Super Smash Guide: Format, Teams and How It Works

A Friday evening in early January at the Bay Oval. The grass banks are full of families who drove in from the beach, the boundary is short enough that the ball keeps landing among them, and the women's match has just finished so the men's teams are warming up on the same square. Nobody paid much for a ticket. There is no auction, no draft, no purple-and-orange corporate theatre, and no attempt whatsoever to persuade you that this is the biggest thing happening in cricket.

The Super Smash is a small competition that knows exactly what it is, which is more than can be said for a number of larger ones.

What the competition is

The domestic Twenty20 competition, contested by the same six major associations that play every other form of senior cricket here. Men's and women's competitions run in parallel, mostly as double-headers at the same ground on the same day, over a window that sits across the December and January holidays.

It began in the mid-2000s, when domestic T20 competitions were springing up everywhere in the wake of the format's arrival, and it has changed names several times as sponsors have come and gone. For a memorable couple of seasons it carried a defunct fast-food brand that was resurrected specifically for the purpose, which tells you something about the tournament's relationship with self-seriousness.

The format

A round-robin in which each side plays the other five twice, home and away. That produces ten matches per team and thirty in the men's competition, with the same again in the women's, before the play-offs. A short knock-out stage then decides the title, with the leading side after the round-robin rewarded with a direct route to the final and the second and third placed teams playing off for the other spot. The exact play-off structure has been adjusted more than once across the competition's life, so treat that as the shape rather than a fixed rule.

Thirty-odd matches is a small tournament by modern standards. For comparison, our own ball-by-ball dataset covers 618 Big Bash League matches across fourteen completed seasons and 1,243 Indian Premier League matches across nineteen. A Super Smash season is over in about six weeks and comes to a total that a bigger league gets through before Christmas.

That brevity is deliberate. There is one usable summer here, an international programme has first claim on it, and the four-day Plunket Shield needs the shoulders of the season. A T20 competition that ran for three months would eat the domestic first-class game alive.

Twelve teams, six associations

Association	Men's side	Women's side	Principal venue
Auckland	Aces	Hearts	Eden Park Outer Oval
Northern Districts	Brave	Northern women's side	Seddon Park, Bay Oval
Central Districts	Stags	Hinds	McLean Park, Pukekura Park
Wellington	Firebirds	Blaze	Basin Reserve
Canterbury	Kings	Magicians	Hagley Oval
Otago	Volts	Sparks	University Oval

The Northern men's and women's sides have both carried more than one name over the years, having played as the Knights, the Spirit and the Brave at various points, so do not be surprised to see older scorecards using something different.

The important structural fact is in the first column. These are not franchises. They are the same six provincial associations that have contested first-class cricket for over a century, described in full in the guide to New Zealand's cricket structure. Nobody bought them, nobody can move them, and nobody can add a seventh. A player who comes through Otago club cricket plays for Otago, and if he is dropped there is no rival Dunedin side to sign for.

The double-header model

Pairing the men's and women's fixtures at a single venue on a single day was one of the better administrative decisions made in the domestic game here. It happened well before several larger cricket nations got round to the same idea.

The mechanics are simple. One ground, one set of staff, one broadcast crew, one gate, two matches. The women's game gets the audience that has already turned up, and the men's game gets a crowd that arrived early. It cut the cost of staging women's domestic T20 close to zero at the margin, and it removed the fixture from the graveyard slots it had previously occupied.

The effect on the women's competition has been considerable. Domestic contracts, a settled fixture list at proper venues, and a real audience have raised the professional floor of the women's game here faster than any single initiative before it.

Where it sits in the summer

The competition owns the holiday period, which is the only genuinely reliable window for domestic crowds. Schools are out, the weather is at its best, and much of the country has decamped to a beach within driving distance of a provincial ground.

That placement also puts it directly against the international programme. A home Test or ODI series is usually running somewhere in the same weeks, which means the competition frequently loses its best-known players to the national side at exactly the point it most wants them. It is a structural conflict with no solution, and it is the single largest reason the Super Smash is not a bigger commercial proposition.

Grounds vary from the Test venues to the outer ovals, and the smaller ones suit the format. A packed Pukekura Park with people on the terraced hillside is a better T20 environment than a half-empty stadium, and administrators here worked that out early.

How it differs from the bigger leagues

The Super Smash is a domestic competition, not a franchise league, and almost every difference follows from that.

• No auction or draft. Players are contracted by their association, essentially year-round, across all three formats. There is no annual redistribution of talent.
• Very few overseas players. Squads carry a small allowance rather than a substantial international contingent. Most matches are played entirely between New Zealand-qualified cricketers.
• No player market inflation. Salaries come out of association budgets set by a small governing body. There is no bidding war because there is nothing to bid against.
• Provincial loyalty is real. Players spend careers at one association. Supporters follow teams their parents followed.
• The competition is a development tool first. Its purpose is to produce international T20 cricketers, not to maximise a broadcast rights valuation.
• Cheap or free entry, and small grounds. The atmosphere is closer to a good club fixture than to a stadium event.

None of that is a complaint. A competition of this size in a market of this size could not sustain a franchise model, and attempts elsewhere to force one have generally ended in expensive contraction. What it does mean is that anyone arriving from the Big Bash or the IPL expecting a comparable spectacle will find something different, and probably better on its own terms.

The pull of the bigger leagues

Competing with January

The competition's real difficulty is not competing with the internationals. It is competing with January.

The Big Bash and several other leagues run through the same weeks and pay considerably more, and the governing body has taken the sensible view that granting no-objection certificates readily is better than losing players entirely. The result is that a good number of the country's best T20 cricketers spend part of the summer playing somewhere else.

Our own ball-by-ball figures for the Big Bash give a sense of how substantial that traffic has been:

Player	BBL matches	Runs	Strike rate	Wickets	Economy
Colin Munro	52	1,408	128.58	—	—
Brendon McCullum	34	933	137.41	—	—
Adam Milne	15	13	86.67	8	7.78
Martin Guptill	12	185	102.21	—	—
Tim Seifert	10	200	122.70	—	—
Trent Boult	8	35	112.90	8	8.03
Lockie Ferguson	6	9	75.00	8	7.17

Those are our figures, computed from ball-by-ball data rather than lifted from a league's own summaries. Munro alone has played more than fifty matches across Brisbane Heat, Perth and Sydney colours, with a top score of 114 and 63 sixes; McCullum's Big Bash work was done entirely at Brisbane. Every one of those appearances is a Super Smash match somebody did not play. If you want to read those economy rates and strike rates properly, economy, average and strike rate explained sets out what each measure actually captures.

The domestic competition absorbs this without much complaint, because the alternative is a generation of white-ball cricketers who never face high-quality international opposition outside a national jersey.

What it produces

The players it has made

Judged as a development competition, the record is good. A run of aggressive top-order batters and death-overs bowlers have come out of it and gone straight into national T20 sides, and several have then gone on to earn contracts abroad on the strength of what they did in a six-week provincial tournament.

Munro's international T20 career, in which he became the first man to make three hundreds in the format, was built on a game grooved in domestic cricket at the Eden Park Outer Oval. Glenn Phillips came through the Auckland system as a wicketkeeper-batter and turned into one of the format's outstanding fielders. Rachin Ravindra came out of Wellington. Lockie Ferguson developed his extreme pace in this competition before anyone abroad had heard of him.

The women's competition has been at least as productive. The national women's side has drawn its batting and spin resources almost entirely from these six associations for decades.

There is a specific New Zealand skill the competition also develops, and it is a bowling one. Small grounds and short boundaries mean a T20 bowler here cannot survive on length alone. The variations, the wide yorker, the slower ball and the hard length into the pitch all get learned in front of hostile short square boundaries at the Outer Oval, and that education is visible when those bowlers turn up at World Cups. The longer-form version of the same argument is in the swing bowling tradition.

Watching it

Tickets are cheap where they exist at all, and children are frequently free. The grounds are small enough that you can hear the players. Grass banks at the Bay Oval, Hagley Oval and Pukekura Park are the best seats in the competition, and none of them are seats.

Fixtures move between the Test venues and the provincial grounds, and the grounds guide covers what each of the major ones is like. For the wider picture of how the game is organised and where this competition sits alongside the rest, start at the cricket in New Zealand hub, and the trans-Tasman rivalry covers what happens when the products of this system meet the neighbours. Career records for the players above sit in the player index.

Sources and method

Compiled from published domestic competition playing conditions and fixture records, the documented history of the tournament's naming and format changes, and scorecards held in standard statistical archives. Big Bash League appearance, run, strike rate, wicket and economy figures in the table above are our own, computed from ball-by-ball data covering 618 completed matches, and are labelled as such. Format details that have varied between seasons are described in principle rather than quoted for any single season. This site is independent and has no affiliation with any cricket board, competition or ground.