Take that.. David Warner lofts a ball to the boundary.
IF DAVE Warner hits the ball harder than anyone since Viv Richards, and makes a match-winning century, but no-one is there to see it, does it count? Or matter?
Almost, but not quite, that is the threshold Australian cricket arrived on in Brisbane on Sunday. For another highly entertaining match in what has been an unexpected series of them, barely 12,000 spectators came. Not even the Gabba's autumnally speckled seating pattern could disguise the fact that most were empty. Whether or not Warner's bludgeoning made a sound, it made an echo.
But there was powerful mitigation. The Sri Lankan bowlers will attest that it mattered; at the peak of Warner's innings, they were ducking in their follow-throughs, in dread anticipation of the cannon-blasts to come. Warner will attest that it mattered. Nearing innings' end, he was blowing like a walrus, and by his exertions had tweaked a groin muscle, putting him in doubt for today's second final. This match was no hologram.
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And it was watched, invisibly. According to television figures, a healthy average of 1.3 million tuned in across the nation. For the third Sunday in a row, the cricket gave Channel Nine a flying head-start into the ratings week.
This was the vanishing point Cricket Australia knew it might arrive at a few years ago when it chose to show international cricket live against the gate on the eastern seaboard. It anticipated that attendances might fall even as ratings grew, until such a time that the matches would in their aesthetics begin to lack the gravitas of internationals. From where CA sits, Sunday's match was a cricketing and promotional success; it just didn't look like one.
Today's match in Adelaide, and Thursday's if there is one, will be blacked out locally in the old manner, and so will stand for themselves at the box office. CA has its fingers crossed.
Resurgent interest in 50-over cricket this summer has both delighted and confounded authorities. When a rearrangement of the summer program a few years ago nudged the one-day finals out of the school holidays period, patronage dwindled. Some great innings were played sight unseen.
CA shelved the tri-series after 25 years, replacing it with bilateral series. The trouble with the tri-series was that it necessarily featured so-called neutral games, which barely attracted even second glances. The risk with, say, a five-match bilateral series is that it is dead after three, but CA was prepared to take it.
Anecdotally, enthusiasm for one-dayers continued to atrophy as Twenty20 grew. CA always refuted it, maintaining that cricket was unique in that it was popularly played in three distinct forms. As host-elect of the 50-over World Cup in 2015, it could scarcely say otherwise.
But by ceding December/January to the reconstituted Big Bash League, interspersing it with Test cricket, but postponing the one-day finals to March - and not in Sydney or Melbourne - CA appeared to be admitting tacitly that one-day cricket was third best. It was a game in and for the autumn. CA says its hands were tied. Scheduling complications meant that it was possible to play India and Sri Lanka only in this window, concurrently. Thus, the tri-series format was dusted off.
As for finals, CA says Melbourne and Sydney both calculatedly surrendered their rights. Cricket Victoria and the state government wanted to stage a ''festival of cricket'' weekend in January, consisting of a Friday night Twenty20 international and a Sunday one-dayer, and Sydney wanted to trial the Homebush stadium for a Twenty20 international. They had to give, to get.
Now, they might have pangs of regret. The tri-series is the game on all lips, at least those not mumbling feverishly about football. Several factors are at work. One is Twenty20, which has freshened up 50-over cricket. So have new rules that have obviated the middle-overs procession. Three hundred used to be the four-minute mile. Now it is a working score.
Sri Lanka has played admirably; it never regards anything as out of reach, typified by Rangana Herath's extraordinary one-hander on Sunday. Australia will never think it has Sri Lanka beaten. India, so disappointing in the Test series, at last gave a youthful yelp.
The three played a month-long game of scissors-paper-rock; even the ''neutral'' games were beauties. Large crowds of ex-pats and emigrees added vibrancy.
Contradicting the course of history, the series is like one of Warner's deadly drives: you dare not take your eyes off it.
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