StephenZA
Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
I thought cricket was more popular in Aus than Rugby?Agreed. South Africa could have played a longer series last July when they were in Bangladesh. Or since it was a short one, they could have played a few more games this July. Sri Lanka went to New Zealand two years in a row.
This is something that you guys are in a better position to answer. Rugby is more popular in New Zealand (And Australia too) and I would suspect it's the same case in South Africa.
How is cricket in terms of popularity in South Africa? I don't expect test cricket to compete with Rugby but is there a decent and sustainable market? And by popularity I mean crowd attendance, quality of broadcast (e.g you know cricket is popular in the subcontinent because almost every international game, including U19 games are telecast) The more popular the game, the better the quality.
Is there a lot of sponsorship interest? Do organisations feel that investing in cricket would be a good marketing and branding strategy for them?
These things are important ultimately in establishing financial clout.
The demographics of the SA are a big reason for some of the issues. In reality soccer/football is the most popular sport followed by rugby then cricket (I would guess). But SA is a pretty sport mad country in general.
Popularity of cricket is difficult to gauge, people do like to go out and watch the ODI and T20 stuff, both international and domestic games, but its more of a day out, than love of the game... pretty sure though that is true for most of the world.
While I agree that the Hansie saga produced a bitter pill to swallow for most SA cricket lovers I don`t think it is a factor now. The truth about popularity of any game is based on how well it is marketed, we had the best test team in the world and nothing was really made of it.... but now that we lost to England and India the team was lambasted in the media. We are a top ODI side but we need to win a world cup before the people in SA will take notice... One of the issues in SA is that people don`t often praise but do like to criticise, even when they don`t actually know what they are talking about. I know this is generally true but it is particularly bad in SA.
Ultimately, winning a world cup would help the cricket in SA in a big way. But the CSA must do something to sell the game more. One of the things I can never understand, is how often I hear about other great international players, whom I know more about, than I know about Kallis, Ntini, Smith, Donald, etc... I know a few programs have been made now and again, but not enough and not enough on primary channels. Doing something particularly on the SABC channels (not paid for) will get to another whole demographic in SA and increase cricket awareness. In effect if the CSA don`t pull there thumb out and truly push the game in SA there are to many other sports that will attract people. This goes all the way back to my earlier points more games more TV coverage gets into peoples pschye.. and this means if CSA must make sacrifices now to grow the game then this must be done. This should have been done 20yrs ago....