December 1, 2009
An innovation this year from BowlsWA has been the scheduling of Premier League games to times other than the traditional Saturday 1:45pm timeslot. Central to this has been the scheduling of 15 night games. Full marks I say for trying something different but are there ramifications of such a schedule.
An obvious benefit to the night game is the ability of the host club to advertise the match and hopefully attract a larger crowd than normal and reap the rewards of potential increased revenue. There is also the benefit for spectators who would not normally be able to watch Premier League games, to attend and watch the games best players compete for premiership points.
As far as promotion of the game surely this is as good an idea as we have seen for some time.
Are there only positives with this initiative, well not really, there is some down side.
Scheduling night games to be played on grass early in the season has an obvious issue. Everyone knows how slow grass greens can get at night especially early in the season. I was informed by players that the speed of the grass at the recent Bassendean V Stirling game was about 10 -11 seconds by game's end, obviously no fault of Bassendean.
When you consider the associations own Green's Self Assessment requires a minimum green speed of 13 seconds, this is not ensuring fairness nor is it providing the spectacle that these games would be if played under normal/reasonable conditions.
At least the synthetics do not pose these this type of problem.
I am sure that BowlsWA will have heard the complaints, and they have been good listeners up to date, will look closely at re-scheduling night matches that are played on grass to a more suitable time of the year.
At least in mid-summer the grass may only slow down to 13 - 14 seconds.
There are a couple of other interesting things that have caught my eye.
Stirling, whose greens are synthetic, have now played 3 night games and out of a possible 12 rink wins they have won on just two rinks. A very poor return when you consider how tough they are to beat at Jones Street during the day.
Have they been disadvantaged or is this just coincidence? must add that Stirling have not complained in any shape or form to me, just purely an observation of mine.
What makes this more interesting is when you consider last season's situation where clubs would prefer to play South Perth on their synthetics in the afternoon rather than the evening as it was considered to be a too significant an advantage to the home club to play during the night.
Could a parallel be drawn with Stirling's night time adventures?
Some players have also made it very clear they struggle to gauge depth well under the lighting provided in the night games. Now whether this is because of age, poor eyesight or poor lighting I do not know but it does again bring into question the fairness of this type of scheduling.
Another gripe from some clubs is that all Clubs should have an equal amount of games scheduled to be played at night rather than more for some and less for others.
I must make it clear that I support the efforts of BowlsWA to try different approaches to promote the game.
I am wondering however what everyone else thinks about the scheduling of Premier League games at night and have posted a poll for people to vote on.
VOTE
SHERRO