Relent! Relent!
As the Commonwealth Bank trophy continued to trundle on through the never-ending “group stages” and after reading Tim DeLisles’s We Want Less, I got to thinking about the state of the travelling throughout this Ashes tour. And I even knocked up a little graphic to illustrate (using the first test in Brisbane as a starting point.)
I know that Australia is a big country, but my extremely rough calculations, our boys will have done 26,000km travelling by the end of this tour (not including the 17,000km or so each way in just getting there). It’s no wonder they’ve been a little out of sorts. I hope they’ve been collecting their airmiles.
No doubt planning a tour schedule is a very complicated matter, involving all kinds of authorities and interested parties, but you can’t help but wonder if things could have been a little more sensible. For example, the 4th Test was played in Melbourne, they then went to Sydney to play the 5th Test, and then straight back to Melbourne to play the first one day match. It’s indicative of the extent to which cricket has become a commodity, something that can nowadays be sold to the highest bidder, with the quality of the cricket and the effect on the game and its players seemingly not even a secondary consideration. For example, by the conclusion of the CB Trophy, 15 matches will have been played. By the conclusion of the World Cricket League, 15 matches (well, OK actually 16, the final between Kenya and Scotland) will have been played. The different, though, is that there were 6 teams in the WCL. The CB Trophy really is a mockery of one day cricket. Teams should have played each other at most twice, with one final. It’s no wonder that injury in cricket is spiralling out of control. If the cricket authorities aren’t careful, they won’t have a game to sell, any players to play, nor any spectators to watch.
(The other obvious question is what’s wrong with Northern Australia? Does cricket not have the same following or are the conditions not correct for producing decent wickets?)
Tags: Australia, Commonwealth-Bank-Trophy, England, One-Day-cricket, The-AshesRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Cricket
1 opinion for Relent! Relent!
Geoff Young
Feb 6, 2007 at 3:46 pm
That is a pretty outrageous travel schedule. No offense to Perth, which I’m sure is a fine city, but wouldn’t one trip there and back be sufficient?
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