LEE PAYNE

Tag: ipl

  • The Hundred might look like a good thing but it’s causing big problems for cricket

    A reminder: cricket is the best sport in the world. I feel it worth reminding everyone because I’m about to spend a few minutes chewing my nails about its current state and future direction.

    If you’re not a dedicated follower of the game, you would be forgiven for thinking that all is well and that cricket is entering the national consciousness more than it has done for some time. You may have noticed that BBC Two have shown a couple of matches from the first week of the Hundred tournament, and that cricket has also been a part of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

    The Hundred is controversial because, while its outward intention is noble in attempting to get new fans interested in cricket, it has gone about this by implying that the traditional game can’t be sold to the public. The fundamentals – such as an over consisting of six balls – have been thrown out of the window, creating a whole new format that no one else in the world plays and bears little resemblence to the others. If the Hundred is meant to be gaining new fans for cricket, what is the point of changing the rules to the extent that those new fans will find it difficult to get into Test matches or One Day Internationals?

    Aside from the format, the Hundred disposes of the traditional county teams and is competed for by sides that reek of a marketing agency brainstorming session. If you think the Manchester Originals and the Welsh Fire sound tacky, you should see their logos. Obviously, in England we only have a few months of the year to play cricket so adding the Hundred to the calendar has raised serious questions about overly packed schedules and player burnout. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) have made it clear that the Hundred is their marquee tournament – it gets the biggest marketing budget – and therefore it gets the prime place in the summer, during the school holidays. The T20 Blast, which since its inception in 2003 had been English cricket’s great domestic money spinner, was done and dusted by the time the kids broke up.

    Hampshire won the 2022 T20 Blast, but you’d be forgiven for having missed it

    Personally, I’m not a fan. I may have been a cricket devotee for twenty years but I’m not one of those pig-headed enough to think the game doesn’t have to appeal to new audiences. Ever since England internationals were sold to Sky in 2006, the game has waned in its relevance to the public. Children aren’t becoming obsessed by the sport by stumbling across it on Channel 4, like I did. Players like Joe Root and Ben Stokes should be rock stars, yet they could walk down most streets unnoticed. The Hundred does at least put cricket back on terrestrial television, yet in my opinion at an unnecessarily high cost. Pumping the same money into the T20 Blast, pushing it into the public eye on BBC TV at the height of summer would surely have had the same effect.

    I do still watch the Hundred. It is still cricket, and I doubt the impact of an individual boycotting something like that. But when I see the BBC Two coverage starting with a sort of rap/hip hop tune in its opening titles, I get the impression that this tournament isn’t for me. Every effort is made to appeal to young people, to ‘urbanise’ the game, and in a way it feels like a bit of an insult to cricket itself because the game is already great. I feel nothing for the teams, being made up and not steeped in any kind of history of tradition, and it takes me a while to remember who won its first edition last year (it was Southern Brave).

    So for all the Hundred is doing in appealing to new fans, it leaves us with a summer schedule bursting at the seams. Ben Stokes, arguably England’s most exciting player, withdrew from the tournament last summer as well as all other forms of cricket to prioritise his mental health. This year, he announced before it had even started that he wasn’t going to play in it before retiring from ODIs, citing having to play too often as one of the reasons for his decision. Having only just turned 31 and three years on from almost single-handedly winning the World Cup for England, these should be the prime years of his career so it should be a significant warning to the authorities that he felt his only option was to walk away.

    Ben Stokes played his last ODI in July, before retiring from the format at the age of 31

    The Hundred is just one of many domestic tournaments around the world that cricketers can sign up for. Unlike football, the international game has traditionally been seen as the most important and most lucrative. This has changed dramatically since the Indian Premier League (IPL) was launched in 2008. According to an article by Tim Wigmore in the August issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, the IPL’s latest broadcasting rights deal will see each live match generate £12 million – out of all the sports leagues in the world, only the NFL (American Football) is more lucrative. Keen to grab their own slice of the pie, other tournaments have popped up all over the world. There is the Big Bash in Australia, the Pakistan Super League, and a new one that is due to launch in the United Arab Emirates early next year.

    The Indian Premier League has been an astonishing success

    Professional cricketers can earn life changing sums of money from playing in these tournaments all over the world. Only players from India, Australia and England could hope to earn as much from playing for their countries. This has left players with extraordinary decisions to make, and increasingly they are prioritising representing an IPL franchise over playing for their nations. It’s a worrying situation, and the Hundred is only adding to the headache.

  • 7 Tests, ODI tri-series and get rid of The Hundred – my ideas to improve cricket

    The T20 Blast has the excitement and the crowds, so there’s no need for The Hundred

    In a concerning development this week, The Guardian reported that the England and Wales Cricket Board could be asked to move or even cancel the scheduled fifth Test match against India this summer. Due to take place between the 10th and 14th September at Old Trafford, it is believed that the Indian board may want the game shifted to make space in the calendar to complete this year’s Indian Premier League. The T20 tournament was suspended earlier this month due to an outbreak of Covid-19 amongst players and staff.

    Given that The Guardian claims the remaining 31 IPL matches are worth £200m in broadcast revenue for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), it’s not hard to see why they would be keen to squeeze in the remainder of the tournament in a packed calendar. To me, however, it feels like a pivotal moment in the sport’s history – if an international fixture was moved or cancelled to accommodate a domestic franchise tournament, it would send out a message of cricket’s priorities and there may be no going back. It cannot be allowed to happen.

    This comes as cricket in England is also at a crucial stage. The Hundred, a whole new format cooked up by marketing men and despised by almost everyone with a passing interest in the game, is set to start in July. I’ve been thinking about ways to improve cricket and here are some of my suggestions.

    England should play 7 Tests every summer

    Test matches. The purest form of the game. The best form of the game, in my opinion. A prolonged examination of a player’s skills, a test of their concentration. There is nothing like the ebb and flow of a Test, the way the story unfolds over the course of five days. You can dip in and out of it, coming back to a match that has changed dramatically in the few hours you’ve been at work.

    England is one of the few countries that can still fill a ground for Test match cricket, a sad indictment of the world’s shortening attention spans. But, with this privileged position, we should make the most of it by playing seven Tests every summer. One series of three, one series of four. The only exception to this would be an Ashes year, in which the battle against the old enemy Australia would have to be over five and the other opponent would have to come over for two matches.

    Bring back the ODI tri-series

    The last ODI tri-series in England in 2005 featured a memorable Bangladesh victory over world champions Australia in Cardiff

    Up until 2005 the English summer would include an ODI tri-series, where three teams – usually England and that year’s two touring sides – would compete for a place in a final at Lord’s. The demise of the tri-series was down to money, of course. The matches that didn’t involve England would understandably generate less interest, making it harder to sell tickets for them and broadcasters to question why they were paying so much for the rights. But as such a multi-cultural place, I think there is still the opportunity for a highly successful tri-series to return. Imagine England playing a two Test series with Pakistan and a four Test series with India, with the meat in the middle of that sandwich being a tri-series including three India v Pakistan clashes at grounds such as Edgbaston, Headingley and Trent Bridge – cities with large British Asian populations.

    The T20 Blast is everything the ECB want The Hundred to be

    As a cricket tragic I find The Hundred a bit of an insult. This sport that I love so much is apparently too complex and too boring to attract new fans without it being pulled into a shape I don’t recognise first. And that’s according to the governing body! I refuse to believe that the concept of 20 overs of six balls would be too much for the general population to understand. And the idea of changing the term ‘wickets’ to ‘outs’? Do me a favour.

    What about the county cricketers of this country, professionals who ply their trade for clubs that have existed for over a century? For them to be told that they are no longer relevant and that the focal point of the summer will now be crass, made-up teams with names as risible as ‘Oval Invincibles’ is just offensive. The fact is, the ECB already have the answer to attracting new fans to cricket right in front of them – it’s called the T20 Blast.

    According to a brilliant Elizabeth Ammon column in Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine, in 2019 all eighteen county teams reported that ‘between 20% and 50% of their ticket sales [for the T20 Blast] were families, and a quarter were people who had not previously bought tickets’. I went to a Blast match that year which had a crowd bigger than most international fixtures around the world. Give it a window so the best players in the world have the chance to come and play in it, get some of it on primetime terrestrial television, and the game of cricket will get the popularity boost the ECB craves. And they won’t have alienated most of the existing fans in the process.