When my son was young, around 8 or 9, we lived in north London. I’d pick him up from school and take him to Lords at tea-time when the entry price for adults was £5 and children were free. We saw all kinds of less popular matches – most memorably, a young Bangladesh Test side, which played with spirit and lost six wickets during our two-hour visit. This was old-style cricket – half-empty stands, occasional ripples of applause, everything charmingly sedate, with a few bursts of moderate excitement. The colour scheme was most definitely green and white. This, in truth, is my favourite kind of cricket.
The Hundred is just crickety enough to be cricket, and will be the English game’s saviour
Fast forward to a few Sundays ago; my son is 25 now, and we were at Lords again – this time for the technicolour, bells-and-whistles final of The Hundred tournament. It seemed like an historic occasion. At the end of the fourth season of England’s answer to the Indian Premier League, the summation of the nation’s latest attempt to inject modernity into the game – it felt like the future had, finally and securely, arrived.
The women played first, to the largest ever crowd for a women’s Hundred game, more than 22,000 of us, and it was a great match – four needed from the last three balls. London Spirit’s Deepti Sharma sent the ball high into the air for six, over the head of Welsh Fire’s star bowler Shabnim Ismail. Cue fireworks, booming music and general razzmatazz.
There followed an interval that featured Zara Larsson, the blonde bombshell winner of Sweden’s Got Talent (no, me neither), who belted out her pop songs from various podiums, one of them on a sort of golf cart circling the ground, as more fireworks whooshed up and Southern Brave’s Jofra Archer and Chris Jordan practised their bowling action with all the godlike athleticism of Noah Lyles limbering up for the 100 metres. For the Oval Invincibles, England T20 World Cup hero Sam Curran was springing about, raring to go.
As the ground filled further and the men’s match got underway, I pondered the much-asked question – is this actually cricket? If not, does it matter? The boom-boom whizz-bangery of the thing was relentless; there were no complicated strategies and variations, and the sound of leather on willow was drowned out by the din. Tea was replaced by the Robinsons’ Strategic Timeout. The Hundred, a simple race for runs in a hundred balls, is exciting but is a blunted and crude version of the game, pimped up for carnival.
In the end, the Oval Invincibles lived up to their name and retained their trophy. Meanwhile, I was persuaded, by the crowd as much as anything, that The Hundred is just crickety enough to be cricket, and will be the English game’s saviour and not, as the naysayers will have it, its destroyer. That is, the crowd was engaged and enthusiastic and, most importantly, it was youthful. Children, some as young as 6 or 7, were everywhere – many of them carrying miniature cricket bats, signed all over by their cricketing heroes. One girl, as sweet as anything, had signed her own bat on the grounds that ‘I might be a famous cricketer one day’. I saw two young boys sidling up to England Women’s Tammy Beaumont, shyly asking for her autograph. Actual boys! Who’d have thought it?
More than half a million tickets were sold for this year’s Hundred matches and two million have been sold in total during its four-year history – which puts the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in a good position to sell stakes in it this autumn. The idea is to raise £100 million or more which will, largely, be used to support the more traditional cricket – the county matches and so forth – that fuddy-duddies like me prefer. If it works, the ECB will justly congratulate itself on a triumph that was achieved in the face of vocal opposition.
It’s not just about the money, though. It’s about the culture of cricket and ensuring that the families who turn up to Hundred matches are encouraged to get a taste for the superior world of maiden overs, of three slips and a gully, of longeurs lasting an afternoon, of slowly building run rates and disastrous batting collapses. I’m optimistic – in recent years I’ve seen the young people in my own family engage with traditional cricket with as much enthusiasm as the generation before. The twenty-somethings have queued for seats on the fifth day of Test matches and devoted lazy Sundays to listening to Test Match Special. So it is possible.
The Hundred is loud and brash and in some respects the anti-cricket, but with a fair wind and all that investment, I’m betting that it will be a gateway, directing a new generation towards the green and white; towards proper cricket as Blowers, Tuffers and Aggers would understand it.
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