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A recent survey found that a job in the armed services was the least desired career for some members of Gen Z, followed by working at the fast-food joints with golden arches or a colonel.
But they clearly didn’t offer the right answer as an option to tick: a bowler in the Big Bash League.
Seriously, who’d do it? There hasn’t been a more thankless occupation since henchmen were first rostered to line up and fight Bruce Lee.
Bowling in Twenty20 cricket, and fast bowling in particular, has always been a tough job since the sawn-off version of the game began over two decades years ago.
But the treatment the bowlers took in the early summers of the BBL looks gentle compared to the pummelling we now see.
Steve Smith launches one into the stands.Credit: Getty Images
There is an average of 13 sixes hit in every BBL fixture, which is a different planet from the six sixes per game in the competition’s first iteration in 2011-12.
With five games in the season remaining at the time of writing, the 2025-26 season is tracking to break the record for most sixes (588), set in last season’s BBL.
Finn Allen, the burly Kiwi who opens for the Scorchers with the equally powerful Mitch Marsh, has crunched 33 sixes this season and is only three behind Mitch Owen’s record set last summer. Allen is one of nine players to hit a BBL century this season. The previous season’s record was six.
Of the nine times a player has hit nine sixes in a BBL innings, five have come this season.
Power is king, and it’s noticeable that batsmen in the top orders of several BBL teams now look bulked-up, like baseball hitters. Next year, it will likely get even more pronounced, with teams able to use a “designated batter” who doesn’t even have to run and field.
It’s been raining crowd catches this season. The Scorchers-Heat game at the Gabba in December produced an astonishing 36 sixes. The Scorchers scored 257 – the BBL’s second-highest total ever – and then the Heat chased it down with eight wickets in hand.
It had to be seen to be believed. A bit like Steve Smith’s captivating knock at the SCG last week, where the ageless Test star made a 42-ball 100. He dispatched one Ryan Hadley over for a record 32 runs, and also hit a six onto the roof of the Brewongle Stand. It was arguably the biggest seen at the SCG.
Smith also holds the BBL’s record for most centuries, with four, which is crazy given he has barely played in it over the journey.
Smith has scored all those hundreds in the last four seasons, during brief returns to the Sixers. In his 11 innings since 2023 (of 39 in total), Smith has scored four centuries and three fifties – yet the eccentric right-hander was not deemed good enough for a spot in the squad for the T20 World Cup next month.
Go figure, as they say in Smith’s digs in Manhattan.
Those who aren’t upset at the selection snub are BBL bosses and the suits at Channel Seven and Fox Sports, too. Smith’s feats helped the Sixers-Thunder game win the ratings on Friday with over two million viewers on Seven, and pay-TV numbers would have been similarly boosted. Since Smith started doing his January cameos in magenta a few years back, there’s been a bankable spike.
This year, Cricket Australia carved out a two-week block to allow all Aussie players to head back to the BBL post-Ashes, and it’s been a success – with some caveats. Most of the Test players who shone are those also not in the Aussie T20 squad, such as Usman Khawaja, Alex Carey and Marnus Labuschagne.
And the old-school rock star who’d rival Smith for producing runs and ratings – Travis Head – was rested to freshen up for the World Cup. (Worryingly, many who are in the Aussie T20 squad aren’t setting the world on fire in the BBL).
But buzz attached to the knocks of Smith and David Warner – who also hit a century – at the sold-out SCG on Friday, along with runs from Babar Azam and an overdue appearance from Mitch Starc, perfectly illustrated why Cricket Australia and BBL bosses are looking to inject private equity into the competition. Six power is good, but star power is better.
Plans are well advanced, we’re told, to sell off stakes in franchises to investors, notably squillionaires from the Indian Premier League, and the hundreds of millions raised will be used to shore up Aussie cricket’s finances and increase the BBL’s salary cap to attract more international stars.
Even without them, it is already one of the highest-quality competitions in a world where the total number of T20 leagues now rivals podcasts. Cricket Australia has already set its sights on becoming second behind the IPL, and getting stars to play from home and abroad for most of a season is the key to the BBL stepping up.
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“I’d love the opportunity to be able to play more, and have the international players play a lot more,” Smith said recently. “That’s what most teams around the world in their T20 tournaments have. It’s tricky, I know, with scheduling, but if they were able to have the international players play as much Big Bash as possible, I think it only benefits the tournament.”
Hurdles would have to be overcome and an Australian summer reshaped to accommodate both Test cricket and a juiced-up BBL. And that may alienate some, but the masses keep on speaking. They can’t get enough of Smith and Head clearing the rope – in both creams and colours.
Sorry, bowlers.
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