WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE
Regardless of how Wednesday’s Big Bash League final between the Perth Scorchers and Sydney Sixers went at Canberra’s Manuka Oval, not many people in Australia could be disappointed with the outcome. The competition, the fourth since Australia’s domestic Twenty20 contest switched over to a franchise-based format for the 2011-12 season, has been evenly fought and full of high-quality cricket. Plus, it has smashed attendance records.
This has been achieved with Australia playing various international series, robbing the event of a lot of potential marquee players, and while most of the other major international teams have also been in action. It’s also been achieved with a salary cap per team of about $830,000, compared with $9.75 million for the most recent season of the Indian Premier League.
The franchises have done well in attracting big-name players who have either retired from international cricket or aren’t currently getting selected: the likes of Dwayne Bravo, Andrew Flintoff, Alex Hales, Jacques Kallis, Kevin Pietersen, Kieron Pollard, Ben Stokes and Daniel Vettori.
Along with the evident depth in Australian domestic cricket, the result has been a tight tournament in which few individuals have dominated. Going into the final, 13 batsmen have scored more than 200 runs but none more than 300, while 19 bowlers have eight wickets or more, but none has more than twice that many.
Instead, the tournament has been highlighted by one-off performances, mostly with the bat. Chris Lynn of the Brisbane Heat and Tim Ludeman of the Adelaide Strikers both managed record-breaking 18-ball half-centuries. A pair of innings on consecutive days at the end of the group stage from Peter Handscomb of the Melbourne Stars and Jordan Silk of the Sixers also stretched notions of what’s possible in a run chase to new limits. Silk’s achievement was particularly remarkable, helping the Sixers chase down 56 off the final three overs.
But the tournament also benefited from its scheduling and geography. With 35 games, it is more concise than other big-name T20 tournaments—the IPL, with the same number of teams, features 60, and the games were all close to major population centers.
With 40% of the country’s population in the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas, it makes sense given that those two cities host two teams each. But it does make it difficult to drive a meaningful wedge between them and carve them out separate identities.
The Big Bash’s answer has been to site the teams in different stadiums in different parts of the city, although that’s admittedly easier in Sydney, where there’s nearly 10 miles (16 kilometers) between the homes of the Sixers in east and the Thunder in west, than in Melbourne, where there is only about 2 miles between the homes of the Stars and the Renegades.
One of those two cities, or Adelaide, might also have been a better choice for the final than Canberra, which doesn’t host a Big Bash team. Similarly, the previous three finals were all in Perth, several hours’ flight from anywhere.
Another small problem with the tournament’s format should be fairly easy to remedy: With four of the eight teams qualifying for the semifinals, and a straight knockout following, a team can dominate the entire group stage, then have one bad day and go out, while a team that scrapes through after an average season then only needs two good games to be crowned champions.
It’s happened both this season and last. This year the Strikers looked by far the best team in the group stages, only losing one of its eight games, before it was ambushed in the semifinal by a Sixers side that had previously only flared intermittently.
Last year the Melbourne Stars suffered a similar semifinal reverse after winning every one of its group games. The final was contested between the Scorchers and Hobart Hurricanes, the third- and fourth-best teams in the group stages with 5-3 and 3-1-4 records, respectively. An IPL-style eliminator round would be an improvement, giving the top two teams two chances to qualify for the final, and reducing the chances of meaningless games toward the end of the group stage.
The successful teams have been all about balance and consistency. The Strikers, with no particular stars, was excellently led by Johan Botha and an attack featuring five distinctive styles of bowler. The two teams in the final have also spread their match-winning performances among various team members. Between them they boast five of the six highest-scoring batsmen in the tournament. For the Sixers, Silk, Nic Maddinson and Michael Lumb all had more than 260 runs going into the final. The Scorchers’ bowlers had been equally consistent, with Andrew Tye, Jason Behrendorff and Yasir Arafat all taking 14 wickets.
The success of the Big Bash in attracting big crowds has caused some soul-searching elsewhere, particularly in England, where the NatWest T20 Blast continues to feel underwhelming by comparison. The only major cricketing nation without a glitzy franchise-based tournament—except Pakistan, which overseas players are reluctant to visit—England invented T20 and staged the first domestic games, but has clearly fallen behind. Partly as a consequence, it is struggling in international T20.
Former England players Pietersen, Lumb and Michael Carberry, all appearing in the Big Bash, have all called for English cricket to copy it, and specifically to move to a franchise model. Whether it goes down this route or not, English cricket needs to address the way quality is diluted by an 18-team tournament, and how crowds are affected by the scheduling of the event, spread throughout the first-class season.
If it’s looking for a successful template to copy, it could do far worse than the Big Bash.
