Kiwi one-dayers swamped by the footy

THE Australian cricket summer will end as it began, invisibly, when the home series against New Zealand is swamped by the football codes.

The season’s next — and last — international men’s matches, two ODIs in Sydney and one in Hobart, will be played in the shadow of the AFL and NRL.

Australia’s quest to reclaim the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy will be punted to a dead pocket as soon as the first Sherrin is bounced in March.

Scheduling the first and second trophy matches clash heavily with NRL fixtures, while the final Australia-New Zealand ODI, on Friday, March 20, in Hobart, is on the same night that AFL behemoth Collingwood begins its 2020 campaign.

Denied a Test match, again, Hobart was instead granted a crumb from Cricket Australia’s boardroom table — a onedayer to close the international summer.

Even that scanty concession will be shunted into the background by the AFL’s first Friday night match of the season — the Magpies versus the Bulldogs at Docklands.

So the summer of cricket will be bookended with marginalised series, given the Sri Lanka and Pakistan T20s in October-November received a tepid reception.

“We’re about 35,000 people below where we wanted to be on aggregate across those matches,” CA chief executive Kevin Roberts said before the last of the T20Is in November.

“We’re disappointed with where those crowds are at. It’s not surprising that the grounds weren’t full, given the experience of this time of the year.”

The cricketing public appeared to be caught out by the summer game starting in spring. So it’s no great leap of logic to suggest they’ll be similarly switched off in autumn.

The flat start and likely forgettable finish to the season has been aggravated by a fallow period — one with 66 days of no international men’s cricket from the last day of the Sydney Test to the first New Zealand ODI.