The Hundred: one step forward, two steps back
The Hundred cricket competition (10×10 ball overs) is now well underway.
It has been much criticised- mostly rightly so, but there are some pluses.
Let’s start with who is watching. Some games (mostly weekend) ones are free to air on BBC2. The viewing figures for the first game on the first Wednesday (a women’s game) were 1.95m 1.78m BBC 170,000 Sky. For the men’s game on the Thursday there were 2.5m in total with the BBC accounting for 2m
I don’t think it’s a secret that viewing figures for cricket on Sky pay channels are for the hardcore. Getting cricket on free to air adds lots of viewers and lots of potential cricket fans. The only people who cant really grasp this are the ECB who run English and Welsh cricket.
Secondly The Hundred is attracting people to watch women’s cricket- both in the ground and on TV. Most should discover that the standard is high and the games as exciting as the mens. Perhaps now the ECB will pay women players equally. Perhaps in addition as a public service broadcaster the BBC when they are promoting The Hundred on TV and radio will actually mention the point and discuss it.
Then there are the downsides. As several people have tweeted me, The Hundred is T20 cricket with fewer balls bowled.
Indeed. The alleged attempt to make cricket simpler to understand for new fans has led to a playing conditions manual of many pages and minor tweaks to terminology and practice that have been going in short form cricket since the Gillette Cup which was 60 overs a side in a day.
The BBC are overselling it as ‘amazing’. On occasion, it is, just as the T20 is. Are the crowds new? Not really though there are probably more women and younger people attending (a plus). Indeed the ECB have already had a moan that the evening crowds of men drinking beer and singing familiar songs is not the right image. They had best to get to work on electing a new crowd then.
While The Hundred is meant to be a City based competition in fact the teams are artificially constructed with no organic relationship to their location at all. It makes for ‘amazing’ individual performances though which are interesting to watch.
Clearly its clashing with existing forms of cricket T20, 50 over and County. Could it not have been sorted out simply by tweaking the T20 and not paying management consultants lots of money to ‘design’ a not really new competition? I think so.
Of course the ECB would argue that in order to get the BBC to show it the game needs to run to time and T20 (often maddeningly) does not. The Hundred has a timer after which if the bowling side has not completed 95 of the 100 balls they get a fielding penalty. Its only been a few matches but its obvious that once we take into account time-outs, stoppages for injuries and checks on decisions, The Hundred will begin to drift as the T20 has long done.
George Dobell’s incisive analysis below suggests we are on our way to the 10 over game..
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