So. The Big Bash. It’s back, yeah?
Now in its 12th iteration, the BBL never actually went anywhere these past few years. It certainly felt that way though.
But as 2023 dawns and the masses return to work looking for any means of procrastination to distract from the task at hand and sunshine beyond, the Big Bash League is offering top-shelf entertainment.
Perhaps better than ever before.
No one has gathered around a water cooler in decades. When was the last time you actually saw one?
But consider the group chat.
“They got rolled for how many?” when Thunder No.10 batter Brendan Doggett top-scored with four, count ’em, four runs in an entire team total of 15 – the lowest score in the history of men’s professional T20 cricket.
“He did what?” “Yeah, and?” when Adam Zampa attempted to run out Renegades non-striker Tom Rogers with the always fun ‘Mankad’, prompting several days of hot takes and heated debate regarding the practice and the always rubbery spirit of cricket.
The reaction was rinsed and repeated from Michael Neser’s juggling catch on the boundary three days earlier, the headline in a 430-plus run game that could’ve gone either way until Neser pulled off said juggling act.
Just quietly, the best pub chat offering from that Heat-Sixers contest was second-gamer Josh Brown.
Effectively a pub cricketer 18 months ago, Brown clubbed six sixes in a 23-ball innings of 62, using a bat he carved himself, possibly from a bigger bat, per his day job as a bat maker.
Controversy will always be king though. And both the Zampa and Neser incidents served to put the Big Bash and the intricacies of obscure cricket rules on a global platform.
Thanks to the internet, they did indeed go global, and helped explain why Neser could hop, skip and jump his way to a legal catch, just as Zampa’s vertical arm denied what would have been a lawful dismissal.
For a Big Bash tournament facing seriously cashed-up competition for star players from rival leagues being launched in South Africa and the UAE, the publicity is priceless.
BBL attendances were understandably hammered down below 8,000 a game by two COVID-19-impacted campaigns when matches were being postponed, shifted at the last minute and played in front of socially distanced crowds.
An expanded 61-game home and away season already welcomed irrelevance. In the middle of a pandemic, it was exacerbated.
Rightly so, potentially as early as next season, the BBL will be wound back to 43 games per campaign.
This year’s average crowd though has just ticked past 15,000 per game following Sunday’s 20,864-strong turnout for the Sixers-Thunder derby at the Sydney Showground Stadium.
Again, punters left the ground with Ben Cutting’s Superman catch on the boundary fresh in the memory and doing the social media rounds throughout Monday, just as the Strikers’ record chase of Hobart’s 4-229 did last week.
Ben Cutting salutes the crowd after his spectacular take against the Sixers.Credit:Twitter
Cricket Australia has estimated for some time now that primetime BBL matches draw a screen audience between 800,000-900,000 across Fox Sports, Channel 7 and Kayo data – the last of which is not publicly available.
BBL chief Alistair Dobson has argued publicly a few times that these are effectively ‘Friday Night Footy’ numbers, each night of the week during summer.
With South Africa’s own T20 league leaving January without an ODI series and the Australian international summer to wrap up on January 8, Australian cricket’s most familiar faces will trade their whites for coloured pyjamas by the end of the week.
David Warner, Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne, Usman Khawaja and Travis Head are among the international stars replacing departing imports before next month’s Indian tour.
How long the BBL’s buoyant new bubble lasts is a genuine question for cricket powerbrokers given the lopsided summer schedule and rival T20 leagues that will only continue to pop up around the globe.
But at least it’s giving us something to talk about.
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