Ben Guild: Competition stumped as season opens in spring

Tahir Afridi is part of Rotorua's Central Cricket Club which has been most heavily affected by the Baywide Cup scheduling. Photo / Andrew Warner

Competition can be defined as an event or contest in which people take part in order to establish superiority or supremacy in a particular area.

The problem is, as it relates to sport, those contests are rarely fair.

Forget the looming threats of steroids, match-fixing, poor officiating, inequality in funding and luck for a moment and consider that competitions in which the draw itself is equitable are as rare as hen's teeth.

Conference systems in the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and Super XV, and an indivisible number of weeks to teams (NRL), mean some teams in almost every sport have a tougher row to hoe than others.

Same goes in golf, with the weather and course conditions, or in tennis, where rain stoppages or an uneven draw can wreck havoc on some of the top seeds.

In that regard the Baywide premier rugby system is near-perfect - 10 teams play the others home and away to determine the semifinalists.

The only unfairness that can be argued is that currently being pursued by delegates in Central and Eastern Bay of Plenty, who would like greater representation in terms of teams due, in part, to creating better player pathways and distributing the burden of travel more evenly between clubs.

With that as the benchmark, it seems the Baywide cricket season could barely be structured more horribly.

The Baywide Cup cricket season - which determines the Bay of Plenty champion which then contests the national club championships - began on October 4, in the heart of spring.

It hailed that day. At Tauranga Airport, no more than a few kilometres from Blake Park, where I was one of about 25 people waiting for Carrus Mount Maunganui's game against City Sports Bar Te Puke to be called off, there was a maximum wind gust of 89km/h.

The maximum temperature for the day was 13C and 5.4mm of rain fell.

Not a single ball was bowled in any of the four matches scheduled, which, on paper at least, featured two games between the top-four teams in a competition in which sides play one another only once.

Had the games gone ahead they would have done so with largely out of form and/or tentative players on artificial pitches with the possibility of rain delays.

As such, it seems, the Baywide Cup can be decided, in part, by the weather.

The running joke last year at the Mount club was that they had the best covers in the Bay. The origin of the mirth stemmed from the first weekend of the season - the work of players to cover the artificial pitch at Blake Park meant their win over Central was the only one to be recorded in the opening round.

Central and the rest of the competition were not happy but the Mount were. It was not fair, but the rest of the sides spent the remainder of the round robin trying to make up the points.

They never did. The Mount went on go host the final as top qualifiers and again failed to qualify for the national club champs.

Because of this no effort was spared in trying to cover the Blake Park block for the opening weekend.

It proved futile, and a few days later players were retrieving covers that had almost blown on to nearby Maunganui Rd.

There are restrictions regarding what can be done about the draw circulating around national club champs qualification and Bay rep fixtures, but playing the Twenty20 tourney at the start of the year on artificials seems a pretty good way to go.

To do anything else would be like playing the first round of the Carrus Open on a sodden pitch and putt.