Gain that followed the Ashes pain

Competition does peculiar things to people. The bookish IT guy at work can turn into a bumping, swearing squash player; or the father who cuddles his children at home runs his studs into an opponent's ankle when his football side is behind. And then there are the hordes of cricket followers who join a sport just as their team has given up the prize it owned for 16 years. It says much about Australia's collective desire - a need to re-impress the world by becoming winners again - that a 2-1 defeat created more action and emotion than an eighth successive reclaiming of the tiny urn.

No sooner had a delirious crowd in Trafalgar Square lauded their Ashes winners on September 13 than England's opportunity for grassroots cricket to take hold was lost as the clocks went back and football pushed forward. In Australia the reaction was swift and without seasonal roadblocks. Summer was beginning and nearly everyone was thinking cricket.

During the 2005-06 summer the game achieved the largest growth by an Australian mainstream sport over the last 10 years. The belief of past and present players - even from the prime minister John Howard - that the result was "good for cricket", compensated for the defeat. Their spin was correct.

Cricket Australia puts the rise in participation at 13.6% - or 65,000 extra players on the season before - with 543,433 appearing in more than four games. "The increase was remarkable and I'm sure it will be sustained," Damien Bown, general manager of game development for Cricket Australia, says. "This season's target is another rise of 8.6%. We've realised how important the Ashes are to Australia but you don't realise what you have until it's gone."

Bown is confident of pushing further ahead for two reasons. The Ashes is the hottest ticket in two countries - only days five, which have not gone on sale except in Adelaide, and pockets of seats for days three and four at the vast MCG, are available. And the large throng of state-based volunteers has so far managed to absorb the extra playing demand.

"Maintaining the volunteer base is a big challenge," a Queensland cricket spokesman says. "Growth doesn't always keep pace with the level of volunteers and we have to deliver people and coaches."

Queensland's state-wide expansion in 2005-06 was 10.92% but some of the major associations registered player increases of up to 40%.

The Sunshine Coast Cricket Association, which covers a 60km strip about an hour's drive north of Brisbane, was one of the big movers with a 20% rise in senior teams and a 25% boost in junior sides. Locally this part of the four-year cycle is called "the Ashes spike" and the officials trace its development from the 1985 and 1989 series. "The fact the Ashes is on during the winter nights here means the sign-on numbers are always big after a tour to England," Don Pritchard, a Sunshine Coast committee member, says. "Losing the Ashes last year generated huge interest - if we smashed them again it wouldn't have happened - now everyone is looking for revenge."

Bown agrees the series "reignited Australia's passion for the game" and during the Australian team's pre-season boot camp, he briefed the players on the game's huge development since September 2005. As he ran through the figures - New South Wales 19.84% gain, South Australia 19.08%, Northern Territory 17.07% - Shane Warne asked what had happened in Tasmania, where the improvement was only 0.16%.

Bown explained that the market in Ricky Ponting's state had already been virtually saturated. "It's no time to sit back and consider the job done," James Sutherland, the Cricket Australia chief executive, says. New programmes have been installed to attract children and keep them on the path to club, state, international and supporter levels.

Five-year-olds such as Bown's daughter go off to play "Have a Go" cricket with their pink and purple bats before graduating to the green and gold uniforms of the "Have a Game" initiative. Cricket has also entered parts of the school curriculum (see panel right) and beach cricket is beginning to thrive.

As a combination of ambush marketing and cashing in on the sport's increased interest, the XXXX beer label, a fierce rival of Cricket Australia's major sponsor the Foster's Group, is running a legends series with Allan Border, Courtney Walsh and Graham Gooch leading their countries in a televised tri-series on the sand.

In Victoria and South Australia formalised yet friendly "official" events are being staged where families need bring only bats, balls and towels. Anyone can turn up and the organisers are encouraging beach Ashes games.

A street cricket programme in Victoria has won government funding; almost all the domestic one-day competition is on pay TV; big screens will beam the Ashes into public areas in the city hosting each Test; and every match will have a Ladies Day as Cricket Australia aims to boost women's participation from 10%. "We want cricket to be Australia's most watched sport," Sutherland says.

"The most attended sport, the most played and the sport that most people are interested in." Loss of the Ashes came at the perfect time.

Last season's international crowd averages were up by at least 2,071 on 2004 and this Ashes series shattered records almost six months before the first ball.

Expect the world-record crowd of 90,600, set in Melbourne for Australia's series against West Indies in 1960-61, to be beaten for the first two days of the Boxing Day Test and the remainder of the grounds are preparing for their full-house windfalls. Cricket Australia officials are confident this will transform into more players and greater support. "In our lifetime cricket will never have a better opportunity to grow public interest," Sutherland says.

He may be right but his goals do not allow for a couple of issues that cannot be projected. If the last 18 months are anything to go by, the closeness of the contest and the result will have the most significant bearings on the lasting impact in both countries.

Recent history suggests that, if Australia win the series easily, the administrators will have a 2005-style battle on their hands to hit their ambitious targets.