Measuring success, England players and Covid concerns: How The Hundred is shaping up ahead of lift off

NICK HOWSON: ECB chief-executive Tom Harrison and The Hundred managing director Sanjay Patel speak effusively about the inaugural edition of the 100-ball competition amid the sizable obstacles that lay ahead

Covid, white cards, DRS, five and a staged toss: How The Hundred will be different

The Hundred squads 2021: Full men's and women's player lists

The England and Wales Cricket Board believe they are on track to successfully deliver on their targets for the first year of The Hundred, despite not having fixed measures for several of them.

Ticket allocated have reached more than 350,000 and while it remains to be seen whether their ideal demographic of new and young followers of cricket attend they are at least happy with the profile of those who are buying seats.

It has not been confirmed at what capacity tickets are being distributed, but the tournament starts after the so-called freedom day on July 19 in England, where all restrictions over crowd numbers are dropped. Limits on fans remain in Wales until August 7 which covers the first three Welsh Fire matches. The target is 60 per cent, but that is a meaningless estimate in the current climate.

Managing director of the tournament Sanjay Patel said: "It’s been a really tough environment in which to sell a mass-market event. It’s not exactly been the easiest of six months to do that.

"I’ve just been blown away by the demand, and that’s way exceeded our expectation this year. I’m absolutely thrilled with where we are with ticket sales. 

"Clearly, we’ve still got a challenging backdrop in terms of Covid and where the pandemic is, and all those sorts of things. We’ve still got to navigate our way through that, but in terms of where we are, it’s really strong."

The other key metric the ECB appear content with is the finances. The governing body says the budget for the tournament is around £40 million, but that figure is understood not to include the £1.3m that is being paid to each first-class county and the MCC. The revenue aim, which includes UK and international broadcasting which are already taken care of, is £50m.

^{The ECB want to move away from broadcast money making up big parts of their revenue}

Patel is confident everything points towards that being met, but the available figures suggest an overall loss for every year the tournament runs, unless private equity investment, first raised by ex-chairman Colin Graves, suddenly becomes a reality.

But this is where the ECB's 'targets' become increasingly difficult to pin down.

Getting more people involved in cricket is next in the four-point plan and arguably the most important factor in growing the game countrywide. A Sport England survey showed the number of people aged 16 or over who play cricket at least twice a month to any degree of intensity for any duration dropped from 349,600 in 2016 to 195,700 in 2020 (November to November). In the Inspiration Generations 2020-2024 report, they said 1.2 million children were playing cricket.

But Patel admits gauging how much The Hundred drives future participation will be difficult to determine.

"It’s hard to put direct numbers on exactly what The Hundred delivers versus some of our other programmes," he said. "But we will be coming back at the end with numbers on things like Dynamos, the number of kids that we’ve reached, the number of urban city programmes that we’ve run and we’ll share all that at the backend of the tournament."

Will The Hundred join the likes of the Indian Premier League or the Big Bash League in becoming one of the elite leagues on the franchise circuit? At the time of writing, 14 of the 24 male overseas players confirmed at February's re-draft have withdrawn. The women's competition has been harder hit with the loss of more than a dozen foreign stars including Ellyse Perry and Sophie Devine though a breakthrough agreement sees five Indian players involved.

Once again, the ECB are unclear on how this will be equated "World-class cricket, it’s quite difficult to measure that," Patel admitted. "But through conversations with coaches and players, we’ll get a sense of where does this sit in terms of performances versus some of the other global competitions."

Then we come to engagement. Patel is confident that thanks to having two broadcast deals, commercial contracts with trading card company Topps and an association with Lego that fresh eyes will see cricket in a new light. But again, understanding what constitutes success is hard to fathom.

^{Andre Russell is among the overseas players to have pulled out of The Hundred}

Chief-executive Tom Harrison said added: "There is a sense around broad engagement which is really important around this. It’s a kind of a nebulous thing, but we do want to see that there is a broader sense of engagement across a broader sense of media channels, in terms of how the Hundred is landing. Those are all important factors for us.

"This point about digital engagement is so critical here. This is the way that some of the audiences we are appealing to communicate. This is where they spend a lot of their time, particularly younger people. These channels we are going to be analysing very closely and looking very hard at some of the data coming back from digital engagement on social media channels."

That inevitably means impressions, clicks, shares, likes, retweets, comments and views. That's the real quiz. Again, no actual targets regarding visibility were presented making success hard to quantify.

Harrison is adamant that cricket needs to spread its net much wider in terms of financial viability, even though broadcast money will again significantly supplement their revenues.

"If you look at this from a purely business perspective, we are very, very reliant on two things. One is international cricket in this country, more so than any other board in the world probably. Secondly, within that, pay-TV is an underlying investor in our sport.  

"We just need to make sure that is at the back of our mind always – that the health of our sport is reliant on those two things in a very significant way. Anything we can do to balance out that huge reliance to keep us safe and secure as a sport."

It sounded a lot like a hint at third-party investment.

England's men celebrated their 2019 World Cup win with an afternoon being adorned by school children at The Kia Oval. The ECB might well mark matching their Hundred aims with an open-top bus tour waving spreadsheets and smartphones.

^{The involvement of England's Test players is uncertain}

Covid-19 inevitably hangs over the tournament, indeed over all of English cricket at the moment, ready to rain on its parade. Rules regarding close contacts will not be adapted for elite sport, so a repeat of the issues encountered by England, Kent and Derbyshire in the last fortnight are bound to repeat themselves. There is little desire or room to reschedule Hundred matches which fall by the wayside due to Covid either, meaning swathes of the tournament could eventually be lost. Replacing an entire squad and backroom team from country cricket won't be possible either.

At the time of writing, the concurrently run Royal London One-Day Cup will go ahead despite murmurings of uncertainty among the counties, some of whom are at breaking points thanks to the unavailability of players.

England's Test players were committed to featuring in three of the eight group matches, but the ECB have made clear the India series will be prioritised. 

"Clearly we’ve got to make sure that we protect the India series but also it’s important they take part in the Hundred," Patel conceded. 

"We’re just working through how that works. The thinking is around their travel, their accommodation, how do we make sure they’re not in close contact with anyone outside of the environment. Do we need to put additional protocols around them?

"Once we finalise that this week we’ll know exactly how many games they will be available for the Hundred. I’m expecting them to play at the start of the Hundred, we just need to work out how many games that will be."

There is no doubt that the ECB are bullish about The Hundred delivering on their own expectations, many of which cannot be held to account.

And if Covid intervenes, as it surely will at some point, it could inadvertently help mask the shortcomings.

Welsh Fire | Trent Rockets | The Hundred | Southern Brave | Oval Invincibles | Northern Superchargers | Manchester Originals | London Spirit | Birmingham Phoenix | 1Banner |