No matter how hard Cricket Australia hammers it, the square peg still won't fit in the round hole.

For Sunday's rematch of last year's cricket World Cup finalists, resuming their tussle for the fabled Chappell-Hadlee trophy, a less than fabulous 23,000 poked their heads into the SCG.

For this Friday's third in a series at the MCG, 25,000 are expected, max. At the grand old ground, that is not a crowd, it's a throng. On Tuesday, Canberra's Manuka Oval may fill up, but at less than 14,000, that will be a modest boast. Sometimes they get more, and louder, at question time.

Pre-Christmas one-dayers don't work. They never have. For reasons fathomable and unfathomable, people do not warm to them.

There was a time when Christmas revellers would come, making for the guise of a crowd. But they were there mostly to amuse themselves, with predictably rowdy and sometimes ugly results. Cricket  Australia backed off. It was an arrangement that suited everyone.

Periodically, CA infiltrates a couple of November/December one-dayers back into the program. If you hadn't noticed, you're excused. To judge by crowds, most people didn't.

Cricket Australia will point to TV ratings full to the brim and spilling over, more for Sunday night's clash than for any night of the Adelaide pink-ball Test match. Commercially, that is reassuring. Practically, it might be all that matters now. But no number of bums on lounge chairs makes up for their absence from the plastic bucket seats at the country's two biggest cricket  grounds. They are not just vacancies, but holes. It's hard to pretend to the big-time with pretend crowds.

Meantime, the cricket season loses rhythm and pace. This is problematic for fans as well as players.

You can't really blame marketing. They had an excrement sandwich to sell. You can't blame ticket prices. If the fare was worth it, the crowds would come anyway. You can blame CA, but only to a point. Pretty much by popular acclaim, they have had to give over January to the Big Bash League. That means everything else has to be jammed in the Boxing Day/New Year's Melbourne/Sydney Test festival. Now that includes reciprocal series with New Zealand for the suddenly back-in-favour Chappell-Hadlee trophy.

Thus this round hole, thus this square peg.

Periodically, world cricket mulls on the idea of giving one-day cricket a context by making all count towards qualification for the next World Cup. Maybe it would help to round off the peg, or square the hole. Would these three matches draw larger crowds if there was something on the line other than a trophy that someone dug out of a dusty drawer a year ago? It's hard to say.

And we may never know, because the ICC's wheels turn as creakily as ever, and the earliest likely date for such a scheme is 2019, when the next postponement to the next adjournment is due.

Meantime, CA hammers away, and the blows echo around half-empty stadiums.