Why free-to-air Test cricket is the answer rather than The Hundred

INTERVIEWED for the latest edition of The Cricketer magazine, Ian Watmore, the recently-appointed chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, uttered a statement with which I profoundly disagree.
TV star: Joe Root celebrates his century, which was seen by armchair viewers. Picture: Pankaj Nangia/Sportzpics for BCCI.TV star: Joe Root celebrates his century, which was seen by armchair viewers. Picture: Pankaj Nangia/Sportzpics for BCCI.
TV star: Joe Root celebrates his century, which was seen by armchair viewers. Picture: Pankaj Nangia/Sportzpics for BCCI.

“What you have to do is get people interested in the game in the first place, and that’s what competitions like The Hundred and the Blast do,” he said.

“They attract new people to the game, and then you have to signpost them through to Test cricket.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Watmore went on to describe Test cricket as “the pinnacle of sport for me” – something with which I profoundly agree – and made his comments concerning The Hundred and the T20 Blast in the context of ensuring that Test cricket remains “a crucial part of the agenda”.

Again, he will get no argument from me on that score, but where I differ from Watmore is in the view that The Hundred and T20 is the way to do this – specifically The Hundred, which is about as far away from Test cricket as the planet Pluto is from the planet Mercury.

Indeed, the idea that you can signpost people through to Test cricket by first of all reeling them in through The Hundred strikes me as a bit like saying that you can signpost people through to the music of Wagner or Shostakovich by first of all hooking them in with a bit of Daft Punk or Dua Lipa.

One is simply not comparing like with like, and it betokens a rather simplistic view of the sporting world and also consumer habits which are a little more complicated than that.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The idea that someone who does not go to cricket – the target audience of The Hundred, remember – would suddenly go from being a heathen to a missionary for Test cricket is too big a leap to be allowed to pass without challenge.

Why would – to put it as bluntly as I dare – anyone who is only persuaded into a cricket ground by watching as bastardized a version of cricket as you can possibly get suddenly acquire as a result of this enterprise an appetite for cricket in its purest sense, going from 100 balls per innings in under three hours to the quantum leap of five-day entertainment?

Yes, there are those to whom this may conceivably apply, to be absolutely fair to Watmore and the ECB, but they are not likely to be in the sort of numbers that ensure Test cricket remains “a crucial part of the agenda”.

Herein, in a sense, is my principal objection to The Hundred: namely, that it is betting everything on a notional audience being somehow attracted to cricket and being signposted through to the proper stuff while at the same time damaging cricket’s existing competitions and alienating its core support.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Rather than helping to preserve Test cricket and the County Championship, a defence so often presented in its favour, The Hundred is actually weakening them by clogging up an already saturated schedule and impacting on an increasingly marginalised first-class programme.

The thinking behind the concept, however well-meant, is like trying to protect the future of opera by encouraging more people to go and watch pop concerts that directly impinge on the operatic schedule.

Or, to put it another way, the logic of Watmore and company is fatally flawed.

Now here’s a thought…

How about, if you want to signpost people through to Test cricket, that you put Test cricket on free-to-air television, say, as is the case with the ongoing series between India and England?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Indeed, what do you think would do more to keep Test cricket “a crucial part of the agenda” – that, or by introducing a completely new competition that bears only a passing resemblance to cricket?

The question, of course, is rhetorical.

I can only write from my own experience.

I was 10 years old when I first saw cricket.

It was not played at my school, I did not live in a city/county with a first-class team, and none of my friends/family had any interest in the sport.

I came across cricket completely by accident while off sick from school one day and happening to see it on the BBC.

Had it been stuck behind a paywall, I would not have seen it or even given it a second thought, and there must be thousands out there with a similar story.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

So I ask myself a question: would I have got the cricket bug as a 10-year-old had I instead chanced on The Hundred? I can honestly say that I very much doubt it.

I was hooked – specifically through free-to-air television – by cricket in what most people would consider to be its proper sense, and by the whole atmosphere and experience surrounding the game.

I was reeled in by the great West Indies team of the 1980s playing quality Test cricket, for example, by Richie Benaud on the microphone, and so on.

Just because I was 10 years of age did not mean that I was unable to appreciate the intricacies of Test cricket, and I honestly think that all the gimmicks, razzmatazz and forced jollity of The Hundred would have totally turned me off.

Frankly, I would have stuck to watching football.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

One appreciates that the architects of The Hundred are grappling with a difficult question: how to get more people to go and watch cricket?

One recognises that there is no easy answer; life has moved on considerably since the 1980s, and there are now far more competing entertainments in our digital age.

But for all those who Watmore and company seem to think will be reeled in by The Hundred, how many will be actively turned off by it?

Have they ever stopped to think that cricket’s chief selling points are actually not trying to turn the sport into something it is not, but broadly the same selling points that have drawn people in since the very first Test match played in 1877?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Increasingly, the ECB’s decision after the 2005 Ashes to put international cricket behind the Sky paywall, thereby prioritising money over exposure, is one from which the game has never recovered.

Ditto the ECB’s failure to capitalise on T20 at its outset which has meant that it has since been playing catch-up to the IPL to the extent where childish concepts such as the The Hundred are conceived in the first place.

There are bound to be many youngsters turned on to cricket for the first time by watching the ongoing series on Channel 4, youngsters who have no need for any quasi-cricket.

The product has always been good enough to stand on its own two feet and would not have survived for this long were the opposite true.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers. Click HERE to subscribe.