ENGLAND have retained the Ashes. Get over it. Tonight an interstate Twenty20 match will mark the beginning of a golden future for Australian cricket.
That, at any rate, is the hope of Cricket Australia, which began the season in the red for the first time in living memory and is now looking to domestic T20 and a potentially vast young fanbase to not only rebuild the foundations of the national game but to enrich it, by 2020, with revenues of $200 million annually, a figure equivalent to that earned by international cricket over an average summer.
''Tonight is a milestone night for us, no doubt,'' said Peter Young of Cricket Australia.
''T20 is enormously significant. It's the format which is engaging the young people, the women and children who are going to be the next generation of cricket fans.''
The revelation about CA's financial health, reported by The Sun-Herald in October, was contained in a confidential Cricket Australia discussion paper for a five-day conference in August.
The same document also noted a 24 per cent decline in TV audiences during the past decade, and observed that female fans have been turning away from the game. It also reported that youngsters are increasingly giving up the game in adolescence, and that the aggressively marketed AFL and NRL codes were challenging cricket as the national sport.
Against that threat, the CA document nominated a strategy of ''customer engagement'' that specifically targeted T20 as the means to ''engage young people and females given cricket's disconcerting skew towards older, male fans'' as a central platform for its ''Backyard to Baggy Green'' 2011-15 strategy.
The big changes to domestic T20 will be seen in 2011-12 when the competition is renamed the Big Bash League and expands from six to eight teams, with overseas investment likely. But its success will depend in large part on the continued attraction of this season's Twenty Big Bash, which launches tonight when Western Australia plays Tasmania at the WACA.
''The T20 crowds have been great. We had 43,000 at Victoria versus Tasmania last year. Normally we'd be counting in the hundreds. We'd be at a significant strategic risk if [cricket] hadn't invented this product."
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