No bums on seats as ‘T20 fatigue’ sets in
● Cricket South Africa (CSA) and its provincial affiliates may be right in expanding the T20 Challenge and making it a proper national competition, but judging by its first night, it looks like being a tough sell to local viewers, who already have a packed sporting menu to choose from.
CSA made it mandatory for its nationally contracted players to feature in at least the first week of the competition, meaning a host of the country’s top players were in action on Friday night.
However, with the exception once again of SuperSport Park in Centurion, attendances at the remaining three fixtures were sparse. One local official described it as “T20 fatigue”, following the SA20 as a possible reason for the poor turnout on the opening night.
At the Wanderers, where Kwena Maphaka — South African cricket’s “next big thing ”— bowled alongside Kagiso Rabada for a Central Gauteng Lions team that featured seven other Proteas, including Test captain Temba Bavuma, only 1,011 spectators passed through the turnstiles.
The union had anticipated lower attendances compared to the SA20, with at least a third of the seating in the lower tiers of the Wanderers and the usually popular Eastern Stand covered by massive advertising banners.
Describing Friday night’s crowd at the Wanderers as a smattering of spectators would be an exaggeration. It was as if people accidentally stumbled upon the game having seen the lights on in Corlett Drive.
At least SuperSport Park had something resembling a crowd for the Titans’ match against North West but, again, it was nowhere close to the numbers that the venue saw for the SA20 or the opening day of the Test against India.
Based on the streaming coverage of the matches in Durban, where Western Province played KwaZulu-Natal Dolphins, and in Gqeberha, where the Eastern Cape Warriors faced the KZN-Inland Tuskers, it was a similar story — far more empty seats than occupants.
One viewer on YouTube lamented the poor marketing of the competition, and certainly by comparison with what was witnessed for the SA20, the publicity for the CSA T20 Challenge was virtually non-existent.
Like the other two Division One competitions, it lacks a sponsor, and the continued absence illustrates how difficult CSA is still finding it to build trust with corporate South Africa.
SuperSport is showing 18 matches along with the semis and the final, which will take place on April 18, with the remaining games streamed on CSA’s YouTube channel, where coverage isn’t of the highest quality.
In an attempt to attract more spectators and create a semblance of an atmosphere, some unions, like Gauteng, Northerns and KZN — the most financially stable affiliates — have offered discounted ticket prices, starting from as low as R10 for Kingsmead. They are all running a scaled-down version of the one-handed crowd catch promotion that proved so popular for SA20, with Gauteng offering R20,000 for the first person to take a catch at each match at the Wanderers, and Northerns offering R15,000.
Gauteng is also running a student promotion, where students get a free beer with each ticket purchased.
But with the top players like Rabada, Marco Jansen, Heinrich Klaasen and Proteas T20 captain Aiden Markram heading to India for the Indian Premier League (IPL) next week, there is little time for CSA to leverage off the Proteas.