The question of what Australia’s national sport is has occupied us for decades, igniting passionate debate at the pub, forcing us to grapple with ideas of what makes a sport part of the national identity and even inspiring a TAB campaign in which famous athletes cast a vote for their own sports.
Cricket has been the default answer for a long time, but is it still the national sport? Making the affirmative case is sports writer Megan Maurice, and arguing in the negative is Crikey’s media reporter (and sports fanatic) Daanyal Saeed.
“Was there cricket on?” asked my housemate as I leant into my dual citizenship and celebrated Pakistan’s first series win in Australia in 22 years. His ignorance was deflating — how could he not know there was cricket on? It’s summer, and cricket’s the sound of summer!
It’s one of those definitive, almost cliched statements that we think nothing of as Australians, but is it actually true?
Whacking grandma for six (and out) into the neighbour’s yard on Christmas morning. Walking around the local park on a weekend and hearing a distant “Howzat!” Plonking down on the couch as a hungover, well-fed mess at some point in the time void between Christmas and the New Year to see men in green helmets scoring masses of runs against hapless visiting nations. This is the traditional Australian ideal of safety and comfort for a lot of us. In our minds, it sits in a certain warm hue of constant golden afternoon light.
But it’s a thing of the past. The idea that cricket is the national sport is long-gone, lost in the public psyche after the retirements of Warne, McGrath and Langer in the mid-2000s, and on the airwaves to anonymous Indian cement companies that clad Twenty20 mercenaries in bright colours to parade around for the sugar hit of barely-remembered “hit and giggle”.
There are many things to blame for the decline of Australian cricket as the national game; the overstuffed international cricket schedule that leads to Australia producing third-string lineups in previously valued home fixtures, short-sighted broadcast deals that put home international fixtures behind a paywall, and the emergence of the Matildas as a uniting force for an entire segment of the country previously unheard by the national sporting conversation, among other things.
If a sport wants to lay claim to being the national game, it needs to fulfil a number of key criteria. It needs to be played widely and consistently across the country, which rules out the two domestic football codes. It also needs to truly captivate the nation. It can’t be relegated to a slightly geeky game played by children and adults who refuse to grow up.
I would argue cricket has lost that mantle of the game that captivates the entire country. No longer are we glued to our screens in our masses watching major events. The first session of Pat Cummins leading Australia to a World Cup win ranked 33rd in last year’s top television events, behind a documentary about John Farnham and Married at First Sight’s final dinner party. It got four and a half times fewer viewers in OzTAM ratings compared to the Matildas losing to England’s Lionesses in the FIFA Women’s World Cup semifinal.
It doesn’t help that the brains trusts empowered to deal with the fate of the game have decided to put one day and T20 international cricket behind a paywall, leaving crowds to languish in their wake. Future Cricket World Cups will also be behind an Amazon paywall until 2027, which will likely see cricket drop further down the ratings charts.
Administrators will tell you fervently that Australians have an admirable and resilient commitment to attending Test cricket, especially the crown jewels of the Boxing Day and New Year’s Tests — and this is true, with ratings to match. But what kind of national sport only exists in the public consciousness for a fortnight? Cricket et al’s Peter Lalor said this week that it has been “ever thus that the Australian summer doesn’t really start until Christmas for the broader public”, and he’s not wrong. The cricket season is under a never-ending assault from the football codes when it comes to narrative building, and the window for cricket is getting smaller and smaller.
This week, as India landed on our shores for the biggest Test series in recent memory, the zeitgeist was instead dominated by the leaked news that Hawthorn will be playing on a Friday night in Adelaide in six months’ time, and debates over whether Joseph Sua’ali’i’s jersey can be written off on tax as equivalent to a set of steak knives.
It is not a lost cause, not by any means. I would hope not, as Crikey’s resident cricket tragic. But if we truly want cricket to be the national sport, it needs to be put front and centre for the nation to consume it, with all the joy they used to.
Build it, and they will come.
Read the opposing argument by Megan Maurice.
