At the end of the day | Shorter, sharper ... better? Cut up the rep calendar

But I’ve stopped watching cricket, too. 

Un-Australian, I know … but local cricket, international cricket, throw in backyard cricket, who cares anymore?

I don’t think I’m the only one suffering this horrible case of cricket-somnia, either.

It’s rampant. 

If the NFL is America’s game – which it is, everyone in the US dreams of catching like Odell, throwing like Mahommes and being great like Brady – then cricket is the Australian equivalent.

As a kid you grow up with a half-taped-up tennis ball, cricket bat, a wheelie bin with painted on stumps and an unbridled fear of your uncle’s bouncers at Christmas time. 

Cricket is Australia’s game … or, seemingly, it used to be.

The great game now appears in free fall, which isn’t news.

From sandpaper-gate in South Africa and the banning of Warner, Smith and Bancroft, to the disgraceful disregard of Sheffield Shield cricket and the damning review of the game released just last month, the downward spiral of cricket at the top is well publicised, and at this point it’s near uncontrollable. 

Interest in the Australian cricket team is at an all-new low as a result. 

But I don’t think there’s issues solely at the top, either.

Sure, the Pat Howard high performance era hasn’t helped, but cricket’s battling everywhere. Has been now for a while, too.

And on Friday I saw something I thought I’d never see – a Dubbo representative outfit scraping the barrel for players?

Not Dubbo. Western Zone’s poster-boy association? Surely not.

Skipper Mitch Bower labelled the outfit “the weakest” he’s been part of in over a decade, which I thought at the time was just a short barb to get the boys selected in the side to fire up and have a crack on home soil.

But it wasn’t. Bower turned out to be on the money, and his side then went on to be thumped by Orange to the tune of over 100 runs on Sunday.

But are we meant to feel sorry for Bower? Or even Dubbo cricket? Really?

Probably not. I certainly don’t.

What’s the issue then?

Commitment. There’s just not a lot of it. And that can be an issue, as we saw on Sunday.

Dubbo only plays in the Western Zone Premier League, meaning selectors have to get a side together just four times this season.

It’s four Sundays in a year the DDCA is asking for a commitment from the best players in the competition. It’s not that big an ask.

And yet selectors were forced into mustering up a team that, let’s face it, turned out to be less than competitive against Orange, an association that’s be the definition of less than competitive for years.

It’s the same problem for a lot of sides. 

Every association fielding its best 11 players in a rep side on the same weekend is now rarer than an Australian victory in a One Day International.

Clearly interest in higher level cricket is waning. 

Perhaps the length of time these competitions run is the problem – the first round of the WZPL was in October and the final isn’t until mid-February.

The President’s Cup, which Orange and Bathurst also plays in, is just a four round competition, but it spans over five months.

Can’t it be run and won by Christmas?

Can’t all the rep cricket be finished by the time the new year rolls around, so clubs and players can just focus on their own premiership quests?

I think it has to be tried. 

We live in an instant society, one that has to have everything quicker and faster. Everyone’s time poor.

Sport has to keep up.

Cricket has been around for well over a hundred years but surely it’s time the game’s structures and formats mirror the way society works as well.

Rep cricket is important, but condensing it and simplifying it will surely make it more attractive for the best players to be part of, which is the goal of higher level cricket, isn’t it? To get the best against the best?

One of the big success stories in Western Zone in the last couple of years has to be the expansion of the Royal Hotel Cup in Orange. 

Let’s take the hint.

Less long-form cricket, more T20 cricket, in every grade, and we might get cricket back up in lights, in this region at the very least.

It might even get a few old horrible-cricketers with even-more-horrible Mycricket numbers back in the swing of things too.