If you're a cricket devotee the coming summer is filled with doubt. For a start the Australian test team, stripped of its two best players in captain Steve Smith and opening batsman David Warner due to their involvement in March's ball-tampering scandal in South Africa, is up against it versus top-flight opponents even with the home advantage. Secondly, the biggest change in broadcasting rights since Kerry Packer took on the establishment 40 years ago will come into effect.
Packer set up the renegade World Series Cricket to get Channel Nine the broadcast rights to test cricket in this country, but like so many revolutions it birthed a new establishment. Nine's coverage became a kind of dynastic rule, albeit with retired Australian champions holding sway instead of blue bloods. But after April's successful negotiation, coverage of international cricket in Australia has moved from Nine and Ten, which revved up the T20 Big Bash League, to Seven and Fox Sports.
Adam Gilchrist (left) and Shane Warne make a lively combination in the commentary box.Credit:Fox Sport
The coming months are a turning point: how will Test audiences react to Seven's coverage after the seemingly perpetual presence of Ian Chappell, Bill Lawry, Mark Taylor and Ian Healy has ceased, and more importantly what will be the response to elements of the season going behind the subscription pay wall of Foxtel?
The cable television provider is providing its own detailed coverage of everything Seven has acquired, including Test matches, women's internationals, and the Big Bash League, but it also has exclusive rights to the calendar of men's one day and T20 internationals, as well as 16 Big Bash League games. A convention of Australian television viewing – that the national cricket team is always seen during the summer on free-to-air – has been hit for six.
Fox Sports, which is placing a dedicated Fox Cricket channel in its line-up, will be hoping that cricket fans will subscribe. Certainly the cultural conversation has changed – Australians are already willing to pay a monthly fee to Foxtel for Game of Thrones and other imported dramas, while the monthly bill for subscription services such as Netflix and Stan has become the new normal. Fans of other sporting codes, such as soccer, have long since grown accustomed to paying for the best selection of live matches.
Australia's first test against India starts on December 6, but Fox Cricket is already up and running. As it does with Fox Footy and Fox League, the ad-free coverage is a prominent selling point, but they still have to prove that they can get the basics right. The first steps, such as coverage of Australia's recent T20 matches, has been mostly positive. Most of the faces are familiar, albeit with the welcome addition of Fox Sport's deep bench of capable female hosts and reporters, but the blazer era is certainly over.
The headline pairing of Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne, who previously commentated the Big Bash League and Test cricket respectively, is a lively one. Gilchrist has a chirpy, brisk tone, while Warne has the opportunity to prosper from the move. Warne has always been good for a tabloid headline every few months, but he's got down the basics of broadcasting better than many former players and he can communicate his knowledge of the game.
Here's one radical thing Fox can do with its coverage: allow criticism of the Australian team when it's merited. Warne provided an example of this when Australia got off to a dismal start bowling to South Africa in a recent T20 match. "Australia is in retreat mode because of the way they started," he observed, before noting their lethargy and adding, "it doesn't look to me like there's any plan at the moment."
That match's coverage could have done with a little explanation for the casual viewer of the many new faces in the Australian team, while one graphic, the Captaincy Grid, was a clunky attempt to rate each bowler available as good, average or bad against the batting line-up. The most curious attempt at access was broadcasting the third umpire, Simon Fry, who adjudicated video replays. With his coolly officious tone and digital dryness – "front on spin vision, please … give me hot shot, please" – he sounded like a drone strike operator locking on a target. Then again, for a lot of people cricket coverage is already a life and death matter.
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