Renegades fans got a kick out of the Melbourne BBL derby last Sunday, as they watched their side triumph in the final over against the crosstown Stars. But it was Australian cricket officials who went home giddy amid an increasingly heated international contest between T20 franchise leagues.
The 68,124 at the MCG – the highest BBL crowd since 2017 – were joined by almost 38,000 in Perth to watch the Scorchers beat the Strikers later that night. The combined turnout set the competition’s single-day attendance record of 105,767.
It was a statement for the BBL on the same day its major global competitors held their own marquee fixtures. In the UAE’s ILT20 final, the Desert Vipers defeated MI Emirates but the 25,000-seat Dubai International Cricket Stadium was well short of full. In South Africa’s T20 league, the crowd at Newlands was healthier, but a low MI Cape Town total allowed local rivals Paarl to end the one-sided match seven overs early.
A push for private investment in the BBL is being driven by a need to keep pace with these upstart competitions, and ensure Australia’s now 15-year-old T20 showpiece remains a key part of the increasingly crowded calendar. But Alistair Dobson, Cricket Australia’s head of BBL and WBBL, argues it’s not all about the money.
“We’re pretty competitive on salaries, albeit that’s going to continue to be important for us,”, he says, looking out over the MCG before the clash between the Stars and Sixers on Thursday.
“But you have to look out here at the MCG to see the quality of the experience that our players get. We talk to them a lot about what’s important to them, and yes, being paid appropriately is important, but coming and playing in the Australian cricket summer is a massive selling point.”
Sam Curran was in Dubai for that final on Sunday as captain of the triumphant Vipers, owned by Avram Glazer of Manchester United fame. The England allrounder flew to Sydney the following day to join up with the Sixers, and played his first BBL match against the Stars of his brother Tom (who was a late withdrawal with hip soreness) on Thursday. Curran hadn’t been to Melbourne since being named player of the match in the 2022 T20 World Cup final at the MCG more than three years ago.
“I’ve never really had the time in terms of fitting [BBL] in the schedules, but as soon as the opportunity came to come to the Big Bash, I’m thankful I got picked up,” Curran says, having experienced a mixed debut which included two catches, 17 runs but also a first over which went for 21. “Tonight’s show is obviously my first experience of it. It’s noisy, there are a lot of kids around, and it’s a great place to play cricket.”
The next few weeks offer the BBL precious oxygen in the suffocating cricket calendar. Australia’s Ashes winners will return to their BBL franchises for the end of the regular season and lead-up to the finals, allowing the league to tap into the Ashes afterglow. And all but one BBL side is still in with a chance of playing finals.
As talks intensify around opening up the BBL to private investors, there will never be a better opportunity for the league to highlight the value of its product. Television audiences on both Foxtel and Seven are up, and last week – thanks to the Ashes lead-in – BBL matches attracted an average over 1m viewers across free-to-air and subscription platforms on four consecutive nights for the first time in seven years.
“It does feel like we’re getting back towards that level of public consciousness and public interest,” Dobson says, arguing the turnaround is caused by a combination of factors, including contracting quality players, high scoring, and long-term returns of being early to the T20 revolution. “15 years old is still a young league in the context of the footy codes in Australia, but we’re now seeing second generations of fans come through,” he says.
Much about the BBL’s future, however, is up in the air. Cricket Australia is trying to convince the state bodies and the players’ association to open up the eight BBL sides to investment from wealthy global elites, including some who own franchises in the Indian Premier League, the UK’s Hundred, and even in the BBL’s main rivals in South Africa and the UAE.
Such a move would require a rethink of Australian cricket, including where the BBL sits alongside the Tests in the Australian summer, with the lingering questions including who benefits from the influx of private money and how much should be channelled towards overseas players. Meetings between Cricket Australia and the states will continue in coming weeks.
The potential is not hard to see. On Thursday at the MCG, hundreds of Melburnians with Pakistani backgrounds stayed back after the game seeking an audience with Babar Azam, the megastar opener who is playing his first BBL season with the Sixers.
Dobson expects more opportunities to emerge to build interest from south Asian audiences. Although male Indian players have long been barred from taking part in the Australian T20 competition, Ravi Ashwin – after his retirement from international cricket – signed with the Sydney Thunder for this season. Unfortunately, the spinner with 1.8m YouTube subscribers pulled out with an injury, but he is reportedly keen to return next summer.
“As the BBL is in an evolution from being perhaps a domestic league into a global one – albeit we’ve always had overseas players, we’ve had a very domestic focus – the future for us is getting a balance of global and domestic,” Dobson says. “So we’ll need to be creative and ambitious around that and continue to tell our story.”
