It was 12 years ago that I told this paper's readers that people who believed that even a smattering of Australians were interested in cricket were deluded, and that the figures claiming otherwise established only that Australians had a compulsion to tell anyone asking a question what they felt that person wanted to hear. We're keen to delude others and just as keen to be deluded ourselves.

"Hello, we're doing a survey for Cricket Australia. Do you love cricket?" Oh yes, I watch it every day. Never miss.

What prompted my frankness then were claims by the Sweeney Sports Report, a report described by cricket chiefs as authoritative, that 54 per cent of Australians were interested in cricket. The market research firm reported too that one in eight people said they took part in cricket, one in five said they attended matches, one in two said they watched it on television. The Sweeney firm was very highly regarded by sports administrators, who undoubtedly used the firm's glowing stats in their bid for sponsorship dollars.

Think about it for a few seconds. It is absurd nonsense to suggest that one in eight Australians is silly enough to stand almost motionless baking under the summer sun for half a day and to sit almost motionless on the sideline for the other half.

One in 800 maybe, and even that is a stretch if we think about driving past a Saturday cricket match in a park. There are maybe 30 people taking part, including umpires and scorekeepers and people who run the drinks, and over the day many thousands of people who are not taking part in a cricket match will drive past and wonder momentarily about the sanity of anyone willing to stand almost stock still on a sunburnt oval at the height of summer. One in 8000 more like it.

Sweeney's one-in-eight statistic needs to be taken in context with the other stats in its report. One was that one in four people go 10-pin bowling! Think about how many people you know who go 10-pin bowling. None, maybe one. Now think about this: According to the Sweeney report, there are twice as many 10-pin bowlers as there are cricketers! Let's settle for one in 80,000.

Six years earlier I'd called on Australia's sports editors to accept that cricket was at best dead or at worst incessantly tedious and to fill their pages and screens with 10-pin bowling or anything else more popular than cricket.

Not that there's never anything newsworthy in cricket, and the fact is that it is newsworthy itself if anything newsworthy happens in cricket. Cheating, streaking, a seagull killed by a ball, a commentator being politically incorrect, Warney's latest floozy, anything but cricket itself and all good for at least a month of headlines.

The television cameras flit often to close-ups of busty women in the stands, probably to balance the hugging and cheek-pinching among the cricketers on the field. Australian cricketers have perfected the leaping group hug.

Anyway, my stating the obvious, that cricket was dead or incessantly tedious, had me taken to task at length in this paper by the then chief executive of NSW Cricket, Brian Hughes, who assured everyone that cricket was a growth industry, trotted out stats like those I've mentioned above, and who told us that one in five people went to an oval to watch cricket.

One in five Australians spend a summer Saturday sitting on a bench or picnic blanket waiting for something to happen as they watch distant figures in whites waiting for something to happen!

I would never understand, Mr Hughes told me in his response.

No. But it seems I did get one thing right.

Late last month The Sun-Herald and its journalist Malcolm Knox reported the results of their investigation that found that Cricket Australia's player numbers are a fiction.

The number of people who play cricket is claimed by Cricket Australia to be 1.65 million, a figure made up of registered players and schoolchildren who play cricket as part of their physical exercise programs.

Mr Knox reported that the number of registered players is about 247,000, less than half the 684,356 claimed by Cricket Australia. As well, Mr Knox pointed out, there were no documents to support the claim of 950,000 schoolchildren playing cricket, a number Cricket Australia acknowledges is imprecise.

I'm looking forward to seeing the inspiring figures for Australian women's cricket, which I watched for 30 minutes on the teev recently in disbelief that anything could be slower than men's cricket. No chance of even a seagull tragedy to break the tedium.

Cricket Australia will have to be at its creative best.

jeffcorb@gmail.com

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