The Hundred: cricket for management consultants
There is quite a bit to say about the new cricket competition The Hundred (ten, ten ball overs) and I expect I’ll say some of it.
As it finally starts a year late due to the pandemic on Wednesday there are some headline thoughts, or in fact one thought. Its cricket for management consultants.
The ruling body of English and Welsh Cricket Board employed management consultants (usual fees) to construct a new cricket competition to attract people who don’t watch cricket. One of the key reasons why there are people who don’t watch cricket is that some years ago the same ECB sold exclusive TV coverage to Sky. The pay TV cricket they show attracts small audiences so there is a generation that has rarely or never seen a great cricket match.
However cricket is not WH Smith. Smug is meant to be a newsagent and bookseller but anyone who goes in there in order to find either item knows one has to get through lots of other items that are not papers or books first.
However the ECB wanted some of The Hundred on terrestrial free to air TV and that meant the BBC. The BBC was happy to screen something that looked like cricket but not something clearly that looked nothing like it.
Having watched a couple of trial games on TV (at Lords) I found that the Hundred did indeed seem very familiar indeed to those who currently watch cricket. You know, batters, bowlers, wickets, umpires, ball, runs, scoreboard etc etc.
So the next challenge for the management consultants to justify their fees was how exactly was the Hundred going to be different from existing cricket?
Firstly they introduced the idea (from the IPL) of a players auction where generic squads were bid for against specific cost ranges (women players are not paid equally-very far from it).
Next they tweaked the language of cricket slightly and changed the length of an over.
None of this to a long term cricket fan used to changing competitions and format tweaks since the Gillette Cup in the 1960s is particularly new.
Hmmm. Ok so it’ll have to be off the pitch. Here lots of entertainment building on the T20 model is being sold as key. There are DJs and live music (popular music groups m’lord) and lots of non-cricket entertainment just in case the cricket is a bit a dull or one sided, or it rains.
The existing 20 and 50 over competitions seem popular and the County game has a solid membership base and support that many might see as a huge potential strength.
Still none of that attracts fees for management consultants..
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