Bails have been whipped off the wider region’s marquee T20 competition, with a litany of reasons cited as to why it won’t proceed in the coming months.
Timing is a fine skill in the world of cricket and, according to organiser Dave D’Elia, the ducks simply weren’t in a row for the league to resume this season.
“It got to the stage where finding time to run it is very difficult,” D’Elia said.
“I think women’s cricket is a great thing, but now with it on a Sunday, it makes it very hard for men who are coaching or men who have partners who are playing.
“And then finding time and putting it in between country week, under-21s, under-19s and Northern Rivers stuff.
“It was a matter of time to put the Bush Bash into place, time that the people who organised had to actually organise it.”
In the 2023-24 season, the GVBBL and Goulburn Murray Cricket women’s grand finals fell on the same day — February 11.
It’s hardly a deal breaker and, according to D’Elia, it’s far from the only reason why the Goulburn Valley’s answer to the Big Bash League has been put on ice.
“I’m guessing a bit of cost came in too; a few of the marquees tended to price themselves out of the market and made things a lot more difficult,” he said.
“Three of the four teams were struggling to get their head around everything and it just became a ‘you know what, it’s probably a lot easier to put it away for this season’.
“We’ll try and get our heads around it next season, there’s a few different ideas — whether we remain with the same four franchise teams or whether we look to go to more association-based.
“We’ll go back to the drawing board and try and work out how it can move next season.”
There is a possibility that the GVBBL could lean away from its current model which features four franchise teams — Shepparton-based Jarvis Delahey Crushers and SRP Mud Dogs, Kyabram’s Hurley’s Hotel Hounds and Bendigo’s Sporties Spitfires.
Instead, the competition could divert to a league-versus-league-style tournament.
It would likely include Cricket Shepparton as well as the Goulburn Murray, Murray Valley and Bendigo associations if all were willing to proceed with the idea.
“The money wouldn’t be involved as much, so it wouldn’t be as big an outlay to try and get marquee players and all that sort of stuff,” D’Elia said.
“The uneven distance of competition, especially with Bendigo coming in and drawing from the whole Bendigo association and you had two Shepparton-based teams trying to draw from Shepparton.
“That goes to one, whether that evens it up — then the Echuca-Kyabram-based side out of Goulburn Murray, there wouldn’t be one club running it for example.
“I’ve got to run that past all the associations and see whether we’ve got support for that, but that’s the idea behind it.”
The GVBBL was first launched in the 2019-20 season and ran over consecutive summers until its newly-announced hiatus.
SRP Mud Dogs claimed the most premierships (two), while the Hounds and Spitfires — introduced for season 2023-24 — each claimed the title once.
For McMahon Shield sides, Goulburn Murray Cricket will continue its T20 competition with the nine A-grade teams set to compete on five consecutive Thursdays starting November 14.
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