100 Ball Tournament is a dangerous gimmick

Summer is finally upon us. The football season is at its climax and the County Championship season is about to begin. All seems well with the world. Yet deep in the ECB headquarters trouble is afoot. The chief executive Tom Harrison has seen that we are all too comfortable with cricket as we know it and has ordered the marketing wizards to come up with a brand new format to scare off cricket lovers and bring in the masses in a terrifyingly Radio 1 manner: the 100 Ball Tournament.

This fresh brand of cricket is meant to capture the hearts and minds of young people…

Meet ‘The Hundred’. I’d explain how the 100 Ball Tournament works but I don’t know, and neither, frankly, do the ECB. Essentially, it’s a T20 game with less deliveries and less overs, or the same amount of overs, depending on who you ask. The idea is that whilst English cricket invented the T20 format we have fallen significantly behind India and Australia in encouraging a new generation to get involved with the game, and therefore need to copy their domestic franchise tournaments with an exceptional twist to stay relevant. This fresh brand of cricket is meant to capture the hearts and minds of young people who will abandon their consoles and recreational drug use to watch a reduced level of new franchises face off against each other.

What the ECB refuse to see is that the current format of the T20 Blast is already thriving. Bigger crowds are turning up to matches and social media is finally embracing domestic cricket. Viewing figures are on the rise as well, despite Sky’s efforts to find the five most boring former cricketers (looking at you Nick Knight) to provide ‘commentary’. With a few small tweaks the tournament could even become just as popular as the engaging and energetic Big Bash in Australia.

Nobody cares about wildcard overs and strategic timeouts, it just takes away from the thrill of the sport.

Why the change then? Do we really live in a generation that has such a short attention span that they can’t digest three hours of sport? Especially given the 100 Ball Tournament is supposed to attract the biggest names in world cricket in order to put on a fantastic spectacle. The example thrown around is that recent IPL games are dragging on for nearly four hours which, according to some, is far too long. This is obviously an issue for the BBC, who want to get cricket back on free-to-air television, but don’t want the cricket to run into their normal schedules. God forbid the 10 O’Clock news might be delayed a little. Personally, I have a cunning plan to solve the problem: if they want to ensure the games don’t drag on too long, fine the players half of their wages for slow over rates. The team will rush through the innings when they realise the impact it’ll have on their pockets and maybe that way the ECB will finally find some money to invest into grassroots cricket.

Within all this drama the cricketing press have surmised that abandoning the leg before wicket dismissal was discussed in talks, as were wildcard overs and a big screen countdown of the deliveries left in the innings. True cricket fans should find this disgracefully condescending. Cricket does not need gimmicks such as the 100 Ball Tournament. We aren’t all neanderthals obsessed with six hitting. It’s a game with many intricacies and complexities yet it boils down to one concept. People love a battle, we love a personal rivalry, we love a truly even contest. There is nothing better than watching a genuinely quick bowler terrorise a team, or a leg spinner wrap a batsman up in a web of deft deception. It’s exhilarating. Nobody cares about wildcard overs and strategic timeouts, it just takes away from the thrill of the sport.

All the other wonderful forms of domestic cricket will be sidelined to the doom and gloom of April and September…

To top it all off, the 100 Ball Tournament will be placed slap bang in the middle of the summer, meaning all the other wonderful forms of domestic cricket will be sidelined to the doom and gloom of April and September, as far as possible from the public eye. Counties will leak fans and cash, and eventually will be forced to fold. Slowly, the fortunes of England’s test match team will wither as domestic red-ball cricket is sidelined and ultimately ignored.

How depressing. I need a beer. And I imagine all cricket lovers do too as we watch our sport mangled to suit the social media generation. After that despairing beer, though, we need to take meaningful action. I’ll be starting a podcast next week celebrating the weird and wonderful aspects of domestic cricket, and I hope the sentiments will catch on. Otherwise, county cricket might be entering its final overs.