You’re living in the glory days of the BBL. The ratings and crowd figures show the BBL was fading. Seven believe they overpaid for the product because there are too many no names.
Ten built it up whilst it was new and shiny but if you think the BBL has any chance of drawing 80,000 to the G with a team like the Stars last night. You’re dreaming.
WA have laughably tried to swap their Test match with SA, so make the 2nd Test at Optus Stadium and the 5th Test in Adelaide. SACA rightly told them to GAGF.
Just reschedule the 5th test to Hobart and be done with it
I’d love to see a day-nighter test at the MCG*. The crowd would be enormous.
*Not at the expense of the Boxing Day test, though.
It’s entirely deluded to think it was going to maintain those levels though.
Oh and for the record, the Stars have 3 T20 World Cup winners on their roster, indeed they have one of the absolute best T20 bowlers in the world. Lack of talent isn’t their problem, lack of performance is their huge ■■■■■■■ problem.
This is nothing more than a political play from the ■■■■■■■■ running the state after being told last week by CA that their test match is dead and buried. He’s trying to convince his imbecilic outpost hermit kingdom constituents that they’ll be the victims and hard done by when they lose their test match for a 2nd year running. WA cabinet back-grounded the West Australian newspaper late last week about this after they got word from CA.
It’s all rather amusing.

At one point the BBL had the highest average attendance for any domestic sport IN THE WORLD outside of soccer in Brazil. It was a brief phenomena that was never going to carry those sort of numbers for long, but it could of been better managed and has suffered from the expansion of the season.
Up until COVID though it was basically achieving the same attendance just spread over the greater number of games. It hit it’s saturation point.
Source? That would be completely wrong IMO. The BBL average attendance would have never outdone the AFL. Let alone NFL, EPL and German football.
I back up my comment with this table:
| Characteristic | Average attendance in thousands |
|---|---|
| NFL | 67.1 |
| Bundesliga | 43.45 |
| EPL | 38.17 |
| AFL | 35.12 |
| NPB | 30.93 |
| MLB | 28.18 |
| La Liga | 26.81 |
| IPL* | 25.71 |
| Serie A | 25.24 |
| CSL | 23.99 |
| CFL | 22.92 |
| Ligue 1 | 22.8 |
| MLS | 21.31 |
Best I could find on BBL is:
AVERAGE ATTENDANCE PER BBL MATCH
BBL05 (15/16) — 29,443
BBL06 (16/17) — 30,122
BBL07 (17/18) — 26,528
BBL08 (18/19) — 20,554
BBL09 (19/20) — 18,880*
Attendance dropped off 22.5 per cent in BBL08 when the extension was implemented. Since 2018, Big Bash attendance has decreased a whopping 29 per cent.
The internationals that come out to the BBL nowadays are by and large absolute garbage.
I didn’t catch last night as I was out but a mate said there was some dude playing last night from Pakistan who’d never played before and got picked off a zoom interview/trial thing?!
In recent years (even prior to covid) a lot of the international drawcards have preferred to play in the Bangladesh league or random Dubai leagues than come here. Something is wrong when that’s happening.
If we need to have a couple of international players exempt from the salary cap then we should look at this IMO.
If the BCCI weren’t so pig headed in the way they control their players and don’t release them to play around the world, that would help too.
And the domestic players who aren’t regular state league players seem to be of a regressing standard too.
Anyway, hopefully it improves soon when the Aus A guys filter back in and some who are out injured return.
Yeah, there is Rashid Kahn, then Alex Hales, then daylight in terms of T20 quality amongst the international batch.
You’re right that the quality of international signings is an issue, and the reason for it is no secret… CA simply refuse to pony up the money to pay for the best guys, thus they prefer to go to the BPL for the same cash over a shorter period.
This isn’t just CA’s fault though, the Cricketer’s Association have a big part in this as well. They refuse to approve an increase to salaries or number of imports because they fear it’ll just cost contracts to local players.
So what you get is junk local players who aren’t any good (sprinkled with a handful of genuine young talent) and you miss out on elite imports who will improve the overall quality, depth, and spectacle of the tournament as a whole.
There’s a couple more that are quality, James Vince has been just about the most consistent performed import the tournament has seen.
Don’t the BCI still block Indian players from playing in the BBL?
We don’t even see the second or third string Indian players come out here
Yeah they do. This year is the first time we’ll have an Indian participant in the BBL.
All over in Mumbai. India win by 372.
cake walk win by India
I personally love T20 cricket and the big bash. But there is a place for it. Imo the shield should run up until a couple of days before Xmas. From boxing day onwards , they play big bash(but the season needs to be shorter and games more condensed. Each team should be playing every 3rd day. There is only 8 teams.
Everyone plays each other twice and then finals. Don’t drag out finals with playoffs etc. Top team goes straight to the GF and 2nd and 3rd face each other for the other spot. It should be done by the time kids go back to school