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GH squints at SA20 and the BBL

Complaints about the Big Bash League are as old as the event itself. It is too long. It is too short. It starts too early, ends too late, or vice versa. It has too many sixes or not enough. That there’s never been any consensus about what’s right or wrong with the BBL may owe itself to Cricket Australia’s constant fiddling with it here and there, with the attendant illusion that there exists an ideal at which given enough fiddling we will eventually arrive.

A paradox, however, is that the underlying competition has changed relatively little across a decade and a half. The teams in number and name have remained the same. KFC’s relationship as naming rights sponsor goes back twenty years to its state-based antecedent. There has been expansion and contraction, but the timing hasn’t altered that much, with the result that even the history is a bit samey. Sunday’s final featured the same teams as the first, Mitchell Marsh top scoring for the Scorchers, Moises Henriques and Steve Smith in charge of the Sixers. Nothing seems to come as too much of a surprise in the BBL: the Scorchers are perennial winners, the Stars perennial losers, the Renegades and Thunder almost invariably rubbish, and the seasons in hindsight hard to distinguish.

Nonetheless, as Pete noted, change is coming, ready or not, for fifteen years is a long time for anything in sport to remain fundamentally unaltered. It was piquant, in fact, that the weekend saw the conclusions of both the Big Bash League and the SA20, given that the former seems bound to follow the same path as the latter in opening the spigots to private capital. The SA20 final, by the way, was a rather better game than the Kentucky Fried squib in Perth, featuring a fifty-six hundred from Dewald Brevis, and a match-winning partnership of 114 from sixty-five balls by Tristan Stubbs and Matthew Breetzke.