Looming from behind a cold beverage, your humble columnist opined that it was perfectly possible to accept that the Big Bash League had caught on as a major club-oriented sporting spectacle of the warmer months – both on television and at the grounds – without necessarily being a single clue the wiser as to the precise nature of people's attraction to it.

The helpful reply was that T20 cricket was shorter than the other forms of the game, and that matches were thus completed within an abbreviated timeframe appealing to TV viewers and  attendees. This seems perfectly plausible. It must have something to do with it. However, it may be one of those theories that makes more sense the less you think about it.

If 20 overs per side is better than the 50 of the conventional one-day match, the logical  extension is 10 or five overs would only be to the greater delight of short-form cricket  fanciers.

Perhaps if the administrators kept working at it diligently over time, they could get it down to  two overs, then one, and finally arrive at a situation where a patchwork selection of not  conspicuously well-chosen music is blurted over the public address system, some fireworks  are blown up, a coin is tossed, the result announced, and everyone heads home brimming with satisfied bonhomie without so much as a ball being bowled in anger.

Of course, we haven't arrived at that point yet. The fact remains that making up eight teams out of whole cloth, naming them after cities in the US baseball tradition, and depositing them out on the field in various wantonly bilious shades of the same frankly depressing clown outfit has clearly been a success story, for both Cricket Australia and the Ten Network.

Tangentially, it says a great deal for the ironclad adherence to tradition – even in this most non-traditional of cricket forms – that the sport remains wholly impervious to the concept of anything resembling a cool team uniform, in any short-form variant of the game, but none moreso than the Big Bash League.

Just about every other sport can conjure up clobber that is vaguely presentable – baseball, field hockey, kabbadi, even European basketball teams and most darts players.

The BBL players ply their trade in something that arguably looks like the jumble that was left  over at the sales after The Wiggles chose their colours, perhaps designed by an astigmatic  cheerleading coach. However, this is not to disparage the rock 'em-sock 'em, Wacky Woodchop variant of cricket.

There's a market for it, and the market speaks for itself. It's a little like someone had the peculiar vision to say, "I'd really like cricket if only they changed just about everything about it."  And then they went right ahead and did it.