Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

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Boris

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Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

Heard this being said around, and looking for new opinions.

After reading this from Shane Bond on New Zealand cricket:
We just lack that ability to play at the top level: mainly, in first-class cricket we just don't get to face good fast bowling or we are not exposed to guys like Murali [Mutiah Muralitharan] or Harbhajan [Singh]. So when you make the step up to Test cricket, all of a sudden you are exposed to that sort of bowling and it takes our players a little bit of time to adjust. It will take at least two or three years of playing Tests for them to feel comfortable to face that level of bowling.
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And:
It is harder for us because our season is limited by our weather. We spend a lot of time training indoors, and we don't get outdoors till late [in the season], which makes it bloody tough for our players. And our season is limited, where we have about four months to play at home.
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Would it be possible for New Zealand to reform its domestic cricket (to perhaps 3 teams?) and come over and join Australia for the domestic summer? If it is possible (which I'm thinking it isn't) then should they?
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

It would probably help NZ out but there would not much point in it for Australia as it would probably only weaken the world's strongest domestic comp.

Getting a NZ team or 2 in for an expanded Big Bash competition might be an idea.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

South Australia would love it :D

But its bad enough they are trying to cut the Shield season down now, it cant afford any more teams or else you will end up just playing every team once and the poor bastards who end up playing the NZ sides in washouts only and not at home will suffer
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

I cannot see this happen at all for various reasons. The Australian FC system is the best in the world due to the limit in playing numbers and quality of opposition. The South African model is based on the current structure. Should the ICC not step in or maybe send players to warmer climates to play in..

Why is this now an issue, has this not been happening for years prior to the current situation? It seems a bit odd that they can produce players like Hadlee, Cairns, Vettori??
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

This is off topic, but I have thought for some time that perhaps New Zealand could use some Australian players who don't play test cricket in their test team. They could offer them two year contracts, particularly older guys like Brad Hodge or Phil Jaques or Chris Rogers, who you'd reckon wont represent Aust again at test level. I know there would be a host of problems with this, but if a system was worked out (maybe 3 players per 2 years), it'd benefit NZ cricket greatly, and I'm sure there are a lot of guys in the Aust system who'd happily move to carve out a test career in NZ.

England seem to do it constantly with SAfrican players, so what's the difference here, providing NZ cricket and Cricket Australia agree? Anything that strengthens test cricket in NZ, Zimbabwe and the other weaker nations has to be looked at.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

Any Australian player can do the same as the South Africans do in England, the difference is no one would move to New Zealand :p
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

I know it's not viable, and would diminish Australian cricket, but considering how hard New Zealand has to work to get anywhere and how they have managed to produce some very good cricketers over the years (though not as many as they would have liked), you would think they would be quite a powerhouse more consistently.

This idea was thrown around by others, not thought up primarily by me, so I'm kinda just throwing stuff together and it's not really linking.

If this idea doesn't work, then how could New Zealand go about giving themselves more of a chance to shine on the big stage through their domestic comp?
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

They've always lacked depth, usually a couple of stars and then the rest average players at best.. To their credit they generally go better than what they look on paper and play as a 'team'. It's probably never going to be easy in a country of only four million and where the game isn't the main sport.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

Couldn't really see it happening unless New Zealand became a state of Australia (an NZ newspaper actually had a poll recently on this and found a majority actually would vote to become a part of Australia if the opportunity ever arose).

New Zealand have six domestic sides which would take the total amount of teams to 12 and I think that would be the absolute maximum number of sides which the new competiton could sustain. For the comp to work each side could only play each other once in all three forms of the game. The Big Bash would probably have to split into two groups of six with the top two sides from each group progressing to the semi-finals.

The NZ sides wouldn't be able to play home games for the first two months of the season with the weather still fairly poor over there, after that they could have a run of home games towards the finish of the season. The amalgation of the competitions would see a lot of fringe Australian state players try their luck at a New Zealand side. An example is Dean Brownlie who spent a long time playing WACA first grade cricket in Perth but then moved to New Zealand at the start of last season to try his luck over there. He now has a spot as a top six bat at Canterbury. The same would happen with some of the New Zealand fringe players as they would try their luck at some of the Australian sides.

A system like this could work but it would take a lot of organising and would probably dilute the competition a little bit. The only alternative to stopping this would be the reduce the amount of NZ teams entering, say from six to four which would give a total of ten teams.

Like I said before, this would probably only happen if NZ became a state of Australia. Other than that it is very, very unlikely.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

The population in the Australian states is in the vicinity of:

NSW- 7,000,000
Vic- 5,000,000
Qld- 4,000,000
WA- 2,000,000
SA- 1,000,000

And New Zealand's population is around 4,000,000.

So in reality, they are less advantaged in terms of population than NSW and Vic.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

@Ljp

I thought those issues would be the case, but as courtjesters says, NZ has smaller population wise than just one state of Australia, meaning to get where they have it's been a good effort, so they could obviously go further one would think.

With it in mind that New Zealand does have to pick players for an International side, I'm presuming just playing 2 domestic teams wouldn't be enough? That would fit pretty well into the domestic season over here, but the problems are obvious.

Just going a little off topic here - if New Zealand have trouble with the climate, could they come to Australia to play half of their domestic season? Not involved with the Australians, but playing at lesser grounds around the country. They would get the benefit of Australia's climate and facilities, then they could play home games for the second half of the season? Money and travel becomes an issue here, but I feel in comparison NZ is quite restricted. Would be interesting to see a New Zealander's perspective, especially after reading quite a number of articles where NZ cricketers say they are restricted by their country itself.
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

But you still have weather problems in Sydney and especially Brisbane, they would feel right at home in Melbourne and Hobart although Hobart would keep the weather issues :D

Not sure they would benefit much from playing in Adelaide and Perth
 
Re: Should New Zealand be part of Australia's domestic season?

eddiesmith;399829 said:
But you still have weather problems in Sydney and especially Brisbane, they would feel right at home in Melbourne and Hobart although Hobart would keep the weather issues :D

Not sure they would benefit much from playing in Adelaide and Perth
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New Zealand gets four months a year to play pretty much, and not much time for training. Anything in Australia is much better than that.

You can play at Brisbane all year round and only have to stop a couple of weekends for rain in the summer. Hell, you could play in Cairns and have to stop only a quarter of the time they would in NZ.

Saying that, they don't need to be touring the whole country and not on the leading grounds either as they would cost too much and most likely be booked.
 
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