It would be fair to say I have not always been an advocate of ‘The Hundred’ or even whiteball cricket as a whole but something (relatively) interesting has happened in my house over the first 2 weeks of August.
My personal view was that the cricket season ended when the Ashes was finished but each evening there has been cricket on in my house, and much to my surprise I have even joined them in watching it.
Bear in mind that the other members of my household have no longstanding love affair with cricket and no allegiance to any county team. The feedback has generally been positive;
- It’s great that its on every day as you can really get into it (and only for a month)
- The ‘score thingys’ on the side of the screen are really easy to follow
- The finishes are mostly all really good (certainly a feature of this year)
- It’s good that the men and women play on the same schedule and watch each other
- It’s quick
On this last point they don’t mean the number of balls, they mean that the overs (sorry sets) are bowled quickly with instant consequences to not doing so and there is less faffing about (unofficial drinks breaks, “randomly passing a ball through some handcuffs” that sort of thing).
One other fascinating factor is that they have no clue or interest in which counties the players play for. Those coming in with a new perspective just don’t care, for the record they also don’t care about the current team names either. We started off thinking we should support Manchester or possibly superchargers as they are geographically closest to us, but concluded that we would decide our allegiance based on our preferred crisps.
I spent some time weighing up the pro’s and con’s of McCoys, Tyrrells and Hula Hoops – the youngest had a tough call to make between Hula Hoops and Skips.
Look its not perfect, even the non/new fans in the house have no idea why its not 6 balls per over rather than 5 per set.
Some of the cricket is horrific, often the batsman decides just to swing wildly for no obvious reason. In one recent game the chasing team were down to a run a ball and the set batsman swung wildly giving a simple catch and the commentators said “he has not choice” – nonsense.
The fielding is weird too, it fluctuates between sublime to ridiculous but overall this is entertainment. It’s Love Island rather than Game of Thrones but I can’t help but think it is attracting new fans to the game.
The challenge then is how to weave the rest of the schedule in (a debate for another day).
Another perk of The Hundred is seeing the likes of Jamie Smith, Jordan Cox, Dan Lawrence, Gus Atkinson, Rehan Ahmed play cricket. It is a real platform for these players to be in the shop window.