Blackadder in 'Nam

GH seeks the right metaphor

From last year’s Cricket Victoria annual report

Sometimes memory lets us down. Sometimes we omit key details of what happened. Sometimes we recall events as bigger and more momentous than they were. It can happen to anyone. It happened this week to Cricket Victoria’s CEO Nick Cummins.

To SEN’s Gerard Whateley, Cummins was trying to explain CV’s plan to nuke the Melbourne Stars and Renegades, with their long-running and successful Melbourne derby, in the name of a Big Bash League team playing under ‘the big V’. ‘We had one game, I think, with the old Big Bash where we were playing as Victoria, where we had 80,000 to the MCG,’ stated Cummins. ‘So I think it’s possible to achieve big crowds without it being a derby.’

Except that this game never happened. The best crowd Victoria achieved in the state-based Twenty20 Big Bash that pre-dated the city-based Big Bash League was barely half that, and crowds in that competition, while respectable in comparison with previous state-based white ball cricket, were paltry compared with what has been standard in the Big Bash League.

Memory, of course, is likeliest to fail us when it supports a prejudice we already harbour. So it is with Cummins. For this chaotic week he asked us to believe, seventeen years after Lalit Modi’s insight that modern cricket allegiance is chiefly urban rather than provincial, that it was time to throw the switch to Ted Whitten.

It is quite a heterodox notion until you grasp that it has been reverse engineered from the perceived necessity of selling the licence formerly known as the Melbourne Renegades as a cleanskin to a private investor. Both Renegades and Stars, Cummins insists, then had to disappear into a new entity, because of the advice from Cricket Victoria’s focus groups: ‘We were concerned that the Renegades fans in this instance then may not support the new team, but then also because they’d spent the last fifteen years hating the Stars, wouldn’t support the Stars.’ Yeah nah….

First, a note: while I understand it is flippancy, ‘hate’ is not a word to be lightly bandied about in the context of cricket, least of all in Australia. Clubs may hate each other in the NRL, and begrudge each other in the AFL, but cricket is not, and has never been, remotely similar. All Cummins means is that, after fifteen years, fans partial to one club may not have migrated readily to the other - and you hardly need a focus group to tell you that. I dare say that respondents’ first preference was not to have their clubs disappear at all, but one must assume that option was not on offer…..

Running the tatty old Bushrangers pennant up the flagpole because it ‘holds a lot of emotion and heritage for a lot of fans’, meanwhile, is an exercise in distraction. Firstly, it is nonsense: I mean, do you remember anybody complaining when the Bushrangers name was retired eight years ago? Secondly, it makes limited sense even in Cummins’ own terms. He tells Whateley that focus group respondents indicated they would ‘support a team that played under a sort of Victorian banner’ in one breath, then that ‘it will still be called Melbourne as a city-based team.’ The “Melbourne Bushrangers”? I mean, I know that sports names needn’t make sense, but I don’t remember Captain Thunderbolt claiming Captain Cook’s Cottage, Ned Kelly robbing Melbourne Town Hall. Maybe Cummins does. But, as we know, you need to discount his memory by about fifty per cent…..

Cummins next volunteers some woke gesturing about Bushrangers being ‘fairly gender-specific’ and maybe not entirely suitable to the women’s team: ’So we are mindful of that. We’re just working through that at the moment. We’ve got a few boxes we need to tick with Cricket Australia.’ You’re meant to be impressed with this deep thought and detailed analysis, and forget that the new team’s name is inconsequential compared to the concept. You might as well call it the Melbourne Focus Groups. After all, they seem pretty bloody powerful - apparently you can’t make a move without them.

I could go on, but I risk repeating myself, and you’re getting the picture. The more you contemplate the value proposition of axing two established brand names in a crowded market in the hope someone down the track will pay over the odds for the chance to put their logo on an empty box, the less sense it makes - indeed, it’s almost hard to find the right descriptive scale. When someone rolls out a stupid idea posing as a subtle one, you usually invoke Baldrick. When someone proposes that eliminating value will somehow create it, you’re reminded of the major at Bến Tre who claimed it was ‘necessary to destroy the town to save it.’ But because these allusions are stale, maybe let’s combine them: Cricket Victoria’s plan is an episode of Blackadder set during the Vietnam war.

So here we are, thanks to Cricket Australia’s desperation to drive privatisation, now mutated into the so-called ‘self-determination’ model aimed at forcing change by exploiting short-term local financial exigency. ‘Burning platform’? It’s starting to savour of arson….