The BBL is slowly but surely going downhill

Yep, it’s certainly better than listening to non stop chuntering from two ex cricketers and a pundit trying desperately to join their conversation. As for Ponting I much more preferred to watch him bat than to hear him rabbit on for three hours.

It is amazing how often Ponting says something is going to happen and then it happens pretty much exactly as he said it would. The other fun thing watching from home is the number of times where you see something on the TV and make a comment, and then the commentators make the exact same comment a few seconds later. I can’t be the only one, it’s like they can hear us!

You had a go at what the BBL are doing for commentators, and I simply pointed out that it's pretty much exactly the same thing as has always been done for commentators in cricket in all forms of the game. I know cricket very well, I don't need someone to describe it to me. But you need commentators. Are you really suggesting that just having the game played in silence with no commentators is better?

It appears from your post that you would like to be told about the game in progress rather than watch it yourself. Fine by me, live and let live. But having played the game at a reasonable level, I can tell a good ball from a bad one, a sweet drive from a blind swipe over ‘cow corner’ and if the game gets a bit stodgy I sometimes join the crowd in a chorus of ‘Sweet Caroline’.

Ponting is a rubbish commentator? Unreal. His tactical insight is sensational, and his penchant for predicting match occurrences before they happen is unmatched. I can listen to him all day. In a world of Warne ranting about his favourites and Brayshaw going on random AFL tangents on a whim, complaining about the best commentator in the industry blows my mind. Also, Damien Fleming was an excellent bowler in his day, much more than an average medium pacer. He played 100 matches for Australia. He's not McGrath, but he was international quality easy.

I don't really get your comment on the commentators. Cricket commentators have basically always been just a box full of ex-cricketers. In other sports where they feel more of a need to have someone actually "call" the action, you tend to have a professional commentator do that, and then the "expert commentator" who's the ex-player, to then talk about aspects of the game and things like that. In cricket, it's always tended to be just the "expert commentators" really, without the need for a professional play caller. That's how it's always been in all forms of cricket. It's not like the BBL has done anything different here. The main difference with the BBL is that, with the games being so much shorter, they often have the same commentators for the whole match rather than a big group running in shifts like you get with test and ODI cricket. But other than that, it's no different to any other cricket.

Perth Stadium certainly is too big. WACA capacity is 500 more seats than the Thunder's home ground. That's plenty. I get the idea of moving to a state of the art, brand new stadium instead of a decrepit old thing in need of renovation, but purely from a size point of view they would be better off at the WACA ground. If they do renovate the WACA ground as seems to be the plan, and keep it at a similar capacity, then they should probably move back there. Can't really use cost as an argument related to the length of the season though. When the BBL started there were only 4 home games. That's a pretty short season. Seemed reasonable to extend it, and they have, but only by 1. Now there are 5 home games. Each team has 7 games where they are called the home team, but 2 of those are away somewhere else. So even if you wanted to go to all the home games, you only have one more game to go to. As for T20 cricket being boring, hey, yeah it can be. Just like AFL is boring, NRL is boring, test cricket can certainly be boring. In every sport you can have exciting games and boring games. I don't think you can necessarily judge T20 as boring anymore than any other sport.

It will be interesting to see if they can reduce the number of games even more. I have no doubt that part of the pitch from the marketing boffins at CA as part of the new TV deal was ‘we can play as many games as you want’. Good luck convincing a tv station that’s handed over hundreds of millions of $$$ that it’s in their best interest to reduce the number of ‘units’.

BBL is a cheap ADHD gimmick, so it needs to have a short season.

It's an ADHD version of the sport that should have that mirrored in it's season length. It should go for like two/two and a half weeks. Any longer and people lose interest as people realise the emperor's got no clothes on.

If the BBL premise is that it's for kids and "family entertainment" like you claim then it should have a short season during the school holidays. The gimmicky ADHD nature of BBL/T20 means it wears thin pretty quick, and quickly becomes boring. You claim it's big appeal is cost: they supposedly keep it reasonably priced to encourage families,so season length should be part of that cost appeal. Even the Perth Scorchers from what I've heard don't even half fill up Optus Stadium anymore, and crowds seem to be not much better than what a sold out WACA was, which looked great on TV, and had a great atmosphere. Optus Stadium is a huge footy stadium which just lacks atmosphere for cricket in my opinion.

Agreed. The length of the season should reflect the brand of T20: short, fast, ADHD, gimmicky. It should be over in two weeks in January with the top Aussie players involved, and a couple of international recruits. Less is more with brain dead ADHD events like T20, but the incompetent CA administrators caved in due to increased TV rights to lengthen the season to where even the T20 fans have had enough.

For me the 20x20 game is a mix of family entertainment and a short game of cricket and watching the televised version it should reflect both sides. The BBL got the mix very near right in its early years while coverage of the English 20-20 in the UK was frankly second rate at best in spite of the Barmy Army. 1 agree 100% with the author that, apart from the action on the field, placing two retired cricketers in a box with a Pundit is not the way to go. Even experienced commentators would find it hard going to talk for the whole game day after day and keep the viewers interest is a hefty task indeed. Their main highlight was telling you what you have just seen then, if it’s a heave into the second tier, showing you five or six time’s, I’ve never seen Pointing looking so bored. After a couple of days, I turned the sound off. It’s a shame but I can’t see the BBL with us for more than a few years

One idea, would be to play it in seperate blocks. Block A: 20 games would be played over a couple of weeks during the October school holidays possibly at smaller and regional venues. Block B: 36 games + finals played over the Summer Holidays with the final being played on Australia Day.

I totally agree that playing too many games has hurt it. But there's actually nothing wrong with a honeymoon period being over. That doesn't constitute a crisis though. Any new thing will get a bit of initial hype that will inevitably fade a bit. The point is where it ends up after it settles. To put things into a bit of perspective, according to this site which came up when I searched for NRL average attendances, this latest BBL season still significantly exceeds the average attendance of the best ever NRL season. To be getting 18,800 average attendance to domestic cricket is still pretty amazing. I'm not trying to convince you to fall in love with BBL or anything of the sort. Just refuting the idea that it's in some sort of tailspin destined for oblivion. CA have made some decisions of late that haven't really helped things like "average attendance" and have left most people agreeing that there's definite fatigue by the end of the season and it really seems to drag on too long. But that's not going to kill it. The whole reason they expanded it and tried to milk more out of it is because it's become a massive revenue stream for CA. For the first time ever, domestic cricket isn't just a cost centre, a necessary expense required to develop cricketers to play international cricket and thus paid for by international cricket, but it's able to make money in its own right.

Or Braysh, Binga and Slats? The BBL commentary teams are no worse than Nine was at the end of their run.

Launceston - 2 adults $80. Be cheaper to fly to the Thunder games then. BBL averages attendance 15/16 - 29,500, 16/17 - 30,000, 17/18 - 26,528, 18/19 - 20,554, 19/20 - 18,880. Since 2018 attendances have dropped 29%. Re Launceston, we were getting double the attendances than in our games this year. And as pointed out in articles the crowds have dropped since the huge amount of extra games were added. As said in an article on News site, "The honeymoon period is over. The BBL is facing a viewership crisis". You obviously love the BBL and that is fine, I will stick to Test cricket and sometimes the ODI's.

I quite like Ricky Ponting in commentary, particularly earlier on with Gilchrist and Waugh. Not as good these days, but that pretty much sums up the Big Bash really.

Who ever said you have to watch it? The BBL are still getting pretty good crowds for domestic cricket. I do suspect that the extra games have just thinned out the crowds a bit. Though with playing more games I suspect they still end up with more total crowds for the tournament than when there were a lot less games. Launceston is the smallest place that hosted any games. Can’t really expect many more than that there surely. And in the final it was all about the weather. Everyone had been saying all week that it would be a complete washout with little chance of any play. Which really kept people away. They really aren’t the games to cite when talking about crowds. And sure, if you get good tickets for a family and go to all the games it can add up. But it’s among the cheapest live sports around. I got family of four tickets for a total of $47 to some Thunder games.

Chris, It may be here to stay, but that doesn't mean we have to watch it. Yes the test crowds are poor in many countries but even the BBL is not attracting crowds. In Launceston we had two games, 8000 at one game and 6000 at the second. We used to get double that. And 90% of the kids at those games were dancing etc between overs, and could not have cared less otherwise. Even the final of the BBl only attracted 13,000 (from memory). Playing as many games as they do and the costs involved of taking a family has surely affected attendances. The BBL may be awesome for some families, but the cost is enormous (150 spent by friends of mine), so if you are going to 6 or 7 games it does get expensive. Good luck if you like T20, but I will give it a miss.