We can’t call TFT a broad church, or even a proper forum for discussion, unless we hear the other side of the argument from time to time. I’ve been boring everyone with my monologues against The Hundred for months. So now it’s time for me to shut up and let someone else put a more positive spin on the competition. Here’s Alex. Be gentle. Or not. He can take it …
There has been a rage building in Britain. People are demonstrating. The press are spitting bullets. There is a social media war. Friendships are falling apart.
No, this conversation isn’t about Brexit. It’s about The Hundred.
The Hundred – just to encapsulate – is a system where teams have to score as many runs as possible in 100 balls. Unlike in normal cricket where there are 6 balls per over, there are 10 for each bowler. Each bowler can bowl 20 balls per game. It’s meant to be basically the 20-over game on steroids.
LOVERS AND HATERS
The lovers of the idea think that it will take cricket forward to the masses, where cricket is taken back onto mainstream BBC TV (the World Cup Final was on Channel 4). Some of the world’s best will see the light of battle, which in turn will fill the grounds. After all, we’re in a multi-cultural country, so people will get to see high-profile hitters in a battle with some of best bowlers in a generation. Indian fans may not get to see any of their players, but you can blame the ultimate cricketing cash-cow, the Indian Premier League, for that.
The haters loathe the format, which sees counties moulded together to form ‘franchises’, eschewing their independence. They hate the fact that it’s a move away from county cricket, and laugh at the fact that it’s only 20 balls less than the T20 game (which they no doubt railed at when it arrived (and by the way, we think T20 may have had the last laugh here). They also wonder what it’s going to do to England’s World Cup defence or Test fortunes – the latter which has proved to be the Waterloo of many English Napoleons over the decades.
The counties themselves don’t seem to mind being merged. They voted for it, helped along by a £1.3m sweetener which might help them pay important stuff like wages to keep the wolves away from the door. Let’s not make any bones about it: cricket in Britain is slowly dying. It’s not taking the quick shot to the head, but the tumour is cancerous, slow, and – to use cricketing terms – unplayable. The players don’t mind being paid rather a lot of money to smash the ball around. If that includes a little bit of lip service to television, then so be it.
IS IT A GOOD IDEA?
Listen, I love cricket. I have celebrated with Worcestershire fans after they beat Lancashire in the Benson & Hedges Cup, and yelled ‘thanks Angus Fraser’ as he forlornly watched Warwickshire’s celebrations after winning the Natwest Trophy. I have hugged friends after my team won Finals Day in 2018, thanks to a Brummie with a good arm and a prolific beard.
I have sat sunburned at numerous Test grounds, laughing along with the floating cocktail party as it flows from sense to insensibility, moving between glorious highs and wanting to punch windows and walls after witnessing utter ineptitude. And I have hugged friends until I went from bloated to thin after England’s World Cup miracle. And I also have sat during County Cricket games, with one man, a dog, and a wizened old man with a scoring book and a lot of time on his hands.
Oh yeah, and I told Shane Warne’s mother once that I hated her son for ruining 14 of my cricket-watching years (she laughed and said: “Good”).
When I heard about The Hundred, I didn’t know what quite to think. I couldn’t work out how it was going to go, how different it would be from T20 or even the UAE’s T10 League – one which has 120 balls and one which has 60. I looked at the experiment at Trent Bridge, and heard that players themselves didn’t see a lot of difference between it and T20 games. I also knew that the ECB’s marketing and PR Machine was falling apart at the seams a little, because they hadn’t pushed for excitement, and early advertisements were at best shambolic and at worst stolen from obscure concerts.
But after thinking, talking and putting a bit of effort in, I came to this realisation: It wasn’t about me.
I am going to go and see cricket anyway. This is because I’m a cricket fan. The bat and ball are intravenously injected into my system from April until the end of a winter tour.
But it’s not about us, the addicts for whom the game is our sporting heroin.
It’s about the untapped fanbase who will want to go for a shorter day out. We are going to see tickets given out to schools and younger people in an effort to get them keen on the game, in an effort to get away from the Etons and Harrows and more to the ground-level.
The Hundred is aimed at tapping the important Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi-British markets of Manchester, London and Birmingham, because – whether we like it or not – that’s where cricket is still seen as a primary game (if you don’t believe me, witness how mental Edgbaston went after we beat the Aussies in the World Cup Semi-Final).
It’s aimed at getting eyes on TVs. We wish all the games were on BBC1 or BBC2 like the good old days, but it at least this will be on Freeview. People will have access to watch at least some of the games. And while it won’t be a conversation as large as England’s World Cup win last summer, it at least will generate conversation again. Something we have sorely needed for a while.
I know that people fear this is the start of the end for the County Championship. And maybe it is. But right now, The Hundred has given the counties a lifeline. You might say it’s a bribe, but the counties took that money because they needed it (and what impoverished team would say no to a cool £1.3m?). We don’t know what this will mean for the Test game. We know that fans of the T20 will probably want to hit up The Hundred, and vice-versa. If you’ve ever been to a T20 game, it’s hardly the home of high-brow cricket fans, anyway.
But the thing I plead for you – including this website – is give the damned thing a chance before damning it. And I’m not talking about one game, but one season.
Please.
Alex Ferguson
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Thanks for this Alex. I think you make the pro-Hundred case as well as it can be made.
I’d just take issue with a couple of points. For starters, no matter how much one might argue that cricket needs a franchise shot in the arm, surely the answer is a T20 competition rather than a 100-ball format. The latter is too much of a gamble and damages the integrity of the game. It’s confusing to add a 4th format. The rules are more complicated than normal cricket.
I think a key issue here is how much the counties actually need the £1.3m. Some surely do. Others don’t. Besides, most counties rely on ECB handouts to survive, and I don’t see why this can’t continue (without The Hundred) because English cricket and the ECB are extremely profitable. There should be plenty of money to go around. Whether the ECB want to share the money 18 ways is possibly the real issue here (not whether they can or can’t). Remember, Sky and the BBC committed to this mega broadcast deal (worth £1bn) when they thought it would be a T20 competition and nobody had even dreamt up the Hundred.
Finally, I dispute that cricket in the UK is dying. The T20 Blast broke the 1 million mark (in terms of spectators this year) and has increased in popularity year after year. Meanwhile, the World Cup was the shot in the arm that cricket in this country needed. Even participation levels were up this year for the first time in ages. The Hundred is therefore, in my view, totally unnecessary.
The ECB created this crisis (if one can call it that) by hiding live cricket behind a paywall for 14 years. The lesson that the World Cup (and the Ashes) showed is that current forms of cricket are perfectly fine. The solution, therefore, is simply to remove that paywall – not invent a new form of the game that alienates traditional cricket fans and endangers the domestic structure.
Even if the Hundred proves to be successful in terms of attendances etc the cost will always be too great in my view. The cost is the further marginalisation of the championship and the downgrading of domestic 50 over cricket – neither of which will help the England teams at all. Many others will also be concerned that this could be the first step towards super counties. I’m not sure to what extent this is true but I imagine we’ll find out.
Alex also misses the point that with a surfeit of these short ball formats in the best part of the season we will not produce players with the technical and attention span skills to play any type of long form cricket so that will eventually die. A self-inflicted wound.
Spot on.
Sorry Alex but I think you’re missing the point slightly. You talk about hugging friends when your team won a final, at being at Test matches cheering on England, which I think we all as cricket fans have done over the years.
What will change though is the sense of identity we feel when we are watching our teams play. Yes, I’ve been at Lords to scream Hampshire to victory or been to the Oval or the Ageas Bowl to cheer on Cook hitting a ton or Jimmy taking a fifer, but am I really going to go to said Ageas Bowl when only Vince and Dawson are the only Hampshire players and the rest of the team is packed with Sussex and players from other counties all under the umbrella of “Southern Brave”?
I know I won’t. I may watch it on TV, I may not, but I certainly won’t go any game. I’m not a huge T20 lover to be fair so perhaps I was never going to be over enthused by The 100, but the way the ECB have gone about this, marginalising 4 day cricket and completely obliterating 50 over cricket (just as we become good at it) just leave me cold.
Have to agree with the above comments.
You know it’s the responsibility of a sports governing body to attract people to their sport with a good product, cricket in its purest form for me. What they and society today in general do is force feed the nation largely with a diet of junk from MCDonalds to Celeb chat showds, social media and more. God the bloody 100 is sponsored by a junk food company when a lot of people are trying to at least get young people fitter. Really if you like T20 you’ll probably like the 100 but most people can’t afford both so in my view the Blast could well suffer. Just spreading the audience.The Asian” target audience” and mum’s and kids who don’t like cricket? Why should they go to this and not the T20? There really is no logical sense in the whole thing is their. Better to spend millions on at least trying to educate the masses that more is rarely better. Crickets Brexit perhaps?
Nice one Alex. I’ve been banging on ever since I first heard of The Hundred’s inevitable introduction, to see what happens before we start putting the nails in Cricket’s coffin, as though what we’ve had in recent decades isn’t anything other than a movable feast anyway.
If the counties seem ok with giving it a go and existing alongside it and the public end up taking to it then who are we to criticise it for failing to live up to our particular preferences.
Cricket has ‘died’ and been reborn in different guises for centuries, so why should things be different now.
1. Franchise cricket or any sport for that matter in the UK is a no no
2. I was brought up on championship cricket when my dad used to take me to the outgrounds during school holidays, I’m now 50. Last summer there was no opportunity for me to take my children as there was no championship cricket home matches for my county from mid July to mid Sept.
3. Why does the Hundred need to be scheduled during the school holidays anyway ? Wouldn’t it be better to have cricket being played during the day when the schools are off ?
4. ECB should have stuck with a 4 week blast during June – an 8 team premier league with 3 overseas players and a 10 team championship with 2 overseas players. Finals days for both leagues with the team winning the championship finals day replacing the county who finished bottom of the prem
Why school holidays? Because then more kids will go and see it!
If you want to watch a short format white ball game then we have T20. Why not put the money behind this?? we know it is successful. The ECB just published about ticket sales going up. Why kill a popular format that the rest of the world is playing. Makes no sense to me. Just put the Vitality Blast on the tele.
Absolutely this. Play the Blast on a Friday night and shift one game to Saturday 3pm and put it on TV for the millions missing their Saturday football.
The CMS hearing doesn’t seem available to watch anywhere (unless it’s hidden behind a paywall somewhere which would be kinda fitting). That’s openness and scrutiny for you in this day and age.
I’ve been trying to find it too. BBC Parliament is just showing Matt Hancock talking about the NHS in the commons.
I’m about to enter my mid-70s. I’ve been following cricket since the early/mids 50s when I was introduced to the game by my parents. Since them I have managed to cope with many many changes to the game. Some I have supported and watched. Others I haven’t particularly liked and given them a miss.
Over the years I’ve been a member of two county clubs and seem a fair amount of Tests (though not so much latterly due to excessive prices).
I listened to Gordon Hollins say on at lest two occasions that the Hundred isn’t for me or other existing supporters.
So, no, I’m not going to follow the Hundred nor am I going to accept any stupid accusations that I am not a cricket supporter.
A lot of people are potentially go to make a lot of money from it. I don’t begrudge the county players whose careers can be all-to-short and relatively poorly remunerated but they are one hell of a lot of hangers on trying to get their greasy fingers into the pot. And to them I say a word which these days is often followed by ‘to Brexit’ .
The only way this will change is a major revamp of crickets structure and focus starting from the ECB down. This awful organisation in it’s current form and board has to go asap before it bankrupts the very game it’s supposed to represent. It’s just not accountable and is actively alienating cricket supporters. Maybe a threatened Packer style breakaway would be a starting point. Any thoughts?
I think The Hundred is a cheapened version of cricket no matter how it’s wrapped up. Why mess with a game that has three formats already? T20 is the entertainment end of the spectrum with Test Cricket with its enthralling complexity at the other. They all work because they keep the familiar rhythm of the game with its six ball overs. This has been settled on as the perfect format to deliver tension and difficulty. The change of bowler allows new problems for the batsman to face. Continuity plus new challenges.
It has a poetic symmetry of question and answer, call and response. The change of bowlers after six balls is very satisfying because cricket depends on balance between bat and ball.
The Hundred has forgone that design. It thinks entertainment is about hitting sixes as a spectacle. It is meaningless outside the context of the game. Bowlers also provide tension and excitement with the taking of wickets. Sounds obvious but the way the ECB talk you would think only runs are in the equation. The Hundred is so dire that its sponsors really match the product. The mindset which produced this may be unconscious of the irony. The ECB put a gun to the Counties’ collective head. And Durham was trashed so they got the message. Cricket is too important to let these carpet baggers sell it short. It is a snap shot of the parlous state of our country when money rules and money dictates. We are turning into a banana republic and this is banana cricket.
You are right.
To build on Doug’s comments, the die is now cast under this corrosive organisation. Remember that the game used to be administered by the Test AND COUNTY Cricket Board. The England Cricket Board increasingly (and certainly since Graves’s appointment) has abandoned any pretense that they represent county cricket, whether the classic “red ball” form or the one-day version.
I have come to the sad conclusion that it is already too late to preserve the 18-team county format. The “weaker” counties were – perhaps understandably – eager to take the bribe offered to them by the ECB to vote for the new franchise tournament. But in doing so they have signed their own death warrants as first-class counties. The best that can now be salvaged is for the richer/braver counties to break away completely from the ECB and establish a rival “County Cricket Conference (CCC)”. No salary caps would enable them to compete with the ECB for the best red-ball cricketers. Even if there were only 10 championship matches, they could be scheduled in the heart of summer. Similiarly, the CCC could organise a 50-over competition during the early months and invite the minor counties or even overseas 50-over teams to take part.
Yes, there are challenges: huge ones. But in 20 years time we might, just might, have some semblance of the game that we know and love left. If the ECB continue to strangle the life out of the game, then it is virtually certain that cricket as we know it will be a thing of the past. It’s worth the leap.
Why are the Indian-Bangladeshi-Pakistani British Community incapable of following T20 but will watch the 100?
They aren’t.
But given that this format will free to air, it gives them more of a chance to watch the game.
I’ve said it before but I completely fail to see any logic in this “oh just give it a chance” mentality. To me, that’s an invitation to stupidity and to switching off our critical intelligence.
Any idea can be assessed before it’s implemented to see whether it makes sense. In fact, in a responsible organisation, it will be. Of course this has to be somewhat conjectural at that stage, but a terrible idea in theory is likely to be a terrible idea in practice.
Here, the logic doesn’t add up (why not improve the Blast which has an existing customer base?)
The finances don’t stack up (from having cash reserves of 72m two years ago, the ECB now has reserves of 8m, which is what the Hundred is forecast to lose next year if you ignore the ECB’s mendacious way of presenting its budgeting…so by this time next year the ECB could well be without any reserves and with a tournament that is projected to lose millions a year for several more years–that is, it could literally bankrupt the ECB).
The attitude–particularly the arrogant, aggressive dismissal of current fans, who it seems to escape the ECB are the people who finance the sport–stinks.
And the arguments that have been put forward have generally been very flimsy, and seem to have mainly consisted of repeating what someone hopes and calling it evidence or an argument. (Some are repeated here. What, for example, is your evidence for saying that fans of T20–which means county fans–are going to watch the Hundred? Why will giving out a few thousand free tickets to young people create interest which hasn’t been there before…and why wouldn’t that interest have been sparked anyway by the World Cup final? HOW will the Asian communities be attracted? Why and how will the sport’s financial issues be solved by an untested competition that has already cost getting on for 100m?)
What I see–quite aside from any cricketing objections–is an extraordinarily badly researched, badly planned and badly presented idea that has no logical reason to get off the ground. I can’t avoid the impression that, if the Hundred was a new train design, it wouldn’t have got beyond the prototype stage before being binned as a risk not worth taking.Of course it might turn out OK, and there might be planning and research that the ECB just thinks we’re all too plebeian to be trusted with–but then again, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
If you think it’s a good idea, fine. But why should anyone else have to go along with the ECB’s little fantasies about how to save the game?
I do wonder what must happen to the Indians who come to Britain.
After all those who stay in India seem to have no difficulty watching the IPL where the innings don’t have the 75 minute restriction and generally last far longer than the Blast games.
Move them over to England and they apparently can’t even manage to last more than 100 balls.
“The Hundred is aimed at tapping the important Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi-British markets of Manchester, London and Birmingham”…in what way is it “aimed” at those markets? Or any market? This is just magical if-you-build-it-they-will-come thinking.
Good piece by Marek.
You don’t need to sell a crap concept to Asian Communities, particularly cricket which most of them are fanatic about anyway. You could argue that some form of Asian T20 competition could prove popular though, giving them some ownership of the product. Unfortunately some sections of the community probably would object. I’d like to see more promotion of cricket for disabled people, but all this is probably beyond the ECBs thinking.