One Day Cricket

Yes, Bleaders, I have something to say about this, too.

Interest in One Day Cricket has fallen off the edge of the table in Australia. Attendance at the matches is considerably lower in each of the last three years, one after the other. Similarly, the broadcast audience is diminishing by ever greater percentages each year. Meanwhile, Twenty20 cricket seems to be increasing in popularity by these measures.
The sports pages, television reports, and tea room talk is all abuzz trying to explain this decline, all the while nodding to the venerable Test Cricket standard.
Most that I have heard and read misses the obvious and searches for the subtle and mysterious clues. The obvious is this:
1. There is cricket overkill on television and internet. The players now play year around, around the world, so there is a match somewhere most weeks of the year and it can be found on the telly or internet. That is a contextual explanation. The One Day matches used to be novelties, a chance to see some superb athletes in a less formal and rigid context than Test Cricket, and to show their stuff where national pride and honour was not at stake. The results was often some flamboyant individualism that was out of place in Test Cricket. Chances were taken to get a result that just did not happen in Test Cricket. It made a refreshing change. And all that fed back into Test Cricket and rejuvenated it, too.
2. More specifically, because of the demands of the near-continuous world cricket season that has slowly emerged in the last decade, accelerated mightily in the last two years by the Indian Champions League, there is no longer any rhyme of reason to the summer cricket schedule in Australia (and no doubt the same is true in England, New Zealand, South Africa, and India itself). Schedules these days seemed determined only by the need to avoid conflict with other matches elsewhere in the world so that the same players can participate. Whereas summer cricket once involved Five Tests of three months, interspersed with one day matches against two visiting teams. (The team not in the Test series would play state sides throughout the summer.) In the course of those months, fans would get to know the players, see the shift between the demands of Test Cricket for patience, tenacity, and stamina and those of One Day for decisiveness, risk, and audacity as the fortune s of individual players and teams went up and down. Moreover, for a couple of summers Australia fielded two teams in the One Day matches, one the National Team and the other was designated A. That meant we fans saw more of the local talent on show. However, the threat was that the A team would show up the National team and so the latter protested and the A team was dropped. A sad day to see the captain of the Australian national cricket team arguing against more players getting international experience but it happened. The results is that there today the one day matches have no narrative. The teams fly in and out to play the games and go elsewhere between matches to play in another competition. Without a narrative context all One Day cricket has to offer is the show, and Twenty20 is far better at that.
Those who are not cricket fans will not have made this far.