Australian Cricket - Crisis, What Crisis ??

[malo]

Where I am coming from is popular choice versus the correct choices.

Too many well connected suits running the game these days,  the disconnect from the interests from the game any the players is alarming.

Will say this though,  the money is filtering down to the lower levels.  All our club sides got new bags of kit this year.  It helps keep kids in the game.

One thing I do hope starts filtering down to the lower levels is the re-focus of the test side on sportsmanship & cutting out the on-field abuse.....the level of just abusive unintelligent rubbish that's going on in grade cricket these days is appalling...and I wonder where it came from ?

I played Grade cricket for almost 20 years (84-2003).....and I saw first hand the creep of this into the local game.  When I started as a 16 year old, I would no sooner think of sledging one of the older players than one of my own team mates !  And if there were any comments made on the field it was the senior guys that made them...and they were nearly always funny, not abusive in any way !

But in the last couple of years I played (post 2000) you even had snotty nose kids of 16 or 17 sledging guys who'd been playing for 15 years......& they weren't intelligent enough to come up with something funny, so they'd just swear at you.

Honestly, I'll be thinking twice about encouraging my 3 boys to play cricket until this sort of garbage is stamped out.  Sadly the umpires seem too scared to do anything about it at the moment, but if the change in attitude comes from the top (Aust test side), then maybe, just maybe this behaviour will be considered unacceptable at all levels of cricket sometime down the track.