Inconsistency dogs Brisbane Heat as another underwhelming season comes to an abrupt end
When the Brisbane Heat conked out against the worst team in the competition — the Melbourne Renegades — it seemed right, as to make the BBL finals after such an inconsistent season would have been an injustice.
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You can talk about costly fumbles and stumbles in the field but you cannot hide one simple fact — the Brisbane Heat got what they deserved.
Boom-or-bust Brisbane have played so inconsistently this season it would almost have been an injustice had they beaten the Renegades and made the bloated five-team Big Bash finals.
The dejected Heat players did not have to look far to work out what their underwhelming campaign was missing this season.
It was right under their nose in Melbourne.
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Aaron Finch’s match winning 63 off 49 balls displayed the two gears — second and third — that Brisbane find so difficult to activate.
The Heat huff and puff and try to entertain the fans by blowing their opponents’ houses down. Sounds fabulous in theory but power without poise often wins you nothing.
Align the two, as Finch did on Monday, and you become a far more formidable foe.
Even on Monday, against the worst team in the competition, Brisbane were overly impetuous and screeched their wheels.
Some of the Heat’s batsmen would use a sledgehammer to swat a mosquito.
Coach Darren Lehmann said before the season that his first priority with the Heat was to win more matches at home.
But instead of being a fortress, the Gabba had all the resilience of a fibro shack, with the Heat losing five of seven home games.
It is now seven years since the Heat have won the Big Bash and since then only the battling Sydney Thunder have a worse win-loss record.
It’s hard to know what to make of T20 cricket where players smile their way through interviews, even if their teams are going belly up, and fans can cheer hysterically for a boundary even if their team is 9-80 chasing 150 with one ball to go.
It does not deserve to be overanalysed but nor is it hit and giggle.
This season the Heat encountered genuine frustration from their fan base, you could hear it from the man in the street, and that is not a bad thing because it proved they cared.
Chris Lynn wants to keep the captaincy and deserves to, for even though he did not have his best summer, he cares deeply about his franchise, a trait never to be taken for granted in the whistlestop world of T20 cricket.
There are some developing threads such as the improvement of Matt Renshaw, the bright star of Marnus Labuschagne and the steady growth of talented leg-spinner Mitch Swepson.
Jimmy Peirson, Max Bryant and Joe Burns lost their places this season and Ben Cutting’s plight — he was switched from the middle to the top of the order and had the keeper stand over the stumps to him at times on Monday — spotlighted the fact that even at the end of the season, the side’s game plan was still a work in progress.
Star import AB de Villiers had a modest summer when one more innings of substance might have changed everything.
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Originally published as Inconsistency dogs Brisbane Heat as another underwhelming season comes to an abrupt end