The Marsh Cup Explained: Australia's 50-Over Domestic Competition
The Marsh Cup explained: how Australia's 50-over domestic competition works, its sponsor names, format, points, finals and the Dean Jones Trophy.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Season & structure18 min read
- First season
- 1969-70
- Format
- 50 overs a side, List A status
- Teams
- The six state sides
- Marsh Cup years
- 2019-20 to 2023-24
- Current trophy
- Dean Jones Trophy, from 2024-25
- Most titles
- Western Australia, 17 by the end of the Marsh era
- Player of the final award
- Michael Bevan Medal
- Most career runs
- Brad Hodge, 5,597
The Marsh Cup was Australia's men's domestic 50-over competition between 2019-20 and 2023-24, contested by the six state sides in a round-robin followed by a final. The name came from the insurance broker Marsh, which held the naming rights for those five seasons. If you are searching for the Marsh Cup now, the thing you are looking for still exists, but it is not called that any more: since 2024-25 the tournament has been the One-Day Cup, and the trophy is the Dean Jones Trophy.
That is the confusing part of this competition and it always has been. The Marsh Cup was the tenth sponsor name for a tournament that began in 1969-70, and each rebrand has cut the thread between one era and the next. The Sheffield Shield has been the Sheffield Shield since 1892. Australia's one-day competition has been the Vehicle and General knockout, the Gillette Cup, the McDonald's Cup, the Mercantile Mutual Cup, the ING Cup, the Ford Ranger Cup, the Ryobi Cup, the Matador Cup, the JLT Cup and the Marsh Cup, and it has changed format almost as often as it has changed name.
What follows is the whole competition: where it came from, what the Marsh Cup years actually looked like, how the points work, why Western Australia won so much of it, and what the tournament is for now that Australia plays so few home one-day internationals.
What the Marsh Cup actually was
Strip away the sponsor and the Marsh Cup was a straightforward thing. Six state sides, fifty overs a side, List A status, a round-robin in which each team played a set number of matches, points for wins with bonus points for winning well, and a final between the top qualifiers.
The 2019-20 edition is a clean example, because it was played as a single continuous block before the calendar fragmented. It ran from 21 September to 26 November 2019 across seven cities, and finished with Western Australia beating Queensland by four wickets at Allan Border Field in Brisbane. Queensland made 205, Western Australia got there for the loss of six wickets, and Usman Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne shared the player of the tournament award despite finishing on the losing side.
That is the shape most people picture when they think of the competition. It has not been that tidy since.
Why the name changed to the Dean Jones Trophy
Marsh's naming rights ran out after 2023-24. Rather than immediately selling the title to another sponsor, Cricket Australia did something more interesting: in August 2024 it ran a public vote to name the trophy itself after a former Australian one-day cricketer, so that the prize would have a permanent identity even as commercial partners came and went.
Dean Jones won. He was a Victorian batter whose one-day international record, running between the wickets and willingness to attack in the middle overs changed the way Australians played the 50-over game in the late 1980s. Naming the trophy for him also gave the competition something it had never had: a name that would not expire.
Michael Bevan finished third in the same vote, and Cricket Australia used his name for the individual award given to the player of the match in the final. Bevan's reputation as the best finisher of his generation in one-day cricket makes it an unusually well-matched piece of naming.
The competition is now referred to as the One-Day Cup, with the Dean Jones Trophy as the prize. The Marsh name persists in search traffic and in conversation, which is why it is worth being explicit about the change.
Where the competition came from
Australia introduced a domestic limited-overs tournament in 1969-70, the second country in the world to do so after England. The first version was a straight knockout played over a handful of matches, closer to a cup competition in a football sense than to a league.
That knockout structure held through the 1970s, including under the Gillette Cup name. From 1979 the competition moved to pool play with semi-finals, then to a single round-robin from 1992, then to a double round-robin with a finals series from 2000. Since 2013 it has used various carnival and block formats with differing numbers of matches per team.
New Zealand entered a side between 1969 and 1975, which is a reminder of how much closer trans-Tasman domestic cricket once was. The Australian Capital Territory competed between 1997 and 2000. A Cricket Australia XI, drawn from the national pathway, played between 2015 and 2018.
Every name the competition has carried
The sponsor list is the clearest single record of how Australian cricket's commercial relationships have shifted over fifty years.
| Years | Competition name |
|---|---|
| 1969 to 1973 | Vehicle and General Australasian Knock-out Competition |
| 1973 to 1979 | Gillette Cup |
| 1979 to 1988 | McDonald's Cup |
| 1992 to 2001 | Mercantile Mutual Cup |
| 2001 to 2006 | ING Cup |
| 2006 to 2010 | Ford Ranger Cup |
| 2010 to 2014 | Ryobi One-Day Cup |
| 2014 to 2017 | Matador BBQs One-Day Cup |
| 2017 to 2019 | JLT One-Day Cup |
| 2019 to 2024 | Marsh One-Day Cup |
The format during the Marsh years
Across the five Marsh Cup seasons the competition was never played the same way twice, because the pandemic and the reshaping of the domestic calendar both intervened.
The 2019-20 tournament was a conventional block from late September to late November. The 2020-21 season was compressed and largely hubbed because of travel restrictions, with matches concentrated rather than spread around the country. Subsequent seasons saw the competition split so that some matches were played in September and October, before the Sheffield Shield took over, and the remainder pushed to February and March.
The number of matches each side plays has also moved. The 2025-26 competition, under its new name, was a 22-match tournament in which each team played seven matches, spread from 16 September 2025 to a final on 11 March 2026. That is a very different animal from a six-week block.
Points, bonus points and net run rate
The scoring system is simple and has been broadly stable, with one moving part.
A win is worth four points. A tie or a no result is worth two to each side. A loss is worth nothing. On top of that, a bonus point rewards the margin of victory rather than just the fact of it: a team that achieves a run rate 1.25 times its opponent's picks up an extra point.
The 2019-20 season used a two-tier bonus, adding a second point for a run rate twice as high as the opposition's. More recent seasons have used the single threshold. Where teams finish level on points, net run rate separates them, which means a heavy defeat in September can still cost a side a finals place in March.
The practical effect is that chasing sides are encouraged to finish quickly rather than safely, and sides batting first are encouraged to keep pushing after the game is won. It produces slightly more aggressive cricket than a straight win-loss table would.
Western Australia's decade
The most striking thing about the Marsh Cup years is how one-sided they were. Western Australia won four of the five seasons played under the name, taking their overall total to 17 titles by the end of 2023-24. New South Wales won the other, in 2020-21.
- Western Australia4
- Every other state combined1
Covers the 2019-20 to 2023-24 seasons only, the period when Marsh held naming rights. Western Australia won 2019-20, 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24; New South Wales won 2020-21.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Western Australia | 4 |
| Every other state combined | 1 |
There is no single explanation, but a few things line up. Western Australia had an unusually deep batting group through that period, a strong pace attack that was rarely all away on international duty at the same time, and the advantage of playing home matches in conditions that visiting sides see only once or twice a season. They were also the most consistent state in Australian cricket generally over those years, winning Sheffield Shield titles in the same window.
The run ended with South Australia's win in 2024-25 and New South Wales's in 2025-26, the latter their 13th title in the competition.
Recent champions
| Season | Competition name | Champion |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | Marsh One-Day Cup | Western Australia |
| 2020-21 | Marsh One-Day Cup | New South Wales |
| 2021-22 | Marsh One-Day Cup | Western Australia |
| 2022-23 | Marsh One-Day Cup | Western Australia |
| 2023-24 | Marsh One-Day Cup | Western Australia |
| 2024-25 | One-Day Cup, Dean Jones Trophy | South Australia |
| 2025-26 | One-Day Cup, Dean Jones Trophy | New South Wales |
The 2024-25 and 2025-26 finals
South Australia's win in 2024-25 was the first time the Dean Jones Trophy was lifted. They beat Victoria at Adelaide Oval, and Henry Thornton took four for 27 to claim the inaugural Michael Bevan Medal. For a state that had spent much of the previous decade at the bottom of both domestic competitions, it was the start of a genuine turnaround, followed by consecutive Sheffield Shield titles.
The 2025-26 final was the opposite kind of match. Played at Bellerive Oval on 11 March 2026, it was cut by rain to twenty overs a side. Tasmania were bowled out for 118 in 20.3 overs and New South Wales chased it with four wickets in hand, reaching 119 for six in 20.1. A 50-over final decided over twenty overs is not what anyone plans for, but it is a fair illustration of the risk of scheduling a decider in March.
Kurtis Patterson finished the tournament with 565 runs and won the Michael Bevan Medal. Tanveer Sangha took 19 wickets, the most in the competition.
Where the matches are played
The One-Day Cup is not a stadium competition. Most of its fixtures are at grounds that hold a few thousand people: Junction Oval in Melbourne, Karen Rolton Oval in Adelaide, Allan Border Field in Brisbane, Bellerive Oval in Hobart, and various suburban grounds in Sydney and Perth.
Part of that is timing. The competition opens in mid-September when the AFL and NRL seasons are still finishing and the major stadiums are unavailable. Part of it is simple economics: there is no reason to open a 50,000-seat venue for a crowd of two thousand.
The consequence is that watching this competition live is one of the cheapest and most accessible experiences in Australian sport. Entry is usually free or nominal, you can sit on the grass twenty metres from the boundary, and you are frequently watching future Test players in front of almost nobody. The Australian cricket grounds guide covers the major venues; the One-Day Cup mostly happens at the ones it does not list.
Why the competition got pushed to the edges of the season
The One-Day Cup occupies the least valuable real estate in the Australian summer, and that is a deliberate decision rather than an accident.
The Big Bash takes the December and January school holidays because it is the largest commercial asset in the domestic game. The international programme takes whatever Test and limited-overs windows Cricket Australia has agreed with other boards. The Sheffield Shield takes October, November, February and March because it is the competition that selects the Test team and it cannot be compressed.
That leaves September, plus scraps. So the 50-over competition opens the season before anybody is paying attention, then disappears for four months, then reappears for a final. The Australian cricket season calendar sets out how the whole summer is assembled and where the One-Day Cup fits into it.
What the competition is actually for
The honest answer is selection. Australia's home 50-over international programme has thinned considerably, and in some summers there are very few one-day internationals played in the country at all. A player who is not in the national squad has essentially one place to prove they can bat through a 50-over innings or bowl a full ten-over allocation under pressure, and this is it.
Selectors therefore read the competition closely even when nobody else does. Fifty-over World Cup squads are built substantially from it, and a player who has a strong domestic one-day season at the right moment in a cycle can move very quickly. The Australian cricket pathway guide covers how that fits into a career.
It also serves a second, quieter function: it gives batters who are not Twenty20 specialists somewhere to be relevant. A player whose game is built on running between the wickets and building an innings has a shrinking market in modern cricket, and this is one of the few competitions that still rewards it.
Records worth knowing
- 50Overs per side
- 6State teams competing
- 10Sponsor names since 1969-70
- 17Western Australia titles
Overs and team count describe the current competition. The sponsor count covers named commercial sponsors since 1969-70 and excludes the Dean Jones Trophy, which is a trophy name rather than a sponsorship. The Western Australia figure is the title count at the end of the Marsh era in 2023-24.
Brad Hodge holds the record for most career runs in the competition with 5,597 for Victoria, a figure that reflects both his quality and the length of a domestic career in an era when players stayed at their state for fifteen years. James Hopes of Queensland has the most wickets with 155. The highest individual score is 257 by D'Arcy Short, one of the largest innings played in any domestic List A competition anywhere.
Those numbers are unlikely to move much. Modern Australian players spend far less of their careers in domestic 50-over cricket, because the competition is shorter and the best of them are away on international or franchise duty for large parts of the season.
The Cricket Australia XI experiment
Between 2015 and 2018 the tournament included a Cricket Australia XI: a side selected from the national pathway rather than a state, giving young players List A cricket against senior opposition.
The argument for it was real. Australia's domestic system has always struggled to give a nineteen-year-old meaningful cricket above grade level without displacing a contracted state player. The Cricket Australia XI created seven or eight extra opportunities a season for exactly that group.
The arguments against were also real. One team in a six-or-seven-team competition was not trying to win the trophy, which distorted the table. The results were heavily one-sided. And several state coaches felt the fixtures diluted the competition without producing much that the Second XI programme could not.
The side was withdrawn after 2017-18, and the pathway work moved back into the Toyota Second XI competition and the underage national championships instead.
State by state: what the competition means to each
The One-Day Cup carries different weight in different states, and that shows in how seriously it is treated.
For Western Australia it has been the flagship. Seventeen titles is a record no other state is close to, and Perth crowds have historically turned out for domestic one-day cricket in numbers that Melbourne and Sydney do not match. For New South Wales, with 13 titles, it has been a steady supplement to a Sheffield Shield record that dominates the first-class game.
Queensland have used it as a proving ground more than a target, and produced two of the competition's most durable records through James Hopes and a long line of seam-bowling allrounders. Victoria have the most prolific run-scorer in Brad Hodge but have found finals harder to win than their playing depth suggests. South Australia spent a long stretch as the weakest side in both competitions before winning the first Dean Jones Trophy in 2024-25. Tasmania, with the smallest player base of the six, treat the tournament as one of their genuine chances at silverware, and reached the 2025-26 final at Bellerive Oval in conditions that suit their bowling attack.
The knockout years, 1969 to 1979
The first decade of the competition looks almost unrecognisable now. It was a straight knockout, which meant a state's entire limited-overs season could be a single match. Losing in the first round meant no one-day cricket at all that summer.
That structure gave the early tournament a cup-competition feel that the modern league format has lost entirely. It also produced very little cricket. A state might play two matches in a year, which was fine when limited-overs cricket was a novelty and disastrous once it became the format the international game was built around.
The move to pool play in 1979 and to a full round-robin in 1992 was driven by the same logic that has driven almost every change since: Australian selectors needed more evidence, and two matches a summer did not provide it.
The split-innings experiment
Around 2010 the competition tried a split-innings format, in which each side batted twice in shorter blocks rather than once for fifty overs. The reasoning was that it would neutralise the advantage of winning the toss and give both sides comparable conditions, which is a real problem in day-night cricket where dew changes the game after dark.
It was not popular. Players found it confusing to pace, the scoreboard was hard to read for spectators, and it produced a format that resembled nothing else in world cricket, which undercut the argument that domestic cricket should prepare players for internationals.
The competition returned to a straight fifty overs a side in 2011-12, explicitly aligning with the format used at the 50-over World Cup. Nothing similar has been attempted since, and the experiment is now mostly remembered as an example of how much Australian domestic cricket was willing to tinker in that period.
Bonus points in practice
Bonus points sound like a technicality until a season comes down to them, which happens more often than it should in a tournament this short.
When each side plays only seven matches, a single bonus point is worth a quarter of a win. A team that chases 220 in 38 overs rather than 45 collects it; a team that gets home with four overs to spare does not. That changes how captains bat in the last ten overs of a completed chase, and it is one of the few places in Australian cricket where a side is actively incentivised to take risks after the result is secure.
It also interacts with net run rate, which decides ties on points. The combined effect is that a heavy loss in September carries a cost that a narrow one does not, and states that lose badly early tend to spend the rest of the season chasing margin rather than just wins.
Overseas and Big Bash crossover
Unlike the Big Bash, the One-Day Cup is a domestic competition in the strict sense: it is played by state-contracted Australians, without an overseas import market. That gives it a different character from English List A cricket, where county sides field overseas professionals.
The crossover that does matter is with the Big Bash. A strong September and October in the One-Day Cup is one of the ways a fringe player attracts attention ahead of the Twenty20 season, and the two competitions bookend the same summer with substantially the same squads. Players such as Marcus Stoinis and Travis Head built reputations across both formats before establishing themselves internationally.
How the One-Day Cup compares to the Sheffield Shield
The two competitions sit in the same season, use largely the same players, and serve very different purposes.
The Sheffield Shield is the selection competition for Test cricket, it has an unbroken identity going back to 1892, and it is treated by Australian cricket as the standard against which a first-class career is measured. The One-Day Cup has been renamed ten times, reformatted repeatedly, and pushed into whatever calendar space is left. The Sheffield Shield explainer sets out the other half of that comparison.
The gap in status is not a reflection of quality. It is a reflection of what Australian cricket has decided to protect. The Shield has been defended through every commercial pressure of the past thirty years; the one-day competition has been the thing that gets moved.
What a One-Day Cup day is actually like
A typical fixture starts at 10am or, for a day-night match, in the early afternoon. There are perhaps two thousand people at a ground built for five, most of them club cricketers, family members, scouts and retirees. There is no music between overs and often no scoreboard beyond a manual one.
What you get in exchange is proximity. You can hear the fielders, you can watch a bowler's action from side-on at twenty metres, and you can see how a state captain sets a field when nobody is filming him. For anyone trying to learn how the game is actually played, this is better viewing than a Test match from the top deck.
It is also where you see players before they are famous. A significant share of the Australian squad in any given year played this competition in front of small crowds two or three seasons earlier, and a September fixture at Junction Oval or Karen Rolton Oval will usually contain at least one player who will be in a national squad within eighteen months. The players section tracks who is currently making that transition.
Watching it
Broadcast arrangements for the One-Day Cup have varied. Matches have been streamed free on Cricket Australia's own platform in some seasons and carried on subscription television in others, and coverage of individual fixtures is not guaranteed. Scorecards and ball-by-ball are reliably available even where video is not.
Going in person remains the better option where you can. The how to watch cricket in Australia guide covers the broadcast landscape more generally, though for this competition the answer changes more often than for any other.
What happens next
The competition's immediate future is settled: the 2026-27 One-Day Cup begins on 18 September 2026 with the final on 14 February 2027, keeping the split-season shape that has become normal.
The longer-term question is whether a domestic 50-over competition survives at all in a calendar under this much pressure. The arguments for keeping it are the ones above: it selects World Cup squads, it develops players who are not Twenty20 specialists, and it is the last format in which an Australian domestic batter can build a long innings. The arguments against are that it draws almost no crowd, generates almost no revenue, and occupies weeks that the Big Bash and the Sheffield Shield would both happily take.
For now it has a permanent trophy name for the first time in its history, which suggests Cricket Australia intends to keep it. Whether it gets a better slot in the calendar is a separate question, and the honest answer is that nothing in the current schedule suggests it will. The Big Bash format guide and the Big Bash League section cover the competition that took its place in the summer, and cricket in Australia and the Australia section collect the rest of the picture.