US Edition
The crowd at Baker Street station was diverse in age, gender and ethnicity, with a good number of children dressed up for the occasion.
In other words, it was exactly the audience the Hundred was designed for. Unfortunately they were going to the Notting Hill Carnival, not St John’s Wood, but even so, those who did stay on the Jubilee Line and go to Lord’s for Sunday’s two Hundred finals were of a different demographic to those who booed and jeered the Australians six weeks previously at the home of cricket.
The third year of the Hundred brought good attendance figures, better matches in the men’s competition and decent viewing figures. The concentration of talent into eight teams, instead of 18, drives up standards, and from a standing start it was clear on Sunday that the teams have built a fan base in just three years. It is a success story.
It should be, given the sums of money thrown at it and the privileged place it held in the calendar in an Ashes summer, hogging August and the school holidays. But one unintended benefit has been the decent attendances in the Metro Bank One Day Cup, in which resourceful counties have attracted good crowds, embracing the out grounds they shunned for years because the players moaned about pitches and the chief executives did not like the lack of facilities for corporate guests.
The Hundred is returning cricket to its fan base in two ways. It attracting new audiences, with 580,000 tickets sold this year, a record, with the percentage of female buyers at 30 per cent, juniors 23 per cent and 41 per cent families – the first two up on last year, the family figure remained static.
It has also forced the counties back to their roots at out grounds. It is not ideal, but the Metro Bank has also become a developmental competition with young players gaining valuable experience playing in front of decent crowds. England’s World Cup players do not need to play domestic 50-over cricket. Winning World Cups is about mettle under pressure, and that comes from international cricket. It is better the Metro Bank allows young cricketers to learn how to play the 50-over game.
The Hundred is working and it is time for that fact to be accepted. The England and Wales Cricket Board, under Richard Thompson and Richard Gould, has moved further back to the counties, redressing the imbalance towards centralised decision making that happened under the previous regime.
It has led to discussions about the Hundred’s future with talk of turning it into an 18-team competition, with divisions of eight and 10, although nothing concrete has been formed.
It has undermined the Hundred, to the incredulity of franchise cricket figures around the world who cannot believe the ECB is not backing 100 per cent the tournament it has spent millions building up. Many reading this may well want to see it canned and replaced with a souped-up Blast competition but that moment has gone.
The future is a tournament built like the Hundred. The debate over the format – T20 or Hundred – is separate. But the mechanics are right, eight teams, a concentrated window and easy to follow fixture list.
The next step is to hold an auction to sell equity in the teams to external investors who will line up to snap up the iconic names in English cricket: Lord’s, Oval, Headingley, etc. Then, in a couple of years, adding teams in the West Country and North East, selling those to a market that has seen how the Hundred has prospered. The Hundred could then copy the IPL, where franchises play on different grounds in their states. There is no reason why Leicester, Derbyshire and Sussex, for example, could not host games, bringing them closer to the competition.
Sources say the Ambani family, the owners of the Mumbai Indians, are ready now to add to their franchise portfolio. That way the Hundred could easily become the second strongest tournament behind the IPL, as Jos Buttler said it should be recently.
It would bring reserves of new money into English cricket. It would be a huge windfall for the counties, securing their futures, and find ways for them to be properly rewarded for producing the talent that franchises rely on. This would guarantee red-ball cricket’s survival. It would open commercial opportunities in India, and new people bring new ideas.
The other alternative is to move back towards county brands, with a pyramid system like football. But as has been seen with Yorkshire recently, it is very hard to persuade businesses to put money into county cricket. Many of the clubs have struggled financially for decades. They are not attractive to serious investors.
The ECB is committed to implementing the findings of the recent report into discrimination into cricket. Ripping up the one competition that attracts a new audience would be an odd way to go about doing that.
The counties were handed cricket’s golden treasure in 2003 when they became the first to play Twenty20 cricket but conservatism held them back and the format was copied and improved by others. The counties started out with bouncy castles but quickly realised there is more money in pints than coffees and ice creams. They would still prefer all their Blast games on a Friday night because that brings in the lads who want to have a beer and spend money.
Thompson and Gould will ease the ‘them and us’ conflict that marred the start of the Hundred but starting again with a new competition that would take years to build up, and set English cricket back another decade while other countries grow their franchise tournaments, is not the answer. Keep the Hundred, invest in it financially but also by making it more collaborative. That way English cricket has an asset it can live off in the future to the benefit of all the forms of cricket we enjoy.
The Hundred can save county cricket – the ECB must not rip it up
It’s time to accept much-maligned competition is a success and, rather than undermine it, use its popularity to guarantee the sport’s future