He made 33 off 220 balls without a boundary in helping former schoolmate Faf du Plessis save a Test against Australia in 2012-13 and eked out 43 over almost six hours and 297 balls against India’s dominant spin bowlers in Delhi in 2015-16. So how does the BBL participation boom help Test cricket? The longer you keep these kids playing cricket, the more they will appreciate the nuances of the game.But De Villiers could also adapt his game to play long defensive innings. This argument completely missed the greater point that BBL-era newbies would not stay in cricket very long if they spent hours on the sidelines watching kids tutored in the nets by cricket-loving families and friends. Some former players claimed "making a duck builds resilience." Never mind they had spent their junior careers pummelling less-talented kids with bat and ball and rarely suffered these supposedly character-building failures. The headline-grabbing take from the new juniors formats was, "You can't go out for a duck", an allusion to a rule in the lowest age games whereby a team loses five runs if a wicket falls and the bowler is credited with that wicket but the batter continues on for his allotted time. Thus the implementation of Cricket Australia's "controversial new junior formats", which are only really controversial to those unfamiliar with the urgent need to engage spoilt-for-choice children while the game has them in its thrall. The public has been excitedly following Australia successful Ashes campaign. But, as sporting day-trippers, they are also likely to abandon the game after a season or two if cricket does not do everything in its power to keep them. These entry-level kids help pad Cricket Australia's coveted "biggest participation sport in Australia" statistics. There you will find children from traditional cricket backgrounds have been joined by a throng of neophytes kids who would have taken up BMX riding or still be on the couch clutching the PlayStation controller if not for the BBL. Let me take you to the nets at any local cricket club in an area with a strong, family-oriented demographic. So if the BBL has not destroyed Proper Cricket, how is it contributing to its long-term health? And does anybody want to second guess what they concluded using that evidence or, in the case of Tim Paine, by ignoring it altogether? "Spin to win" is the new BBL mantra.Ībout the worst we can say is that the BBL has bumped the Sheffield Shield from its place in the summer schedule, creating a hiatus that might have been damaging had Australia needed reinforcements during the Ashes.Īs it was, the selectors had three first class games to make their decisions. Meanwhile, the spin bowlers we feared would be made redundant by BBL cavemen wielding sponsored planks have instead had their craft elevated and, in the case of quadragenarian tweaker Brad Hogg, their careers extended. Our fears it would create a generation of pie-throwing ball machines have proven ill-founded on the evidence produced by this season's lethal Australian pace attack.Ĭlose finishes and thrilling climaxes have become a hallmark of the Big Bash.
Similarly, the BBL has NOT destroyed bowling. "Some things you need to do to be successful, such as watching the ball moving and playing late to maximise power and timing. In 2016 everyone looked different above, but the same below," he said. "If we compare the 1984 Olympic 100 metres men's final to the 2016 final, in 1984, everybody looked the same on top and below the water. Woodhill compares changes in batting to the evolution of swimming. "I still think orthodox is the way forward," Woodhill says, who hasn't done much damage to the first-class careers of David Warner, Virat Kohli, Ellyse Perry and many other cross-format stars with whom he has worked. Read the discussion.Īustralian batting guru Trent Woodhill might once have been cast as the Dr Kevorkian of cricket by traditionalists given his advocacy of free-form batting, and his involvement in various T20 competitions.īut given Woodhill's students include Steve Smith, who fidgets like Rafael Nadal, moves sideways before going forward, flourishes his bat like a lightsabre and is still currently scoring Test runs at a Bradmanesque rate, we can hardly say his methods are only fit for T20 sloggers. ( AAP: David Moir) We asked why you thought Test cricket purists were embracing the Big Bash. Shane Watson got the 2017/18 BBL season off to a flying start on Tuesday.