The Hundred still doesn’t feel like a serious tournament - Chris Waters
SOMEONE once asked me: “Why don’t you like The Hundred?”
The temptation to give a Christopher Hitchens-style response – “well, because it’s ****” – was almost overwhelming, but good manners prevailed.
It is, however, a fair question. What is it about this garish, gaudy and ultimately garbage competition that grates – beyond, that is, those essential drawbacks?
If I had to isolate one thing about the product itself, it would be this: it still doesn’t feel like a serious tournament. It feels like a sideshow, devoid of significance. Not so much a poor man’s IPL as a beggar’s IPL.
Everything about The Hundred seems tinpot. The gimmicks, the hype, the migraine-inducing graphics, the sheer meaninglessness of what we’re watching – it’s hard to think of a single thing in its favour.
Its supposed “point of difference”, the 100-ball format, only makes it more pointless. No other country plays it, or is likely to do so. The rationale, of course, was that it fits more easily into TV schedules. That tells its own story.
Ironically, The Hundred’s attempt to get serious – courtesy of significant private investment – has only heightened the problem. New owners; new team names; new branding; new colours.
Folk had barely got used to Northern Supermarkets, Manchester Werther’s Originals and Ovaltine Invincibles, or whatever they were known as, and now they must adjust to SunRisers Leeds, Manchester Super Giants and MI London. Imagine if the counties changed their names like that. They wouldn’t last five minutes, private investment or not.
Affinity with teams is more essential than the organisers seem to realise. Our sporting culture is built on affiliation and tribal identity: Yorkshire CCC, Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday, and so on. These are not here-today, gone-tomorrow inventions but institutions that link families across generations.
If fans care about the team, they’ll care about the product. Even some hostile to T20 at the start have come around because, in the final analysis, they are still watching Yorkshire – the club they care about and have supported all their lives.
Much franchise cricket suffers from this problem. Who genuinely gives a flying fig about Galle Gallants, San Francisco Unicorns or Antigua and Barbuda Falcons, or the cricket they play? The Hundred is simply the most vivid example of the self-glorifying genre: loud, lab-designed, and utterly lacking the one thing sport cannot fake – meaning. As such, and I emphasise this, it cannot be taken seriously.
Now we hear – ahem – that the crowds are down. What took them so long? Only 9,438 turned out for the recent SunRisers Leeds-Manchester Super Giants derby at Headingley. The penny is dropping – just not where it counts.
Television viewers, in fairness, are apparently slightly up. This, however, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, more children can watch cricket on free-to-air TV, given that Test matches – criminally – are no longer available. On the other, the product they are watching should rightly turn them off for life – meaningless sport accompanied by some of the worst commentary you could possibly hear, with screaming halfwits, mostly former players, reacting as if even an edged four past the wicketkeeper were a moment of transcendence.
This relentless exaggeration of the mundane, the trivial, the stunningly unimportant – and the constant insistence that the product is somehow magnificent – only hardens dissatisfaction and exposes its failings.
Children of my generation were lucky – although we didn’t realise it. Not only did we have free-to-air Test cricket, we had Richie Benaud on the microphone, Tom Graveney and Jim Laker. On the radio we had Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Fred Trueman and Trevor Bailey. The television coverage was allowed to breathe; it complemented rather than asphyxiated the action.
You have to hand it, however, to the powers-that-be. Somehow – and don’t ask me how – they have raised millions upon millions for this giant heap of cow dung. Money for old rope has got nothing on this heist.
We are told that the standard of cricket is up this year, bigger salaries having driven up the quality of players. I wouldn’t know. If Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Vinicius Junior were playing in a nondescript competition right now in the Middle East, would anyone care? Again, the competition must mean something; it must be serious in its bones.
The “affinity” problem is exacerbated by the number of players who moved to different franchises at the player auction. So now we have Joe Root playing for Welsh Fire, for instance, and Adil Rashid for Southern Brave. Good luck to them.
When such players look back on their wonderful careers, one thing is certain: The Hundred will be remembered, if at all, as the bit that didn’t matter.