When Cricket Australia first hired Dan Migala, he hardly knew a bat from a badminton racket. Migala is a baseball nut from Chicago, “the equivalent of the cricket fan who keeps score with a pencil and quotes statistics from a century ago”. And he’s also chief innovation officer at the sports marketing firm Property Consulting Group. When Cricket Australia first started work on the Big Bash League, Migala was the man they brought in to plan the marketing strategy. He had a hand in almost every last little part of it, the colour of kits, the names of the competing teams, and all the other gimcrack gimmicks. If you love cricket in the way Migala loves baseball, then you probably wince when you think about what he’s done to the game. And that’s exactly the reaction he wants you to have.
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