National Indigenous Cricket Championships to be held in Alice Springs without Northern Territory side

Alice Springs has hosted the tournament since its first edition in 2017. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)

The seventh edition of the National Indigenous Cricket Championships has encountered a strange issue after the Northern Territory failed to field a team despite hosting the competition.

Leaving the rest of Australia to battle it out for glory in Alice Springs, it is the first time the NT has not competed in the championships it has hosted every year in central Australia.

NT Cricket chief executive Gavin Dovey said there were several issues that led to the decision.

“The NT will always have some challenges around depth and talent and … the National Indigenous Championships are a step up,” he said.

NT Cricket had sought to try to arrange a mixed team that included other states and territories that lacked the numbers to field a team.

Tasmania and South Australia will not field women’s sides, while the ACT does not have the numbers to field a men or women’s team.

“We could not have done more in the last couple of months to engage all the different areas of our game across the Territory to try and put ourselves in a position where this wasn’t an outcome,” Mr Dovey said.

A call to move the tournament

The Imparja Cup, which features local Aboriginal teams within the NT, concluded only this week.

Yet despite players congregating at Alice Springs, those sides did not contribute to a Territory team for the championships.

Graeme Smith is the chief executive of broadcasting company Imparja, which sponsors the tournament, and said it was fanciful to suggest there was not enough skill to field a team.

“Aboriginal people have more talent. All you need to do is nurture it. This is what I’m going to be speaking to them [NT Cricket] about participation and development,” he said.

Mr Smith himself was part of an Indigenous NT side that beat teams from other states and said expectations of talent being ready-made were unrealistic.

“Don’t expect indigenous people to walk out of the bush and start, you know, playing like Ricky Ponting, if they have not been in the system at all,” he said.

He said moving the national tournament away from Alice Springs could be a good move as the current state of play has not grown participation within the Territory.

Mr Dovey told the ABC part of the challenge for funding programs to develop Indigenous players had been that NT Cricket was not a part of Cricket Australia, the sport’s national body, so it missed out on some funding opportunities that other states received.

Mr Smith said he would be seeking written commitments from NT Cricket to develop local Indigenous talent as part of his organisations support of the local Imparja Cup.

“It does not stop them from developing the game of cricket in the Northern Territory. Let’s be realistic here.”