As the Renegades beat the Stars in the Big Bash final on Sunday, there was a general sense of “at last”. Less that a Melbourne team had broken the city’s title drought, but because the competition was over. The persistent response from punters and pundits alike is that the season has dragged on after it expanded from 43 matches to 59.
Others have rejected that contention. Administrators like the outgoing (in both senses of the word) Cricket New South Wales boss Andrew Jones and his Cricket Tasmania counterpart Nick Cummins have used Twitter to back the expansion, regularly posting and debating attendances and ratings as the numbers roll in. They make fair points, like that the television numbers remain strong and that the timespan of this season’s competition is only marginally longer than last.
But then, as Australian politicians have exploited for the last couple of decades, facts often don’t matter as much as what people feel. Any Australian who has encountered Dennis Denuto knows the national importance of the vibe. The facts are that average attendances and ratings have dipped, and the vibe is the competition has a severe case of bloat.
This shift feels significant after January 2016, when 80,000 people showed up to a Melbourne derby at the MCG. “It’s astonishing. I’m speechless. The players are absolutely pinching themselves,” said Stars coach Stephen Fleming that day. Around the same time, the Strikers were selling out Adelaide Oval and the Scorchers were packing the Waca. It felt like the league had exploded.
It did make sense to try expanding. It might have worked; there might yet be a way to make it work. But the first attempt hasn’t. Until now, the Big Bash felt like it had become a national summer convention. It was on every night on Network Ten, at the same bat-time on the same bat-channel, for a chunk of summer from before Christmas until the end of school holidays. Most people hardly cared who won, or knew who was playing, or remembered games an hour later. But it was there during the break when there was nothing good on TV. It was consistent and cheerful and colourful, and then it was done.
This season, cramming in more games and visiting more locations, there has been a jumbled timetable and a slow bleed of attention. Even as someone who follows cricket closely, I’ve been surprised by mid-afternoon games or 11pm matches beamed from Perth. You have to work out which of two networks is carrying which game, while pay TV excludes most of the population. The beauty of the old system was its simplicity, and that’s what has been traded away.
Crowd numbers have also dropped, with more matches to choose from and less urgency to attend one. In effect 16 extra games have added 72,000 spectators over last season. During this summer, Perth dropped from 36,000 to a low of 16,000, and Adelaide from above 30,000 to 11,000. Outreach games in places like Geelong and the Gold Coast were well attended proportionally, but the cost for broadcasters in fitting out those grounds for no benefit is immense.
Melbourne and Sydney numbers were weakest, their market saturated with two teams bringing 14 games. Docklands crowds got as low as 10,000, with barely 15,000 for the Renegades’ semi-final win. The MCG, where the casual spectator is more likely to go and where the Members Stand always bulks out crowds, got as low as 20,000. Even the final got a good but not blockbuster turnout under 41,000.
The issue here is that fundamentally, who cares about these teams? A small core of supporters, and some kids for whom eight years spans all living memory. But for most people those teams have no identity of their own: they’re just Red Melbourne and Green Melbourne, Pink Sydney and Green Sydney. People might come once a season for the spectacle but they won’t come seven times. And just as big crowds generate big crowds, smaller turnouts deflate future interest.
The four other BBL teams draw the parochial support of one-team towns. The Renegades could have been based in Geelong, a city that has supported a highly successful football club for 150 years, and where there’s not much on in the summer aside from swimwear. The Thunder could at least have branded as Western Sydney, giving the millions-strong population of the baking plains something to identify with against the beaches and fig trees of the moneyed coast.
The other cause of audience weariness was the quality of cricket. With a brilliant season this conversation might not exist. But more matches means more one-sided matches, making them harder to hide. Too many pitches were poor and the standard declined. International star players were almost non-existent, with apologies to James Vince. T20 circuit names like AB de Villiers simply won’t come to Australia for nine weeks when they can be paid more elsewhere for three. Domestic Australian players can’t make up that wattage.
Don’t expect much change: the expanded season is locked in for five more years. In some ways the Seven Network and Fox Sports might not mind a reduction, which could cut their production costs and increase the value of remaining games. But neither would want to reduce matches relative to the other, with Seven already the lesser partner and Fox desperate for exclusive content to attract subscribers.
The last Cricket Australia rights deal – passing up the chance to make Ten a free one-stop home of all cricket in favour of sequestering a chunk of the game for a pay network – may yet prove to be the single greatest failing of a group of doomed administrators who signed the paperwork after the sandpaper scandal but before it had rightly cost them their jobs.
The challenge for those left at CA is to find a way to make this league work from here. The fundamentals and upsides remain. Despite its flaws we still had a season that was ubiquitous, most often enjoyable, and immediately forgettable. Which is, in the end, exactly what the Big Bash is supposed to be.