In a sporting world obsessed with clocks, countdown cricket does make some sense

JAMES COYNE: They count down in American Football, basketball and ice hockey, after all. When I played league cricket in West Yorkshire, we counted the overs down, too

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The ECB have announced details of their new domestic competition

Spare a thought for the statisticians and the analysts. Spare a thought too, for the journalists – though we understand if you don’t wish to go that far. I was not alone in not seeing this stonker coming.

Over the last few years, various bodies around the world have created impact ratings and world rankings, drawing on complex algorithms, to analyse T20 cricket.

Very recently, journalists have finally cottoned on to weaving this new data into their copy. Jarrod Kimber, one of the most prominent of the new breed, has written well on ESPNcricinfo and in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack about how the new analytics is entering the cricketing lexicon. It is all based on T20 – the lingua franca of world cricket.

The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians have worked hard with the ICC to define first-class, List A and Twenty20 as the three distinct formats played around the world. (T10 was played in Sharjah late last year, but no one else has seriously followed that up yet.)

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Teams will play games of 100-ball innings

The ECB were already preparing to tweak their selection process this spring to draw on a range of “discipline-specific scouts”, so as to ensure that expertise from all the formats are covered adequately. They might need a few more of those scouts now.

They’ll all have to consider another format now.

But these are all cricket industry points.

100-ball cricket: at its core, the idea is a strong one. If we didn’t have T20, it would be the obvious place to start. But we do. And we have had 16 or 20-over midweek cricket in clubs for decades.

You can understand the attraction for those trying to sell an arcane game to a public uninitiated with the game, those who know nothing of overs and deliveries, let alone fielding positions or the new analytics.

Presumably we will all now be counting down on the clock from 100 to 0. They count down in American Football, basketball and ice hockey too, after all. When I played league cricket in West Yorkshire, we counted the overs down, too. Come to think of it, in T20 and one-day cricket, they count down in balls on TV from several overs (or balls) out. So we do that already, to a degree. There is nothing to stop T20 from counting down from 120. That's a fairly round figure too.

Sanjay Patel, the ECB’s commercial director, said: “This is 100-ball cricket, a simple approach to reach a new generation. Based on 15 traditional six-ball overs, the other 10 balls will add a fresh tactical dimension.”

I was rather hoping that might mean the spare 10 balls used as a tactic, sprinkled around at the batsman’s, bowler’s or captain’s behest. But, it seems, from initial reports, that those 10 balls will be delivered in one chunk.

Of course, this is actually all about “attracting a new audience”. Time and again over the last few weeks I have heard English cricket officials repeat those words, and how distinct they feel the target audience for the new competition will be, compared to those who watch the existing T20 Blast at the grounds and on TV.

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It is a revolutionary step for the sport

I must admit I was sceptical. It’s all T20, I thought. The same format played in the IPL, Big Bash and World T20. OK, there should be more glamorous players in the new competition, even the top Indians like Virat Kohli and Ravi Ashwin. And the game itself constantly evolves, as it should. But it’s still T20.

We assumed that was how it was sold to the broadcasters in the game-changing bonanza of £1.1bn media rights bought by Sky and the BBC last year, and to the 41 members of the ECB (including the 18 first-class counties) who were persuaded to vote to change the ECB’s articles of association in order to allow the new T20 competition to go ahead.

How wrong we all were.

Shorter matches will surely suit both Sky and the BBC, since a game with almost seven overs chopped off could mean more games can be crammed into an evening, or at least finished by 9pm. And it’s hard to deny that distilling a game to the simplicity of 100 balls does make it easier to explain to viewers, including the untapped thousands who will watch cricket on free-to-air TV for the first time since 2005. But I still maintain that 20 x 6 isn't that hard either.

This idea has apparently been bubbling around for a while. But, still, it has escalated fairly quickly. It was discussed by the ECB’s board of directors at their meeting on Wednesday April 11.

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Counties have given it unanimous support

It was raised at the inaugural meeting of the ECB’s T20 Board last Wednesday – a collection of businessmen, plus Patel and other ECB officials, Michael Lumb and a couple of county chairmen – who gave the idea their “unanimous support”. (Presumably, given what we now know, they also gave their unanimous support to dropping “T20” from their name before the end of their first meeting.)

Finally, it was presented to the first-class county chairmen and chief executives at their meeting at Lord’s today. They gave their “overwhelming support”. Within hours, the email explaining the proposals dropped from the ECB’s media department.

The ECB are already creating eight new teams. They were due to create a draft system, supposedly based in part on performances in the T20 Blast. They are hoping to tie the new competition in with their South Asian Engagement Strategy – which, by the way, is absolutely the right thing to do. As one official said today, “they obviously feel they may as well go the whole hog”.

Ultimately, this competition has been set up to capture a new audience and bring more money into the game. In that last respect, India are crucial. I could be wrong, but I suspect that if India buys into 100-ball cricket, this could be the greatest marketing idea since, well… T20. If not, we could be reverting to a T20 competition sooner than you know. Because T20 does a pretty good job on its own.

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