The New NBL will soon take shape with applications for licences set to open this week. While the interim administration told current owners prior to last month’s vote that any club who could meet the new criteria would be included, the Illawarra Mercury’s basketball writer Tim Keeble reported this week that “it is looking more and more likely next year’s league will feature no more than eight sides…”
If this is an enforced maximum, one can only assume that the league, perhaps through the pressure of Fox Sports, is ‘doing a Julie Bishop’ and plagiarising the A-league’s blueprint.
Yet, if the interim board were to take a step back and analyse the A-league, they will see that the league’s realities are currently falling short of its perception. This is not to say that soccer is in a “sad, sad state” as Rebecca Wilson’s deservingly criticised article in the Daily Telegraph was titled. It’s ethnic cleansing has tidied the game’s image, it has extracted $140m out of Fox Sports, garnered solid media coverage and the Socceroos now rival the Wallabies and Australian cricketers as the country’s most prominent national sports team. However, the A-league is in a slump. As reported in The Australian, Round 14 was the second consecutive weekend where none of the four games reached the 10,000 mark, while this season’s aggregate is already down nearly 150,000 on 2007.
While the league had previously been a strong performer on Fox Sports, there are also danger signs in this season’s television ratings. Take the following analyses of ASTRA’s official ratings figures as an example. Remember the farce that was the Rugby League World Cup, the tournament no one gave a rat’s toss bag about? Well, a live game between Fiji and Ireland had 36,000 extra viewers than the live telecast of that week’s Perth Glory Vs Newcastle Jets clash, or 146,000 more when including replays.
Also, for the week commencing November 16 2008, the A-League’s highest rating game was Melbourne Victory Vs Central Coast Mariners on a Friday night. Yet, it failed to top a “World Series Cricket Classics” filler screening two nights later. For those thinking there must have been more people watching TV on the Sunday night: wrong. There were almost 100,000 more Pay-TV viewers on the Friday night. Speaking of cricket, a Ford Ranger Cup game during that week – the national competition that couldn’t draw a crowd with a HB pencil – had a cumulative reach of 819,000. This was more than triple the Victory Vs Mariners’ 256,000.
The significance here for basketball is the main reason for the A-League’s lean patch. Earlier this week, respected soccer scribe Michael Lynch was interviewed on SEN and attributed the code’s halt in momentum to its tired 8-team format. Similarly, Kevin Muscat’s ghostwriter wrote a fluff piece last Sunday in The Age – the Melbourne Victory’s official newsletter – saying:
“The A-League’s two extra teams –Gold Coast United and North Queensland Fury – have…come at a perfect time. After four seasons with eight teams, people are used to playing against the same opposition over and over again with such a short turnaround between meetings.”
This is the true lesson to be learnt from the A-League: eight teams is not a league. It’s a tournament. The unpredictability caused by concentration of talent is nullified by the repetition and predictability of scheduling. Take a look elsewhere to see what constitutes a league: the NBA has 30 teams, the EPL has 20, locally the AFL will soon have 18, and the A-league itself will have 12 by 2012.
Will the New NBL learn from the A-league’s greatest flaw, or will it plagiarise it for the sake of appeasing a faceless television executive in Sydney with more dollars than basketball sense?
Time will tell, but the shot clock is ticking.
1 Comment(s)
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
[...] Michael Scibilia has wrote a piece titled Plagrise at your peril I was wondering when I saw the heading what the piece was all about. It is actually about how [...]