Dwarfed by the son

From Philip and Alan Sutherland, Australia

In 1858, the talented allrounder Tom Wills was posed with something of a problem, namely, how to keep his fellow Victorian cricketers fit during the off season. The solution he helped find was the birth of a robust new sport in Australian Rules, said to be something of a mix of rugby, Gaelic football and the similar pastimes involving possum-skin balls of some of the indigenous peoples of the Western District of Victoria.

Over a century and a half since, cricket and the sport it helped spawn, Australian Rules, are uneasy bed-mates. Together, they rule the sporting landscape in Australia’s four “southern” states – Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. Yet, despite sharing grounds they inhabit totally different environs. In 1997, Australia’s regular free-to-air broadcaster of cricket, Channel Nine, had something of a problem too. Its problem was how to keep viewers entertained during the 40-minute Test match lunch breaks. The answer was The Cricket Show, a half-hour magazine-style programme hosted by former Australian allrounder, Victoria captain and Australian Rules footballer, Simon O’Donnell. As successful as it has been, however, perhaps The Cricket Show will ultimately tell less about the state of the game in Australia than another programme from WIN TV, a Channel Nine affiliate in Victoria – The Country Footy Show.

Of course, The Country Footy Show has nothing to do with cricket and therein lies the point. There is no country cricket show, nor will there ever be. Footy may have began partly as a means of keeping flannelled fools fit in the winter, but now cricket is more likely to be a way of keeping footballers entertained in the summer. Australia’s pre-eminent farming paper, The Weekly Times, tells a similar story. Its sporting section is packed with country football ladders, stories and statistics for six months of the year. This includes a small Legends of the Bush column which looks at prominent people and families in the country game. When the cricket season comes around, the only bit that is left is this one, small column, now converted to the bat and ball. This different reporting only reflects the different perceptions of football and cricket. The situation is similar in the rugby states of New South Wales and Queensland as well.

Football is the realm of club loyalties, whether to Melbourne FC in the AFL or South Sydney FC in the NRL and it is clubs that people are most passionate about. That cricket has survived so well Down Under has more to do with its long history of international rivalry, especially with the Ashes and in more modern times against the West Indies at their peak. How this support will transfer to a local IPL-style 20-over competition is difficult to say. This season of the IPL is not being telecast in Australia. In previous seasons, it’s unlikely to have attracted massive audiences here. Australians do not have a great track record in watching cricket not played by their national team. Only the short stuff of the Big Bash came close. To many Australians, the presence of the likes of Shane Warne in the IPL has probably more curiosity-value than anything else.

The coming season is to have two 20-over teams in both Sydney and Melbourne, a radical departure from the strictly state structure that cricket has maintained. Club loyalties in the IPL are reshaping cricket and a similar process is beginning here. We cannot simply blame the IPL, however. Our own attitudes are at least equally responsible for the changes occurring. As a young footballer from the club we support was once reported as saying, “It was nice to be involved (briefly) with cricket again – you forget how much you enjoyed it.” As cricket is dwarfed by its back-sheets son, we forget too that cricket needs space, not just for grounds and deeds, but thoughts as well. When Australians stand at a cricket match and talk footy, do we ever stop to think that the reverse, irrespective of the different time-lengths involved, hardly ever happens.