NICK HOWSON AT LORD'S: Entertaining. Engaging. Unsurprising. The men's edition has been everything we expected, but the concerns over its role linger
Nearly four years on from the PowerPoint presentation that threatened to turn English cricket underside down, finally, The Hundred is here.
After many, many months of questions, concerns, threats, questions, PR own goals, confusion, questions and rhetoric, we've reached the end of the inaugural edition.
For a competition that has navigated a cricketing minefield to reach this point, it was only fitting that it had to swerve a forecast of rain to reach a conclusion. But reach a conclusion it has.
The women's tournament has been an unparalleled success. That is the simple part.
Meanwhile, the men's competition hasn't offered many surprises or answers. Yet. But those difficult conversations are looming.
It provides a quality cricket competition. With Imran Tahir, Rashid Khan, Glenn Phillips, Quinton de Kock, Liam Livingstone and Moeen Ali among the cast, what did you really expect?
We need not judge the tournament on the one-sided Eliminator or Final. Southern Brave proved the old adage that bowling attacks win you trophies and sometimes that isn't always exciting.
Nothing against Jofra Archer, but his absence probably made the finale more competitive than it might have been.
Add to that some absurd fielding and Birmingham Phoenix, though with the outstanding player of the competition in the form of Livingstone, never really stood a chance.
It probably says more about the carousel that has been the squads in this year's event that Tim David, not even part of it at the start of the week, was the man of the moment.
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Liam Livingstone's run-out swung the final in the Brave's direction
A fantastic catch at backward point and an incredible throw to run out Livingstone after he cracked two sixes in the Brave innings capped the perfect evening. Bound for Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL, he arrived off the back of two centuries for Surrey in the One-Day Cup. Yeah, that.
Away from the middle, people still like cricket. With Test and Blast crowds having sat at or close to capacity for many years and Covid have created a thirst, was more of the same names, the same entertainment at these iconic venues really going to produce a different outcome?
And with it has come what my colleague Sam Morshead called 'big Blast energy' across the country. Beer snakes, 'Don't Take Me Home' and pitch invaders remain staples.
The ECB must find a way to accommodate both these fans and uphold the family-friendly, inclusive atmosphere that this tournament was meant to be built.
Tim David starred in the field and with the bat
As it turns out there is an audience underneath those county devotees. It doesn't mean the traditionalists deserve to be left behind, but they are not in the majority. They have to accept that now.
Simplifying cricket didn't mean ruining cricket. Sets of five, skyscrapers, funky graphics, 10 balls in a row. As long as you get the right ingredients in place, these aspects don't really matter.
How this affects the tapestry of the sport won't be clear until next summer at the earliest. Will the Blast be completely undercut? How are the four formats accommodated in a single summer? Is the £1.3 million due to each county enough to offset the inevitable shortfall? Balance sheets once Covid has fully passed will be fascinating.
The All-Stars and Dynamos programmes are enjoying record-breaking take-up. But is this enough to arrest cricket's declining participation figures?
In many ways, this is the easiest edition of the men's Hundred to stomach. All the difficult questions are for the future. Once the stages are fully dismantled, these must be addressed and not ignored.
Posted by Byron Smedley on 25/08/2021 at 14:45
The powers that be these days are the problem. Constant tampering with competition formats led to apathy among cricket fans who were seldom consulted and always ignored when three day games became four, the county championship was split into divisions and Team England's insistence upon central contracts upon the grounds that 'Australia have them' led to all sorts of problems most notable of which was the lack of star players in county cricket. When I first saw Warwickshire in the 1960's the team had several test players, Amiss, Kallicharan, Gibbs etc. It was every bit as much of a treat as seeing internationals play for and against my local football club in the winter. All of that ended abruptly and worse at the very same time cricket disappeared from terrestrial tv so we had a whole generation lost to the sport. Had I in my youth have been taken to Edgbaston to view teams deprived of their best players by England with four days to conjure a result rather than three to force one I doubt I would know a leg break from a bouncer, I would not have been interested and in real cricket todays youngsters are not interested either. So the ECB, having dug these enormous holes both financial and indeed spiritual have decided to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's a Simon Cowell approach, who cares if it's nonsense as long as it sells. Trouble is, the older people get the more discerning they become, those who enthused over Cowell's first ventures are now listening to serious music and have turned off is such numbers that the X-factor is now defunct because the new generation are not replacing them, they want something else. I fear both the Blast and the 100 will go the same way and this is why I oppose both. Yes we old fogies are in the minority right now but we are still here and we will still be here long after the music has stopped and the stages packed away for the last time. We can only hope that we live long enough for the ECB to come to it's senses.
Posted by Glynn Burgess on 22/08/2021 at 14:32
I think you need to mention some of the elephants in the room - will the traditional Blast fans be as bothered when they have been able to attend their own county games before the 100 without Covid restrictions, will the supply of free tickets continue (dished our at 6 per person on the sites I looked at), why did so many 'sold out' games have thousands of people not turn up (from official attendances) and how is it financially viable when I believe a ? £10 million loss is predicted this year when payments to counties are added in to the costs? Also when the effects on the One Day Cup, red ball game and sabotage of the hugely successful Blast are taken into account, it seems obvious that a revamped Blast would have been the better choice (although most of us know thr real reasons why the ECB did not go down this route).
Posted by drken on 21/08/2021 at 22:58
For all the inevitably angry boomers: Cricket is so mired in traditional inbred quirks and terminology that you've all gotten too used to, like how they display scoring info, no one under the age of 50 understands what the hell they’re looking at on the TV. Most kids try to watch cricket, they want to know what is going on, but they just can't understand the unnecessarily complicated score card on the screen. The 100 attempts to resolve this, but it doesn't go far enough. The creators have fundamentally not realised why young people aren't interested, as it's still formatted in a way that is alien and deliberately confusing. Why don’t they just display how many runs each team has!?! Currently you’ve got to look all over the screen for clues and then do maths to figure out what the actual score is because the first team's number of runs are never shown again once their turn is over! This is vital information!! Imagine only being given half a football score! This would be such simpler - "Birmingham 159 - Manchester 91 (batting) Balls left: 32. - Batters left: 5" There, easy.
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