Bulls, Bushrangers, Tigers: What happened to state cricket team nicknames?

Queensland used to stand alongside a real life Bull, Victoria would bring out the old Ned Kelly armour. What ever happened to the iconic state cricket team nicknames? DANIEL CHERNY explores.

Australian cricket’s entry into the brave new world of state team nicknames started with a thud.

Quite literally too. It was the sound, and sight, of bovine excrement.

It was 1993, and Andrew Blucher was less than a year into his role as marketing manager at the newly rebranded Queensland Cricket.

Though NSW’s Sheffield Shield side had colloquially been known as the Blues, domestic cricket teams had not had formal accompanying monikers to match those of the football codes, or the burgeoning National Basketball League.

Blucher was the man who changed that, driving the Bulls name that remains entrenched with the Queensland men’s side more than three decades later.

It wouldn’t be cricket without some action involving the tail-end though to provide an enduring memory.

“When we had the function at the Gabba, we had this outdoor barbecue to launch,” Blucher recalls.

Queensland unveil the Bulls moniker in 1993. Picture: The Advertiser 1993.

“We had the players all dressed in gear, and a (real-life) bull came out and dropped a big bloody turd very close to the barbecue.”

Yet within 18 months the Bulls nickname was destined to stick, the change coinciding with Queensland’s drought-breaking Shield title in March 1995.

Blucher was a pioneer. Within a few years, every state had followed suit. No longer was it just Victoria v Western Australia. This was now the Bushrangers and the Warriors. South Australia v Tasmania became the Redbacks going up against the Tigers.

Women’s teams followed too, as the Spirit, Breakers, Fire, Fury and Scorpions arrived on the domestic scenes.

Bold and arguably garish cartoonish uniforms became de rigueur, with Mercantile Mutual’s innovative signs around the boundary and catch-a-six competition adding lustre to the hitherto staid and conservative world of state cricket.

And yet by the time the domestic season began this week, half of the six states had tossed away their nicknames.

The great Shane Warne after being named captain of Victoria's Bushrangers in 1998.

Following the lead of Victoria and WA, South Australia announced in March that the Redbacks and Scorpions would also be consigned to history, with the SACA reverting to simply calling its respective sides the South Australian men’s and women’s teams.

To understand why these names have been cast aside, it is worthwhile to appreciate why they were brought in to start with.

“It came in primarily as a marketing tool,” says former Cricket Victoria chief Ken Jacobs, who was in charge of the then Victorian Cricket Association when the Bushrangers label was added to the Vics’ name.

As anachronistic as it may appear now, in the mid 1990s, a Sunday game at North Sydney Oval broadcast live nationally on Channel 9 was relatively hot commercial property, at least by domestic cricket standards.

“When I was in that role at Queensland Cricket, our biggest marketing tool was the Queensland Cricket team for the most part playing one-day cricket. That was the best chance you had to promote a brand,” Blucher says.

Recently-departed WA cricket boss Christina Matthews agrees.

“When names came in many years ago for those domestic teams, a lot of it was around giving names rights for teams. The Retravision Warriors, the SpeedBlitz Blues,” Matthews says.

“Like everything, sponsorship matures and changes and the value of the naming rights wasn’t the same anymore.”

South Australia’s Redbacks nickname is history. Picture: Mark Brake/Getty Images

Having played 20 Tests and 47 one-day internationals for Australia, Matthews was at the helm in 2019 when WA became the second state to officially shed its nicknames.

While not strictly a directive from Cricket Australia, Matthews says that around the table of state CEOs there had been discussion for several years around whether state nicknames had passed their used-by dates. CA had already acted in 2017, detaching the Southern Stars name from the national women’s side in part to provide consistency across the genders.

The biggest factor though was that 50-over cricket was no longer the shopfront. The advent of Twenty20 had cast the state competitions into the distant background.

“With the advent of the Big Bash League you then had competing brands. By the time the Big Bash came around it was well understood that one-day domestic and Shield were the pathway programs. T20 and Big Bash League was the way they could get revenue generation,” Matthews says.

“People were wasting a lot of time trying to promote two brands, and the players, they really want to represent WA in those pathway programs. Ultimately it just became common sense. You put all your marketing efforts into the T20 brand and your domestic competitions are to develop players for Australia and the Big Bash League.

“One by one the states started dropping them.”

Tasmania Tigers still hold their nickname. Picture: Steve Bell/Getty Images

There has been some resistance though. Rather than shunning the graphic animal era, Tasmania has this season lent heavily in on the Tigers name, producing a one-day shirt inspired by the uniform worn during the ING Cup success of 20 summers ago.

Queensland too is sticking fat, unsurprisingly given the Bulls Masters not-for-profit organisation founded 14 years ago relies heavily on former players to develop cricket around the state.

“A state like Tassie, where theirs is the Tigers, it kind of fits, the same way the Blues fits in NSW. Other than that it really didn’t make sense. For some of the female players, they’d grown up with their team being known as the Fury or the Breakers or whatever. So they were probably a little more attached,” Matthews says.

Nostalgia seems a hit with fans too, with digital engagement at state level tending to spike with old highlights from ISC-era uniforms of the mid-to-late 90s.

Three nicknames are history, and three remain.

The 90s names also point to a time at which a certain type of mascot was in vogue. Jacobs recalls some pushback around the idea that the Bushrangers name was glorifying violence.

“It wasn’t universally accepted,” Jacobs remembers.

“We went through quite a bit of research around the name and eventually settled on the Bushrangers.

“It certainly helped us along the way relatively speaking with the awareness of the Victorian team, and with kids in particular.”

Coincidentally PETA this week called for the AFL’s Western Bulldogs to change their name to the Western Mutts on the grounds of ceasing to promote animal cruelty.

By the time the BBL teams were being named, weather-based and more abstract nicknames like the Sixers and Strikers were in demand.

“The naming of the Big Bash League teams was a massive exercise that Cricket Australia did with marketing agencies about what resonates with American marketers who work with the major sports over there,” Matthews says.

Originally published as Bulls, Bushrangers, Tigers: What happened to state cricket team nicknames?