How to ruin a T20 league
‘Drastic’ expansion has led to plummeting attendances and forced BBL marquee players to ply their trade elsewhere. Tim Wigmore reports.
On January 2, 2016, 80,000 fans packed into the MCG to watch the Melbourne Stars against Melbourne Renegades – two teams who had not existed five years earlier. The heady sight embodied the sense of a league rising inexorably.
While the Big Bash glistened, the only question seemed to be whether it could expand quickly enough to meet demand. ‘‘We have found that the more successful BBL has become, the more opportunities have come our way,’’ Anthony Everard, the then manager of the Big Bash, said in 2017.
‘‘There are a lot of ideas floating around.’’ The ideas are certainly still lurking: this season’s Big Bash will feature the most radical rule changes in the 17-year history of T20. Except where the ideas were once an attempt to help the league reach new heights, now they are seeking to reinvigorate an ailing competition.
This season the Big Bash has introduced a substitute player, bonus points and reformed the Powerplay – tweaks derided as ‘‘gimmicks’’ by Shane Watson, perhaps Australia’s greatest T20 player.
‘‘I think we might have killed the franchise,’’ George Clooney observed after the movie Batman & Robin flopped. Similar greed explains the Big Bash’s plight.
The league fattened from 35 games to 59 in two seasons; last season it crept up again, to 61, with two extra playoff games. Aaron Finch, Australia’s white-ball captain, said recently that the increases were ‘‘too drastic’’.
The increase from eight group games per side to 14 has fundamentally changed the feel of the Big Bash. From a tournament in high summer, it now has the feel of a league, with the currency of each individual game devalued and the competition extending both sides of the Christmas holidays, which were once its natural timespan.
The enlarged playoff system, which now involves five of the eight teams, rids league games of jeopardy: a side can lose eight of 14 group games and still reach the playoffs. Fans have noticed as much: from an average of 30,000 in 2015-16 and 2016-17, average attendances plummeted to 18,000 last summer, when net attendances fell by more than 90,000.
As well as diluting the importance of any individual game, overreach has lowered the quality on the pitch. Australia’s best players seldom play in the BBL: Steve Smith has played three games since 2014, and Mitchell Starc none at all. David Warner has featured in only three games in the nine previous years of the Bash. ‘‘I don’t think I will play while I am playing for Australia still,’’ Warner said.
The competition extending later into the season has brought clashes with Australia’s white-ball games, meaning leading players in the competition have often been unavailable for the crunch stages. This has exposed the gulf in standards within the local talent pool; increasing the number of overseas players from two to three this year is designed to lift the standard.
The sheer length of the tournament has made the Bash less attractive for overseas players – and even leading Australian T20 freelancers. Last year, Watson opted to play in the Bangladesh Premier League instead of the Bash – allowing him to earn more while having more time to spend with his family.
Big Bash organisers could point out that, even in its enlarged form, it is near-identical in structure to the Indian Premier League. But the comparison is disingenuous: all other top-tier cricket ceases during the IPL, allowing it a monopoly on the world’s best players. And the Indian market has a unique capacity to absorb such a lengthy tournament.
Rather than try to mimic the IPL, a better model would be to look to the Caribbean Premier League and Pakistan Super League, which have usurped the Bash as the best non-IPL T20 leagues. These lack the IPL’s riches, but make up for it with short, sharp leagues: both have only six teams, and allow four overseas players per side.
And so while these tournaments retain a sense of being a festival, the Bash rapidly descends into being a grind: this year’s competition will drag out for 59 days, while the CPL was all over in 24. Far from being the envy of the T20 world, now the BBL serves as a warning to all sports leagues: of the dangers of greed.
Almost five years ago, during the Bash’s zenith, Cricket Australia’s chief executive James Sutherland said that the success of the league had ‘‘cannibalised the demand for international cricket’’. It seemed like a fair analysis. But as the new season rolls in, it increasingly seems as if the Big Bash has cannibalised itself.