Slow Death of one-day cricket?
We not only have Australia to thank for the clapperboard, pre-paid postage, zinc cream, the super sopper and bionic ear, but the modern-day incarnation of one-day cricket.
True, the first limited overs competition was held in England in the early 1960s, but it was Australia - and namely, Kerry Packer - which brought the format to technicolour life in the late 1970s with World Series Cricket. Floodlights, coloured pyjama clothing, mass marketing (including the anthem-like C'mon Aussie C'mon), mass merchandising, and big dollar remuneration for once lowly-paid cricketers. All are legacies of the Packer revolution.
But is Australia now witnessing the slow death of the 50-over format? Certainly, the attendance figures suggest it is in serious trouble, with even sports-mad Melbourne turning its back on the game. Only 25,643 turned up at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday for the one-day international between Australia and the West Indies, its lowest ODI crowd in almost thirty years. By contrast, 60,054 turned up at the MCG for a Twenty20 international only 24 hours before.
The television ratings are also down. , which has held the exclusive broadcasting rights to cricket ever since the Packer take-over, trailed third in the ratings on Sunday night when it aired the one-day international.
The rise of microwave cricket has been the sports story of the southern summer, with the interstate Twenty20 competition, the Big Bash, an instant success. For a game between Victoria and Tasmania, 43,125 people turned up at the MCG, while tens of thousands have also converged on the Olympic Stadium in Sydney to watch this abbreviated version of the game.
The cricket is usually agricultural, and can be ugly to the point of disfigurement, but even for purists there's a guilty pleasure in seeing the ball smacked to all parts of the ground.
The 50-over game, in contrast, is stuck in a sort of cricketing no mans land: lacking the instant, knock-out thrills of Twenty20 or the slow-cooked flavour and nourishment of Test cricket. Cricket Australia, which has limited to three the number of Twenty20 internationals, has mounted a "comprehensive review".
The irony is that one-day cricket is the only form of the game in which Australia retains its global dominance - which reinforces the argument of previous blogs that Aussie sports fans are not as victory-orientated as is commonly assumed.
Some have argued for a global league system to increase the popularity of the 50-over game. Or perhaps it is time to split ODIs into four separate innings, which might heighten the drama. Maybe it is time to ditch 50-over cricket, and focus on test and Twenty20.
While we are on the subject of cricket, the southern summer has proven to be unexpectedly interesting and exciting. The Sydney test, which saw an extraordinary Australian fight back against Pakistan, will live in the memory for decades to come, while the West Indies were by no means a push-over. Both series demonstrated once more how the comparative decline of the Australian side has helped enliven test cricket. And talking to a lot of Aussie fans, they enjoy watching tension-filled cricket after a decade, more or less, of lop-sided results.
In the context of the ongoing debate about racial attitudes in Australia, it is also worth pointing out that the Pakistan and West Indies passed without incident. Indeed, the main crowd-related story of the summer has been the over-officiousness of police and stewards rather than the unruliness of the spectators.
On that note, the only time that I have been to a ODI this season I spent almost as much time watching the stewards puncture beach balls as the game itself. Great entertainment, and arguably more so than the 50-over game.
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