants in the tournament. The Netherlands and the West Indies couldn’t afford to send teams. Only India, Australia, England and New Zealand participated.

In the absence of nearly half the intended teams, the organisers did the best they could. They decided to only have a single round-robin format. There was no scheduled final. As it was, they got lucky. The last match was a de facto final between Australia and England.

Cowan and contemporaries like Brett Geeves take it for granted that there will be at least a single round robin plus one match. As you read earlier, it is also CA’s baseline.

It is beyond that line where they merge: to get back to the top of the tree in ODI cricket, the argument goes, Cricket Australia needs to go back to the complete double robin round system, or something that more closely resembles that in terms of the number of matches than the current system.

Or, in the absence of either, a more convincing alternative than simply trying to manage the consequences of a lack of one-day cricket and focussing on expanding the BBL.

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Which is where the 1998 ICC KnockOut Trophy comes in. The original format was for all the Test nations to play a knockout tournament in a non-Test country.

The inaugural edition was held in Bangladesh. After New Zealand qualified over Zimbabwe for the tournament, eight teams were involved in quarter-finals, four teams were involved in semi-finals and two teams were involved in the final.

If taken alone, CA’s new finals system is not so different from that system.

The KnockOut Trophy was held in a non-Test nation to boost the game in a country where there was a lack of international cricket. As it stands, CA has an obligation to the Northern Territory that it is struggling to fulfil.

Consistently deprived of international or domestic cricket, that status was underscored by CA’s decision not to host Bangladesh this year.

They deserve an annual knockout tournament, at the very least. And it would need not affect the JLT Cup. One could still crown a winner at the end of a round-robin format, even without a final. 1978 proves that.

The places, meanwhile, could be used to dictate the knockout tournament draw in the winter months in Darwin or the Alice Springs.

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Tim Whittaker said that sort of idea was considered, but that it should also be remembered that CA wants its players to have as much overseas experience as possible to aid Australia’s chances of overseas success.

Tim Paine of Australia bats

Tim Paine of Australia (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)

This is a worthy consideration, particularly as it pertains to experience in the United Kingdom. It should also be acknowledged that splitting the current tournament in two wouldn’t represent split aces, more like split eights.

However, it should also be remembered that in relying on other cricket boards in this way, CA are ceding control to an outside party and hoping that they will help that player develop, and also be in a team involved with governing body that does not have its eyes focussed on increasingly shorter formats.

In this context, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s decision to try and get a new format off the ground may cause CA’s staff some mighty painful headaches as it pertains to one-day cricket from 2020 on.

Or, as anyone who has watched the current series can testify, some different mighty painful headaches.

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