HUW TURBERVILL - SPECIAL REPORT: With the ECB standing firm over their new competition, The Cricketer assesses the tournament's prospects with less than a year to go...
It’s full steam ahead for The Hundred. The invites have gone out for the draft at Sky TV on Oct 20. Will there be fans of county cricket camped out in Isleworth, one wonders, gluing themselves to satellite dishes?
The Cricketer ran an eight-page special investigation in its summer issue, and we continue to receive considerable mail on the subject.
We made some suggestions for the ECB, the upshot of which were as follows…
The Hundred has some things going for it. The fact that it lasts a few weeks will attract some good players. The return to BBC TV is a good thing. A couple of tweaks would also help its cause...
1) How about the ECB keep their new sides, but go back to T20? They could still speed the match up by having two, five or even 10 overs from each end...
2) Bite the bullet, break the mould and have nine teams – with one at Taunton.
There is no rule that the competition has to have eight like the IPL and Big Bash.
Or could Welsh/Western Fire (or whatever it’s being called this week) spread the games around? Two at Cardiff, and one each at Taunton and Bristol (after all, the latter duo have both hosted international cricket recently)?
T20 and nine teams - bringing the Westcountry back in to play... it might not be a miracle cure, but it would certainly make the ECB’s sell of The Hundred easier...
Free-to-air TV exposure is guaranteed until 2024, but what if the crowds are not – could/will the ECB let youngsters in for free (no bad thing in wooing a new audience, but a move that will not recoup all that money that they have spent).
Are the BBC and/or sponsors feeling twitchy about negative comments about The Hundred? (Credit where it is due, the ECB have secured KP Snacks as ‘Team Partner’ for The Hundred. “A completely new sponsor for cricket and one that understands family audiences better than anyone,” said an insider.)
Will the ECB ever concede that they made an error? The current regime’s future certainly seems tied to its success. If it was canned, new leaders would be hired to find a replacement (like Michael Heseltine introducing the Council Tax to replace the Poll Tax in 1991). Many feel The Hundred could last two years, then, if it is a failure, English cricket reverts to two divisions of counties...
How will the ECB turn it around?
The ECB are sorry that debate has become so heated – they say they never wished to court bad publicity – and essentially feel the game is in good shape on and off the field, with women’s, disability and grassroots (thanks to All Stars) growing. They maintain that The Hundred is the best way to expand the game further however, and seem determined not to blink. They insist doing nothing would be the biggest risk of all… Maybe they also subscribe to the adage, ‘All publicity is good publicity’. After all, people certainly are talking about it…
Moeen Ali in action in the T20 Blast
Long before England’s World Cup triumph turned everyone into optimists, there seemed to be a consensus that English cricket needed its own short-form tournament.
According to the England and Wales Cricket Board, who surveyed 100,000 people in partnership with Sport England, the Office of National Statistics, the United Nations and the Galactic Federation (I made that last one up):
- Cricket has 10.5m followers in England and Wales, but only 1.1m buy tickets (rugby union has a similar following but 2.5m stump up);
- Only five per cent of youngsters aged between seven and 15 list cricket in their top two sports;
- The average age of an English fan is 50 and most people who buy tickets are “white, middle-class and male”(I don’t think they are saying that is a bad thing, just that they would like more non-white, lower and presumably upper class and female fans also forking out). The benchmark for the ECB is the Women’s World Cup final at Lord’s in 2017.
We also know that recreational participation is declining (with teenagers in particular dropping out at an alarming rate); and that cricket in state schools has long been an endangered species… and so on. So something had to be done…)
Andrew Strauss for one believes that the existing competitions do not make enough money or appeal enough to youngsters to safeguard English cricket’s future, and that while the ECB do not want Test – or international – cricket to decline, there is no guarantee that it will not like it has overseas. The ECB’s strategy is called Inspiring Generations. It is a 24-point plan to improve engagement, participation and the game’s perception. The Hundred is just one part of that, but has attracted most attention.
Most simply, no one can deny the word ‘hundred’ is an integral part of cricket…
But there seems to be further justifications:
1) We invented Twenty20, but were left behind... It was embarrassing that we did not have our own city-based, eight-team, six-week extravaganza. T20 started here in 2003, but the Indian Premier League, which began in 2008, and the Big Bash (2011) have stolen a march. We had a county T20, but that tended to be spread over most of the season, deterring the world’s elite players.
2) Restoring cricket to BBC Television: cricket needed BBC TV more than BBC TV needed cricket, frankly... with its national and global reach, its authority as the national broadcaster, its social media battalions, its behemoth sports website and even CBeebies. Some of the tournament will therefore be on the BBC, part of the £1.1bn 2020–24 TV contract announced in June 2017.
The ECB assumed naturally that the BBC would want something that they could package into a three-hour slot, probably from 6–9pm, most likely on BBC2 (and anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of families/youngsters leave T20 matches at 9pm irrespective of the match situation as bedtime beckons). Apparently the Beeb – and Sky – were content with T20.
But they seem even happier with this new format. The BBC like new. Asked if he believed that the BBC would not have been keen on a county T20, Gordon Hollins, the ECB’s MD of county cricket, said: “No. The BBC like The Hundred, in fact they love it. No broadcaster will [come to a governing body] and say this is the product they want – but the BBC like it because it appeals to their agenda.” Stephen Lyle, the BBC’s head of televised cricket coverage, said: “The key thing for us really, let’s be honest, it’s quicker. Newness, innovation, these are all good words in the TV world.”
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T20 games may well have been played in 150 minutes, excluding the break, in the early days, but IPL matches now last four hours plus. The ECB are convinced that millennials crave rapid-fire entertainment. The ECB point to Rugby X and Wimbledon’s experimentation with a shot-clock as examples of other sports seeking to speed things up. The Hundred will be quicker – it cannot fail to be – with only nine changes of end, as opposed to 19. The newness is interesting. The ECB point out that companies like Uber and Expedia, and computer games like Fortnite, were unknown until recently…
3) There was also acknowledgement that many fans, particularly from the cricket-devoted South Asian community, or the lapsed African-Caribbean, lapped up tickets for the World Cup, but do not attend county cricket. As Hollins said:
“Look at the city of Leicester – 52 per cent of the city’s population is South Asian, but where are they at Leicestershire games?” There certainly appeared to be a different demographic at the MCC v Rest of the World T20 for Hurricane Relief in 2018, for instance. So something non-county and new was needed, the ECB felt.
4) It was also hoped that The Hundred would attract more spectators than the Blast (although the ECB underplay this, saying they are just as focused on coverage on the BBC, Sky, people watching digital clips, and participation). Last summer, at the eight (Test) grounds chosen for The Hundred… Lord’s (28,500) and The Oval (24,500) for the most part sold out. Headingley (17,500) did not, although they drew in 13,000 v Lancashire; Old Trafford (23,500) ranged from 5,000 to near sell-out in the Roses match; Edgbaston (24,450) 6,714–14,897 (v Worcestershire); Cardiff (15,500) 4,198–6,613; The Ageas Bowl (13,000) 5,396–8,091; and Trent Bridge (17,500) 9,830–13,657. This summer Middlesex v Surrey drew 27,773 - a record for a domestic T20 in England. MCC and Surrey do not need The Hundred, but there is room for improvement elsewhere…
5) As part of the struggle to persuade the counties to sign up for this – making turkeys vote for Christmas, as some wags said – they would let them ‘keep’ T20 (and of course an annual payment of £1.3m per year to each team also helped, as well as 1/19th of the profits, as many are struggling).
6) There’s also a theory that the ECB liked inventing something – as Stuart Robertson is recalled for the T20. We don’t know exactly whose idea The Hundred was – Clare Connor is the rumour – but let’s face it, that would be great for the ego...
Unlike the IPL, our version will not have privately owned ‘franchise’ sides, but be like the Big Bash, with teams owned by the national board. The tournament will run between July 17 and August 15. There will be 32 group matches, with each team playing four home, four away, before four play-off games. All of the matches will be on Sky, with 10 men’s games and eight women’s simultaneously on BBC TV. Each team will have 15 players with three overseas. A draft will be used to allocate players to each team, and this could be interesting (in a good or bad way). It will be on October 20 and broadcast live on Sky and the BBC. A place in each squad will be reserved for a wildcard (possibly a performer in the Blast). “The draft creates a bit of excitement,” says Sanjay Patel, managing director of The Hundred. “A bit of noise.”
Fans will be split between the Blast and The Hundred
So far, so good(ish). Yes, OK, there were lots of people who were not happy, especially the county aficionados, but generally things seemed to be running smoothly, until…
A difficult birth
They say everybody recalls where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated. But everyone in the ‘cricket bubble’ remembers where they were when the ECB’s email dropped…
I was buying lunch when I saw it on my phone. It was April 18 but I checked it was not 17 days earlier… After assuming for so long that the tournament would be T20, it was now 100 balls per innings. Although the breakdown of balls was not set in stone, the favoured format seemed to be 15 six-ball somethings (we were not allowed to say ‘overs’), with a 10-ball finale. As the young ’uns – part of the target audience for this down-with-the-kids competition – say, “WTF?”
The negativity started as soon as that email arrived…
It was tempting to wonder if the ECB were merely testing the water. That once they saw that people were not in favour, they would revert to T20. But that was not the case. “Been saying for weeks that new 100 comp is a disaster of PR,” tweeted John Etheridge, The Sun’s long-standing, respected cricket correspondent. “No launch, details and rumours seeping out (some true, some not), confusion and mockery all round. ‘Research’ absent. Organisers on the back foot already. If you believe in it, shout it from the rooftops.”
Bad PR
Scepticism. Ridicule. Scorn. Fury. The Hundred attracted all these things… “The Hundred’s mania to be different makes it grimmer by the minute,” The Guardian lamented. “The Hundred is now a total laughing stock,” said The Times. (It is worth pointing out however, that it felt at least half of cricket fans were opposed to T20 17 years ago…)
Then there were the briefings to the press. That this new competition was not for existing fans. ECB chairman Colin Graves’ intervention was probably the most infamous. “The younger generation, whether you like it or not, are just not attracted to cricket,” he said. “They want something different. They want it to be more exciting. They want it shorter. They want it simpler to understand.”
Then there was Eoin Morgan’s in April 2018. “The Hundred sounds different. I have a lot of friends outside cricket who’d never come to a match but have already said they enjoy that there is a bit of noise around it, because it’s upsetting people that already come to a game and that is the point of the product.”
This was catnip to the critics. It is surely inconceivable that The Hundred can be a success without existing fans attending. How many of those aforementioned 9.4m who do not attend matches can be relied upon to suck and see the new format… and, perhaps more importantly, keep attending. The ECB have rowed back since, saying they want new and old fans. It is hardly rocket science. The steadier hand of Hollins was sent out.
“Cricket has an important core of people like us who oil the wheels of the game – club, county, international – we are the base or platform upon which you can build the game [but] we need to nurture and grow that core and support. Younger people have more distractions than we did when we were growing up. We had cricket, rugby and football [but] the last round of Sport England funding saw awards go to 64 sports. Electronic devices don’t dominate every day, they dominate every minute of a youngster’s day. Unless we react and appeal to more people, cricket is going to suffer down the line.”
But Morgan was at it again this July. “The Hundred, yes, I do think we need it. Whether it’s The Hundred, 10 or 20 overs, we need one franchise-based tournament, with fewer teams, in order to consistently sell the game to the country. Anybody I speak to who loves sport but doesn’t necessarily love cricket is crying out for a tournament that they understand, because 18 teams going for a long period of time just doesn’t make sense to anybody.” Asked if that meant the Blast being culled, he said: “I’m not making the decisions, but...” Cue county fans’ (understandable) meltdown.
There was also the ECB’s briefing (some saw it as a relaunch) in May. They had to change the image on The Hundred’s funky, new website when it was pointed out that it was of a mainly male crowd taken at a concert by American rapper Logic in Miami, and contained no children or families. It was then replaced with a girl in a sports shirt before it emerged that was from a football match. Finally one of youngsters wearing England cricket shirts was used with other images on rotation. “It’s an image on a website – that is all,” said Patel. A minor matter, but…
A fourth format?!
There is the fundamental question in many fans’ minds of whether cricket needs a fourth format when it has first-class, List A and T20 already (although confusingly there was a report that the ECB want The Hundred to have List A status). The ECB insist that there are only three formats though – the longer game (five- and four-day); one-day (40, 50, 55 and 60 overs per side); and – the one The Hundred fits into – short format (T20, Hundred, 10-over).
The cost
The ECB believe The Hundred will cost £180m over five years (including £6m a year on marketing), and will make £250m. Thanks to the next £1.1bn television deal, the ECB say it is the only such tournament to make a profit in its first year other than the IPL. It is worth pointing out however, that England cricket made up a hefty proportion of that £1.1bn…
And it is argued that when the ECB are making that claim, they are not factoring in the £1.3m a year they are giving to each county for agreeing to The Hundred.
There is also a question of extravagance…
George Dobell of ESPNcricinfo and columnist for this magazine, has reported that costs for The Hundred trebled from £13m–£40m (although Lancashire chief executive David Gidney has been involved in cutting it).
Setting up The Hundred has also played a prominent part in slashing the organisation’s cash reserves from £73.1m in 2016 to £8.6m two years later.
Money well spent, or an expensive folly?
If that money is blown, and the existing competitions are irreparably damaged, Dobell’s likening of ECB chairman Colin Graves to Dr Beeching could have a point…
It is not difficult to see where the marketing spend has gone. Anybody who has signed up to be on the mailing list of The Hundred receives regular emails. The same garish colour scheme on the website – lime and pink – is used. It is distinctive, unusual – everything is meant to scream – this is different… but is it too different? Not forgetting to mention the bombardment of sponsored content on Instagram, which irritates many.
Apparently Sky and the BBC also have striking graphics lined up emphasising two things – runs needed, balls left.
Do we still need it?
Then there is the question as to whether we still actually need it. After England’s World Cup win, we all saw families and friends suddenly playing cricket in parks. Would the money have been better spent elsewhere? Is putting cricket back on terrestrial TV (at least to share with Sky) actually far more important, rectifying the ‘mistake’ of 2005, when English cricket had a similar zeitgeisty moment after the Ashes was won? After all, The Times reported that of the TV audience for the World Cup final, only 14 per cent were under 35, but the majority were over 55…
Not T20/stats
Perhaps the biggest gamble/problem about The Hundred is that it is rejecting what is now cricket’s most popular format, the global phenomenon that is T20. The Hundred stats will be incompatible with the IPL, Big Bash and Blast. Etheridge said: “T20 is a global phenomenon while England will be the only nation playing The Hundred. It will have no context or relevance.” Ah yes, the ECB say, but in 2003 there were no existing T20 stats… That may well be the case, but it is difficult to see the IPL, Big Bash and international cricket holding their hands up and saying, “Let’s forget T20 and play The Hundred...”
Somerset mourned
There is also the disenfranchisement of Somerset, that quintessential cricket county; who have played such a key role in the rise of T20. The Westcountry – Somerset, cricket-mad Devon, Dorset, Cornwall – ostracised (shades of Beeching again – ever tried getting a train down there?). Ditto East Anglia. North of Yorkshire… And so on.
Damage to existing competitions
Then there is The Hundred’s impact on existing formats. The number of Championship matches is holding firm at the counties’ insistence now at 14; but the 50-over competition – the summer after we have just become world champions at long last – is to be downgraded to a ‘development’ tournament; and the Blast will be played earlier in the summer, losing this year’s prime slot.
Conspiracy theorists say the plan is for the eight new teams to eventually succeed the counties – presumably playing four-day matches and The Hundred. The ECB deny this, and Hollins’ appointment (moving from his job as the ECB’s chief operating officer) was a measure to alleviate fears. The chief executives of the counties were also brought in to run the teams, in a surprise move. It took a long time for the ECB to get them on board, to achieve the two-thirds majority it needed for the Articles of Association and the new County Partnership Agreement to be signed off. The theory seems to be that it is better to – quote Robert Kennedy talking about J Edgar Hoover – have counties inside the tent p***ing out, than outside the tent p***ing in.
Simpler?
The ECB have also claimed The Hundred is easier to understand. Why? How? The countdown from 100 balls has visual merit for sure, but no one has articulated why the format is easier to comprehend; and anyhow, the World Cup final showed that complicated is not an anathema to sports fans. Super Overs, oblique boundary counts (Liam Plunkett knew England had won but not why they had) did not deter 8.7m TV fans, 5m on the radio and so on from lapping it up… cricket can be complicated and it is glorious for it. It is cerebral, it is physical chess. It is… [enough clichés: Ed].
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Long slog
There are also practical problems. Bowling a 10-ball over is tiring for quicks – and even medium-pacer Daryl Mitchell said he found it a slog in the trial at Trent Bridge last September. It was hard enough for a fast bowler to bowl eight in Test cricket (ask England’s in Australia in 1978/79).
Name game
Then there are the unusual names… Manchester Originals, Northern Superchargers, Birmingham Phoenix, Trent Rockets, London Spirit, Welsh Fire, Oval Invincibles and Southern Brave.
It was presumed that city names were avoided for fear of alienating rivals football fans but apparently this was not an issue.
There doesn’t seem to be any local logic to a lot of them though.
Birmingham chose Phoenix because inhabitants of England’s second city said it is being reborn... but it has already been used by Yorkshire in white-ball cricket… What have rockets got to do with Nottingham (unless it is a nod to Leicestershire, the county that they have been paired with, and their National Space Centre)? Western (was Welsh) ‘Fire’ – is that because of those dragons that used to roam Cardiff? No wonder it has all been likened to W1A, the spoof BBC comedy.
Conflicts of interest
There are fears about conflicts of interest. That Test counties will lure players to play for them with the carrot of Hundred contracts – worth up to £125,000 for five weeks of cricket – dangled (the practice is called contract bundling). Independent directors on each of the executive committees are meant to safeguard against this, although at time of press none have been named.
2020 vision
Next summer looks a difficult time to kick things off – with Euro 2020 football and the Tokyo Olympics (albeit that is in a different time-zone) also on the BBC. It is bad luck.
Indian stayaways
The Indians are not going to play in it because the BCCI do not want their leading players in a domestic short-form competition other than the IPL (to be fair this is the case with the Big Bash). England’s Test players sound as if they will play in the early games, but then will be engaged in the second Test series of the summer.
Overseas bias?
There has also been criticism that The Hundred is using overseas coaches (mostly Australians). Simon Katich (Manchester Originals), Andrew McDonald (Birmingham Phoenix) and Shane Warne (London Spirit) have been confirmed, with South African Gary Kirsten taking the Cardiff team, and Darren Lehmann (Northern Superchargers) looks poised to follow. They are stellar names with great coaching credentials – McDonald landed a domestic treble in Australia – but should this not be a learning ground for young Britons? Many of the assistant coaches are English – enough to placate critics?
Time-outs?
Finally, there will be a single strategic timeout, as seen in the IPL, of two-and-a-half minutes each innings. If there is such a hurry that they have to shave 40 balls off the match, why have a time-out? Samit Patel, as captain of the North, used a time-out to great effect in the first of the two trial matches at Trent Bridge, so some may appreciate it.
ECB chairman Colin Graves, left, is a big supporter of the new tournament
Once the ripples calmed, there were a few who were saying – is 20 fewer balls an innings that big a deal? We have had different-length overs before… (although not in the same innings/match).
But the critics will not be silenced…
Mentioning it on social media is like walking down sniper’s alley with a target on your back (although critics argue Twitter in particular is an echo chamber). In a survey conducted by The Cricketer, 96 per cent of our readers opposed it, while only six per cent planned to go to games. Now we all know people who tweet, blog and fill in surveys are passionate people and do not necessarily speak for the majority, but The Hundred by any standards has had some abysmal PR – and stories like the one linking comedian Michael McIntyre as a presenter prove divisive. How many ‘cricket people’ really hate The Hundred already? 50 per cent? 60? I have tried to think of a better analogy, but have not improved on Dobell likening The Hundred to Eldorado (1992–93), the BBC’s ill-fated soap opera. It was dire, became a national joke, improved a bit, but by then it was too late… Is The Hundred already doomed because of the scepticism and hostility?
Are new alliances forming? The playing conditions were agreed by the counties by a vote of 17-1 in February, with Surrey voting against. It was interesting to see Surrey issue a press release in July lauding 2019 Blast crowds, in conjunction with Lancashire….
The critics
Scyld Berry, cricket correspondent of The Telegraph: "As one who enjoyed the experience of playing a 100-ball club game of 15 six-ball overs and one 10-ball over, as originally proposed by the ECB, I have to say the revised version being proposed is not cricket, more crackpot. It ceases to be cricket the moment you abandon the over, of six balls, and replace it with blocks of 10 balls from one end.
"The over is the basic component of a cricket match, and has been since the sport began three centuries ago, and it always should be: you need the variety which comes from a change of end, a change of batsman and change of bowler. The equivalent is to scrap the net or the tramlines in tennis, or to reduce a game of golf to a driving range."
Lawrence Booth, editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack: "It is hard to be sanguine about stuffing another quart into the pint pot. Even if The Hundred succeeds – and the early signs were not good, with projected audiences of around 12,000 in stadiums capable of holding twice as many – then what of the other formats? T20 will take a hit, years after the world agreed it was the way ahead.
"The 50-over competition, its fixtures clashing with the new tournament, will smack of the 2nd XI, just when England have become good at one-day cricket. And the Championship will be shoved deeper into the cupboard under the stairs. Then there’s the growing divide between the eight counties who will stage the competition and the 10 who won’t."
Virat Kohli: "I’m already very... I wouldn’t say frustrated but sometimes it can get very demanding of you when you have to play so much cricket regularly. I feel somewhere the commercial aspect is taking over the real quality of cricket and that hurts me. I don’t want to be a testing sort of a cricketer for any new format."
Mike Atherton, The Times’ cricket correspondent: "The World Cup was the first stage of the plan and the Ashes is the second, a strategy of top-down success that they hope will filter down to the grass roots of the game and help mitigate the PR shambles and strategic errors that have dogged the campaign for The Hundred."
Media supporters
There are prominent cricketer media operators who back it. Critics say some broadcasters are just feathering their own nests by supporting it – i.e they hope to be part of the broadcasting teams... but some cricket writers back it.
One of them is Barney Ronay, of this parish and The Guardian.
"A new, short, glitzy thing on the BBC is in the end a good idea – because people will watch it… I think you have to understand what the ECB’s marketeers are trying to achieve and then it makes sense on its own terms. Of course, it would have been more sensible to have a two-division Blast and put Division One on TV. It would have made more sense to keep it T20 and make the teams hurry up. But this is the thing they’ve been able to sell to each other and it will work because cricket is good.
"Plus, like it or not, the old language and structures and rituals do seem odd and silly to plenty of young people not introduced to it through school or family. It now needs to be presented on TV by someone other than the usual fuddy duddies, no matter how popular they are with existing fans.
"Like it or not The Hundred has a lot more chance of succeeding on its own terms if its public faces are Greg James, Stormzy and Love Island’s Yewande Biala, not dear old things from theTMS box. And imagine KP helping to plan The Hundred. Watch any of his TV segments where he talks about the sport in the round, chucking out ideas that are often radical, sometimes silly, but invariably fascinating."
The establishment
Andrew Strauss is no longer MD of England’s men cricket, but helped devise The Hundred.
He said: "All these other T20 competitions are popping up all over the world. We have the opportunity to create an event that maybe doesn’t rival the IPL, but certainly should be second behind it. Why wouldn’t we do it? In fact we have to do it! We’ve got to have a seat at the table, and at the moment the T20 Blast is not a big-enough seat for the only country that has our summer during this time of year.
"Not only do we have to do it, but we have to come up with something that differentiates us from everything else out there, and obviously that was behind some of the thinking around the 100-ball concept. If I’m honest we’ve scored some own-goals – we haven’t landed it quite as we wanted to. But forget about whether it’s 100 balls or 120 – having the best players in the world here in what is a relatively short, sharp tournament, a game a day, a complete focus on that format through that period, will be a brilliant initiative."
Colin Graves said: "This [World Cup win] is a launchpad for taking the game forward. The Hundred is the next part of it. We have now got people engaged with cricket. This is a great platform to launch something new with a lot of razzmatazz and entertainment around it. We have got the timing right. A lot of people said it was wrong but we got it spot on."
Tom Harrison told the FT: "My instantaneous reaction was: I love it. I absolutely love it. I can actually feel the hairs on my neck just thinking about that moment, that sense of, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ Very quickly afterwards [there was] a kind of dose of reality. When you’ve got three years from the decision to do something [to] the first ball being bowled, there’s an awful lot of time for people to fill the void. I’ll be judged in 10 years’ time, long after I’ve left this job. I’m terrified [that] I’ll wake up and say, ‘God, we had an opportunity to do something exceptional and we didn’t take it’."
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