If you wanted to publicly speculate on the idea that the Australian public is “off” the national men’s team, November is a very good time to do so – basically every year.
There has been much commentary in recent weeks, around Australia’s failed Twenty20 World Cup campaign and slim crowds for the context-free 50-over series against England, that the fans have not filed in because the team is unpopular.
Only 16,993 spectators were at the SCG on Saturday night, after 15,428 were at Adelaide Oval on Thursday. A similar crowd, in the 15-20,000 range, is likely for the MCG on Tuesday.
Sydney’s crowd was slim for the England one day game.Credit:AP
Among the voices raising concern about these sparse turnouts was that of Ian Healy, a Queensland Cricket board director as well as one of the nation’s finest wicketkeepers.
“Maybe we don’t win hard enough, we don’t fight hard enough when the chips are down, there’s less empathy for the players now because of their earnings,” Healy said on SEN this week. “When we’re dealing with a lack of empathy, we need to re-engage with the public better than we have.”
Healy, though, took part in a couple of Sydney Test matches when an all-conquering Australian side proved similarly unable to draw big crowds, at the very moment Mark Taylor’s team was inking its standing as world champions.
In 1995 and 1996, the Australian Cricket Board scheduled a pair of Test matches against Pakistan and the West Indies at the SCG in late November.
Taylor, Healy, Mark and Steve Waugh, Shane Warne, David Boon, Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath all featured in one or both matches.
Yet their pulling power seemed enormously diminished for these two Tests, which drew total crowds of 61,733 for the Pakistan Test and 79,581 for the West Indies, an average of little more than 14,000 per day in Australia’s most populous city.
At the time, the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald offered the following reasons for low crowds: “The rescheduling out of school holidays, a dull wicket, the failure of Brian Lara and the West Indians lacking the glamour of previous Caribbean sides.”
The ACB’s move away from playing the SCG Test in the earliest days of January came initially because Pakistan needed to be out of the country for a subsequent tour of New Zealand in early December 1995.
The following summer’s West Indies Test dates had more to do with the desire of the South Australian Cricket Association to retain its customary Test match around the January 26 holiday.
Either way, the concept was deemed such a failure that it was one of the issues around which the ACB’s respected New South Wales representative and former chairman Alan Crompton, was rudely dumped by his state association in 1997. Sydney’s keynote Test match returned to January in 1998, where it has remained ever since.
In Melbourne, host of Tuesday’s final ODI between Australia and England, the figures are even starker.
Much can be drawn from the fact that over the more than 40 years since the end of the World Series Cricket schism that gave us more or less the rough outline of the commercially driven international season, only three ODIs have been held at the MCG in November.
The average attendance from those three matches, in 1981, 2010 and 2014, is a mere 17,993. For December, that figure jumps up beyond 40,000. For January, it is nearly 50,000. Even in February, matches over the past 40 years have attracted around 40,000 per game.
These numbers, which quantify how Australia’s traditional cricket audience takes time to warm up to summer before being glued to seats and TV screens from mid-December and into January, transcend all manner of changes.
Live broadcasts against the gate, avoided by Cricket Australia for years, began in 2006. The Big Bash League came along and brought some measure of competition with international matches in 2011. And men’s white-ball matches were handed exclusively to the pay TV operator Foxtel in 2018.
Cricket Australia did, during its expansionist years from 2010 to 2018, look at a strategic drive to grow the game’s footprint beyond that December and January window. In terms of broadcast audiences, that move has not been unsuccessful – more than a million viewers across Nine, Foxtel and Kayo tuned into Australia’s final World Cup game against Afghanistan in Adelaide, and the Fox/Kayo audience for Saturday night’s SCG game was around 500,000. But crowds at the ground are another matter.
Ashton Agar ‘saves five’ with ridiculous fielding on the boundary rope in Adelaide.Credit:Twitter
Never have spectators had more choice, nor more matches. They certainly have the sympathy of Mitchell Starc. “100 per cent, there’s a game every day,” he said after the SCG game. “It’s not for me to sit here and decide on a schedule, but it is what it is.
“We’ve come off a T20 World Cup into a three-match one-day series into five Tests, the WBBL is heading into finals at the minute, then you’ve got BBL, we go to India for Tests and white-ball, the girls have got a T20 World Cup into IPL. There’s a game of cricket every day of the week.
“I guess I can see both sides of it. How do you ask people to go spend 400-500 bucks at a day of cricket three days a week? It’s a busy schedule for players and staff and fans.”
What did buck the prevailing trend at the T20 World Cup was the huge turnout of south Asian cricket supporters to see India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka at a time usually devoid of big international fixtures in Australia.
That precedent has left Cricket Australia with something to ponder: whereas the audience for the men’s team remains exceptionally seasonal and habitual, there is another passionate group of cricket lovers in Australia willing to depart from the former norms if given the right incentives.
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