Cricket - dropped, kicked
DateDecember 16, 2012
Jake Niall
.FOOTBALL'S less than stellar year has become cricket's problem.
The Kurt Tippett scandal, the Melbourne tanking investigation, drugs and the challenges facing indigenous football have all been unwelcome dramas for the AFL since the season ended. Collectively, these eruptions of controversy have made 2012 the longest ''season'' on record.
The AFL says the draft and salary cap are the pillars of the equalised competition. The Tippett affair undermined the sanctity of both.
The AFL is proud of its drug rehabilitation regime and likes to trumpet its success in ensuring integrity - largely via crackdowns on officials and players placing $10 bets. This post-season, the drug policy has been damaged by club complaint and speculation about players ''on the gear'', while the admirably rigorous Melbourne tanking probe, perversely, suggests to the public that tanking was real, did happen and that the AFL was in the denialist camp for too long.
Crowning this spring/summer of discontent was a perceived setback in what is the AFL's No. 1 point of legitimate boast, the progress of indigenous footballers - draft numbers were down and risk-averse clubs are muttering, behind closed doors, about the increasing difficulties facing young Aboriginal talent.
If we continue on the negative for just a moment, crowds were down, the bottom five or six teams were wooden-spoon worthy, almost half the competition are mendicant clubs reliant on hand-outs (a situation reinforced by the fixture) and several executives, most notably football operations manager Adrian Anderson, have exited AFL headquarters, though some would argue that an infusion of new people is timely.
Football officially winds up this week, when the AFL offices shut. The Magpies will be back from Utah soon, dispensing presents to the unfortunate - no, not just their membership - on Christmas Day. Footy will fade, although, as a media person, one can never be sure that a gun player won't find trouble in King Street, Lakes Entrance or even while backpacking in Greece.
Why is this litany of footy fiasco cricket's problem? Well, look at the back page, listen to SEN and check the sentences flowing along the screen bottom on Fox Sports. AFL controversy might hurt footy - I'm sure Andrew Demetriou would rather the Crows hadn't bent the rules, that tanking was truly a media fantasy, that the drug policy was considered 100 per cent kosher, that indigenous players were maintaining their market share - but these stories are also having the unintended consequence of creaming cricket.
No one within football that I speak to can remember a post-season like the one that is concluding this week. The only comparable tumult was in 2002, when Carlton's implosion bookended a year that Wayne Carey ''started''. Cricket is hurting, just in terms of commanding the media and (therefore) public attention, and it is further hamstrung by the fixture, which has Australia playing Sri Lanka, rather than England or India.
Unlike footy, which devises its own fixture and sees to it that there are bi-annual blockbusters, cricket, as a global game, is subject to international obligation.
It does not ''decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come''. Doubtless, there would be more interest in the Ashes, or Indians than Sri Lanka in its current Murali-less phase, but cricket cannot schedule the Poms to play Australia twice a year like Carlton and Collingwood; Boxing Day is not Anzac Day.
The Lankans, incidentally, draw well in Melbourne, due to the expat factor, but will not captivate the airwaves. A five-Test series against South Africa would have been more arresting, but even the Proteas seemed low profile.
The notion that cricket is losing ground to the AFL, and perhaps to rugby league, is not novel. But when the rout is discussed, it's often measured in talented two-sport kids - for example, Brett Deledio - and their choices.
In reality, the most important measure is media, which produces the rights, sponsorship and interest. Cricket Australia understands this, hence the high hopes for the Big Bash League as a way of winning youth with Nintendo attention spans.
Cricket is getting a heavier hiding this year than it did two years ago when the Australian Test team was embarrassed by England and we turned, overnight, into a nation of disgruntled Richmond fans.
The Ashes confirmed that Australia was in rebuilding mode. Yet the debate about what had to be done to revive our team was healthy in the sense that it generated passion and raised cricket's profile.
As one football insider, who knows the cricket world well, observed, cricket ''did a North Melbourne and didn't capitalise on a once-in-a-generation team''. In those 15 years of supremacy, when Australia boasted Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath et al, cricket made no inroads on footy's command of the calendar, which the AFL partly controls by having drafts, trades and various ''key dates'' scattered from October till December. This year, the trades lasted a month.
Today, due to footy's unintended imperialism, the cricket season - as defined by those of us who work in media - begins this week and ends in early February.
Tennis gets two or three weeks around the Australian Open. Golf is becoming mini. Soccer moved to summer to escape footy and the NRL but found there was no escape. For footy media, the season is from February 1 till the December draft.
Did cricket lack vision and enterprise, or is football an unstoppable media juggernaut?
Certainly, the AFL is more popular and intensely followed in its home states than cricket, which is weak in Western Australia where football is rampant but surprisingly strong in Tasmania (see Ricky Ponting, Matthew Wade, Ben Hilfenhaus), where there is no permanent AFL team; New South Wales is the cricket powerhouse and the AFL Third World.
In my childhood, cricket was close to par with footy in terms of profile. World Series Cricket, far from an existential threat to the game, served to heighten interest as we chose sides in that civil war.
Solutions aren't obvious. Move the Big Bash to October-November and take on the AFL trade period? Maybe. Can the international fixture be fixed? Unlikely.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, as Oscar Wilde so memorably put it. A bit of controversy - even scandal - isn't necessarily so bad.
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/cricket--dropped-kicked-20121215-2bgoc.html#ixzz2FAOYCKik