Difficult to know quite what to make of The Hundred, which has the feel of being knocked up on the back of a packet of Senior Service and anyway sounds like a film about a heroic battle rather than the name of a new cricket thrash coming to a Test ground near you sometime in 2020. My only hope is that the ECB will call on the bikini girls to march round the ground signalling the change of overs. But I’m old-fashioned like that.
The tournament is scheduled for the ‘school holidays’ to pack in the kids, but in my day the school holidays were when people went away, to spend rain-swept hours in the Morris Minor on the prom at Exmouth. Chennai it wasn’t. But maybe I’m old-fashioned about the hols as well.
The Indian Premier League is still far ahead of anything we can offer, right up there with the best leagues in the world, the NFL, the NBL, our own Premier League. I fear we have missed the boat: ten-ball overs or not. The Derbyshire Scorpions against the Leicestershire Foxes is like am-dram in Buxton compared with what’s going on in Mumbai or Kolkata. That is real big stadium cricket, packed with superstars like Dhoni and Kohli, as commentators and crowds go mental. It’s not the same as a chilly night in Chelmsford with James Foster.
At least when it comes to real blood-and-thunder football we’ve got the Championship where big teams are still trying to beat each other (unlike West Ham the other day who were ushering the City forward line through to goal). The top six in the Championship reads like a hard-core First Division from a vanished era: Wolves, Cardiff, Fulham, Villa, Middlesbrough and Derby.
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