I am not particularly a fan of cricket, but I love the arcane language and the almost spiritual quality of the long form of the game.
I understand the need to have limited over series, and that’s all good and fine - commercial sports face the challenge of having to evolve and match the requirements of their audiences in order to survive.
Which brings me to the big bash stuff that’s happening at the moment, with the contrived team names and the fireworks and dugouts by the side of the oval and whatever else (I haven’t actually spent time watching so I’m not the full bottle). My question is whether this is seen to be working, bringing fans and revenue to a new variation of the sport.
Personally I like sport to be entertaining, but it needs to be sport first and foremost. BBL seems to me to be self-consciously entertainment to the detriment of the sport. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that, but has it captured hearts, minds and market share, or is it a fizzer?
You know, I follow cricket pretty regularly and I hadn’t even realized the Big Bash season was still ongoing. Everybody is talking about the Australia v India series and the upcoming IPL season but Big Bash seems to have faded into the background. This article from about a month ago brings the problems to the forefront, I think. Big Bash was a TV hit but mostly it seemed because little else was going on sports-wise in Australia at the time.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with the Big Bash is that with the city system nobody knows who to support. Australian cricket has always been divided along state lines. The English Twenty20 Cup works because it kept its old teams together, the IPL because their state teams weren’t that well supported in the first place but everybody identifies with their city (and because big, big money was plowed into the league). As the article notes, nobody seems to know who’s playing for who in the Big Bash league, and that’s going to slow down attendance.
So, barring changes, I’d bet that Big Bash won’t keep on working in the future, if for nothing else than fans won’t pay to watch games forever if they’re not that interesting.