Sixers entered the decider on the back of an energy-sapping travel schedule which had them fly to Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and back to Perth in the space of eight days.
The finals period was particularly hectic, with Sixers losing the Qualifier to the Scorchers in Perth on Tuesday, beating Hobart Hurricanes in the Challenger in Sydney on Friday night, before flying back to Perth on Saturday afternoon ahead of Sunday’s title decider.
Sixers certainly looked off their game in the grand final, rolled for 132 before allowing Scorchers to race to 80 without loss by the ninth over.
“It wasn’t ideal,” Shipperd said of the hectic finals travel schedule. “Some of the scheduling was not what we were looking for. You don’t get a chance to train the day before the game, which I would have thought not many other sports are letting that happen at this elite level.
“We’ll feed some feedback back to headquarters. I think we were the only team that provided feedback to Cricket Australia [earlier this season]. So I don’t know whether other teams are lazy in that respect or we were thinking that we were going to be playing finals, and so we were worrying about that sort of thing.”
One possible option was to play the decider on Monday, given Australia Day is a public holiday. Shipperd would have been in favour of that.
“If it was a holiday, yes, we could have played on Monday and given our team that sort of break to freshen up going into the game,” Shipperd said. “But that’s not a major excuse for us in the context of the season.”
Shipperd also questioned why play wasn’t stopped in the fourth over of the Scorchers’ innings as the rain started to get heavier.
“We thought that there was an opportunity to come off,” Shipperd said. “The umpires, I think, may have set a benchmark down in Hobart [in the knockout match on Wednesday] where they played through blinding rain.
“They probably played that same card tonight, when there may have been a possibility to come off and just reset, let the ground settle down in terms of the wetness of the ball.”
