Big Bash League faces scrutiny amid arm-wrestle over its place in Australian summer

There is something darkly comic about a Brisbane Heat capitulation. In a league still negotiating its place in the public consciousness, the men in teal once again provided the Big Bash League’s most stable storyline: top-heavy slogging is saleable, but not successful. To watch Chris Lynn, mic in hand, account for another defeat in a post-match interview, staring into the middle distance while dealing with Ricky Ponting’s altogether more narrowed gaze, was to enjoy a Michael Jackson popcorn gif moment in real time.

Viewers were able to watch in amazement as Lynn defended his team’s “blueprint”, which according to his most recent interview, “definitely works”. In BBL terms, both the Heat and Lynn are clearly box-office, but not Nick Kyrgios box office. Kyrgios appears willing to evolve.

Related: Big Bash League and the importance of putting on a ‘damn good show’ | Jonathan Howcroft

But the Heat should at least be respected for providing a BBL tale we can compute. Elsewhere, the arm-wrestle over the competition’s overall performance continues unabated, with the truth about as opaque as Ponting’s answers during a recent Twitter Q&A.

“Is the Big Bash set for a big crash?” headlined a recent Fairfax piece, highlighting demonstrably dwindling attendance and TV numbers as compared to the heights of 2016-17. Or are they? There is no suggestion that Cricket Australia and its allied stakeholders are running a troll farm, but every graph making such a contention seems to get pounded by a thousand others to the contrary.

For example, as a Twitter account purporting to provide analysis on the sports industry contends: “The 2019-20 BBL home and away season finished with an average Foxtel audience of 163,000 per game (across both innings). This figure is down 15% on the 2018-19 average.”

At first glance, it would seem fairly open-close evidence of diminished viewership. But hang on: are we talking about prime time viewing versus afternoon viewing? Mid-week afternoon or weekend afternoon? Does this tally with Channel 7 numbers? Does it take Kayo into account? Can we get Kayo’s numbers? (No). And besides, it’s doing well in relation to other codes, so any comparison must take that into account.

In the absence of overly memorable games and on-field talking points, this particular conversation – the performance of the BBL – is becoming a regular feature of the Australian cricket season, as its stakeholders wrestle with its space and place in a summer where our canary team was outsourced to India for a while.

It continues to iterate against a rapidly changing sporting and media environment, so maybe nobody really knows how it’s doing. It’s on every night though, which is more than can be said for other sports. Whatever the case, it appears any attempts to highlight even modest declines are being met with a strategy of denial, obfuscation, rinse, repeat – which tallies with the current on-trend approach toward public affairs in Australia. Sadly, this approach usually works.

However muddied those waters are, we can find familiarity in another BBL story arc: after a dominant home-and-away season, the Melbourne Stars hit the finals looking once-again shaky. Can this collection of expressive units finally go all the way? There is a sense that when the Stars get comfortably in front, they’re very difficult to stop. However, as one player put it to me this week, “they haven’t shown they’re willing to their hands dirty, and as soon as there’s scoreboard pressure, they shit themselves”.

Though they’ve lost Sandeep Lamichhane, they regain the hitherto irrepressible Haris Rauf, the Rawalpindi speedster who has remarkably ascended from Wests second grade to the Pakistan T20 side in two seasons. There is no coincidence that the Stars’ dip has coincided with his absence.

Their “qualifier” foes are the Sydney Sixers, perennially underrated on the basis of an also-ran squad, who now boast arguably the best batsman in the game in Steve Smith, one of the best fast bowlers in the game in Josh Hazlewood and one of the best spinners in the game, Nathan Lyon. They join Sixers’ leading run-scorer Josh Philippe, an in-form James Vince and Moises Henriques, and the returning lynchpin Sean Abbott, who will act as a straight swap for the departed Tom Curran. They have the feel of a side peaking at the right time.

But as the aforementioned contest over the BBL’s success shows, nearly 10 years into the competition there is still much about the league we don’t yet understand. As Chris Lynn has unwittingly demonstrated, the familiar blueprints now seldom cut the mustard, and the ways to win audiences and win matches feel as opaque as ever.