Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Imagine. First day of the first-class season and the Bradman Oval in Bowral is a maze of picnic blankets as Steve Waugh, wearing the baggyish blue of New South Wales, walks out to toss with Victoria's captain Paul Reiffel. In the ochre-tinted heart of Australia, meanwhile, Aboriginal children in Utopia, population 700, are wiping the sleep from their eyes as they board a bus bound for Traegar Park, Alice Springs, where South Australia are preparing to meet Queensland. In the far west Adam Gilchrist's men are cooling down after their sunrise jog along the sparkling white sands of Cable Beach, Broome, where the locals are aflutter ahead of Western Australia's match against Tasmania.

Improbable? Yes. Impossible? No such thing.

A quick scan of this summer's Pura Cup schedule makes for depressing reading. Thirty matches, six venues and one certainty: that few people will care and even fewer will bother watching.

So here comes a rallying call you don't hear very often. Iit's time for Australian cricket to take a leaf out of English cricket's book, even if that book is going out of print faster than you can say Basingstoke, Portsmouth or Chesterfield. Let's forget this obsession with staging matches in soulless stadiums in the cities and instead play before packed grassy banks in the towns - a surefire, cheapish way to regenerate interest in domestic cricket. Let's limit the Test grounds to two games a year. Let's make outgrounds the in-thing.

We'll start with Victoria who, whenever the MCG is double-booked, insist on playing at a hotchpotch of cheerless, suburban football grounds. No longer: the Bushrangers are going bush. One game a year in Bendigo or Ballarat, where 13,000 watched England in the 1992 World Cup, with the remaining two shared between Wangaratta, Leongatha, Sale, Warrnambool, Shepparton, Yea and Echuca, who have all hosted touring sides down the years.

NSW can stage an annual fixture at Canberra's Manuka Oval, an atmospheric ground in an unatmospheric city. Bowral can take turns with North Sydney Oval - a city ground, but one with a white picket fence and festival feel - or even Bert Oldfield Park in Killara, just as rudimentary but twice as homely as, say, Essex's endangered second home at Ilford. The remaining match can be held in a rural centre: Dubbo, maybe, or Newcastle, or the banana-quaffing beach paradise Coffs Harbour, where Michael Bevan's XI played Shane Lee's XI last Saturday.

Tasmania can go back to dividing their time between Hobart, Launceston and Devonport. Queensland are swamped with options: Mackay, Maryborough, Townsville, Caloundra, Bundaberg and picturesque Toowoomba, where the ground is cut into the Darling Downs and where more than 1,400 runs were scored when England visited in 1994-95. Tropical Cairns, where Alec Stewart's men melted three years ago, might prove more problematic.

WA can play one match a year at Fremantle or Lilac Hill, the Arundel Castle of the Oz circuit, plus another at Busselton or Mandurah in the Margaret River wine region. And once a year they can head further afield still - to Northam or Kalgoorlie, gold-mining and topless-bar capital of Australia, where Mike Gatting's journeymen were bewilderingly sent for a one-day game all those years ago. An attempt to distract the England captain, presumably?

Which brings us to SA, who can make an annual trek to Renmark, Mt Gambier or Berri, a charming ground in Murray River citrus-growing country that hosted a World Cup match in 1992. The Adelaide Oval, in the interests of artistic splendour, can retain three matches a year, but in return the Redbacks must spread the word to Alice Springs. Or, better still, why not invest in a good pitch and quality infrastructure and stage an annual match on the Tiwi Islands - a bottomless well of precociously talented Australian Rules footballers but, at the last count, no cricketers?

From a compassionate angle, the savaging of modern tour itineraries means that interstate matches offer a last chance for country towns - a traditional lifeblood of Australian cricket - to glimpse high-class action. From a mercenary angle, gimmicks like orange balls, floodlights and jazzy team nicknames have failed to pull the people to the game. It is time, surely, to take the game to the people.

Chris Ryan is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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