Yes, the BBL is slightly long. But does it matter?

Tired old has-beens and ex-players love test cricket. But quite obviously the majority of people prefer entertainment which in the cricket form is T20. Unfortunately it has been a very poor BBL to date with so few exciting games. So it remains to be seen if people keep coming back when the prime broadcaster leaves major games to pay channels. Batting well, bowling well is all about confidence. So sometimes that is all there is available. A Guardian newspaper writer had an excellent proposal for scheduling the cricket season. It would probably go over the head of the brown noses currently in power. Our selectors are incompetent fools appointed by the failed previous regime at CA. They are from the ex cricketer "cant get a job" Boys Club and have failed Australian cricket with haphazard rubbish selections.

One of the problems with this current schedule is the India tour took the main schedule and was to be one of the big money spinners. The ODI s and the Sri Lanka tests are an afterthought and have played second fiddle. Why are we having a tour match which is being used as selection criteria and all matched (ODI s and BBL aren't all free to air. Chanel 7 have obviously thrown all their eggs in the one basket as far as crowds and TV marketing with BBL. The Australian public deserve better than this from Chanel 7 and CA . I'm sure this program has been in place for months but didn't they sack their marketing guy not so long ago. The administration is very similar to the NRL clubs putting ex footballers in to run a club and now ex cricketers. If it is to be run like a business it must be run professionally and stop treating the public like idiots.

Apologies. I'm not sure where "top notch" came from. Presumably auto-correct I didn't spot.

Ch7 broadcast is pretty poor in Western Australia. There are only 5 prime time (AWST, after 6pm) games this season, and ch7 are not showing 2 of them... so WA only gets 3 prime time fta broadcasts from 59 games. 3. Also, and I assume this only happens in WA, otherwise it would have been raised, ch7 switch the broadcast channel TWICE per game, during play, for Scorchers broadcasts for games starting at 4.30pm AWST. It is just incredibly poor that CA has allowed ch7 to treat WA viewers so poorly.

Chris, It's true Sheffield Shield struggles for interest. But is it any wonder when the leading players are rarely seen? What's the point of a premier domestic comp when so few of the top 20-25 players are missing most games? if you want to destroy a domestic comp, this is precisely how you do it, by removing the cream of its players. Imagine for a nano-second, if the AFL, to prove my argument, removed the top 50 players from the Premiership Cup for the entire season. It would still go okay, but nowhere near as successfully without its best 50 players. It wasn't that many years ago the marketeers were apparently sprouting, & perhaps the administrators hoping, that Sheffield Shield would be dead by 2018, & test players could successfully use BBL as a preparation stage for test cricket. Nah! What genuine cricket fans have always known, those not caught up in hype, that test cricket & Sheffield Shield go hand in hand. Even the Indians, who liked abandoning test cricket a decade ago with their obsession firstly with 50 overs cricket, then T20, now realise the importance of the Ranji Trophy to their test cricketers. My point has always been this, & I use these figures purely for the sake of the argument. Instead of CA seeking 100% revenue & perhaps 60% welfare/wellbeing from its illogical domestic structure, why not aim for 90% revenue & 90% welfare/wellbeing. It's what's known as an old fashioned win-win scenario. Give up a little in one direction to win more in another direction. Structurally, it means accepting the SS must be run concurrently with test cricket, wherever you wish to place it in the season. BBL then gets its own slot, either prime time, or somewhere else less optimal prime time. But running test cricket & BBL both concurrently in prime time, will eventually seriously impact on the quality of test cricket, & perhaps also do BBL no favours either in the long run.

Well, that's easily fixed by having Boxing Day as the first Test of the summer. Day games Top notch January when more people have time off. Its too late for the next few years (difficult against NZ or South Africa) and CA won't move the BBL anyway.

Maybe. My kids like watching it but they don't like test matches. To keep people playing and watching they need to play at a high standard though. Playing for your country is something to strive for, no matter what generation you're from.

It can be fixed with two things - cash and scheduling.

India do it with the IPL. All their international players play in it. The scheduling has to be at the time it is though. I don't think it would work nearly as well if the bulk of the competition didn't fill up the school holidays.

To true Prez. The BBL is a necessary evil - T20 cricket is keeping the kids going and some will grow up to appreciate Test cricket. And lets not forget - due to India etc, cricket is generally considered the second most followed team sport in the world after football. it has its issues but it is still very popular generally

And I'm sure there was one of the players who only played the first half of the BBL season because he was then going over to the Bangladesh Premier League. That's a bit sad that the BBL is at a state where playing in Bangladesh isn't considered preferable for some.

I don't know about that, I think it's more just settling into a more normal, long term season. You wouldn't find too many NRL or AFL supporters that would watch every game every weekend. And nobody thinks that because of that those competitions are struggling. The BBL has brought that tribal feel to cricket that football codes have but cricket never did, and it's made cricket a much more viable career choice as a sport with more than just a small handful of international players able to make a good living out of it.

Don't blame CA. Every cricketing country on the planet has gone down the same route of creating a tournament style T20 competition like the BBL. And as for starting the season with it, as I said above, I don't get why people think this would be some sort of improvement. That means that by the time the Shield season starts the tests have already begun without any of the players getting to play any first class cricket prior to the first test. It would mean the BBL would be what the players have as the lead-in to the test series. And just because you aren't personally a fan of something doesn't mean it's a given that it can't last in it's current format. BBL is here to stay.

Shield cricket has really only existed as a breeding ground for test cricket since the advent of television. Back when there was no TV and the only way to watch cricket was to go to the ground and watch it live, and you only got one international match a year that you could watch in your city, Shield matches would have had more spectators. But it hasn't been the case for a long, long time. You are never going to make the Shield into something that will get lots of spectators along or lots of people wanting to watch on TV. It hasn't ever been that. With test cricket the only international cricket on FTA TV, CA definitely needs the BBL to fill that void. Most years the tests finish with the Sydney test, so for most people that would be the end of the televised cricket season if not for the BBL.

So your suggestion is to have players preparing for test cricket by playing BBL instead of Shield cricket? Because that's what this would mean. Your suggestion would likely mean a single Shield match before Christmas. Since the New Years test in Sydney is usually the last test of the season (obviously there are a couple of later ones this season, but that's not the norm), that would mean that the only domestic cricket played prior to the first test would be BBL, that would be going on until mid-way through the test series, then there would be one Shield match prior to the last couple of tests of the summer. So if there were players failing miserably in tests I suppose there is one Shield match for other players to stake their claim on those spots. I can't see logic here. The schedule for this year meant that most players had 4-5 Shield matches to stake their claim for test selection. Sure it means that players not in the tests aren't playing first class cricket during the second half of the test series, but surely getting a good run of form leading into the test series is better than preparing for tests with BBL.

Well considering last nights BBL game had the worst TV ratings in the histories comp, I'd say that its over saturation does matter. The tennis, not even into the third round, nearly doubled its TV figures.

Sports porn !

Its just not cricket.

BORRRRRING won't watch it absolute GARBAGEEEEEE.