The Hundred: The Oval Invincibles will take part in a single female match for the new 100 balls per side format on Wednesday in the southern London Oval.
With the release, Wednesday of The Hundred, a fresh new 100 balls per side format, English cricket takes a step into the unknown. Cricket has already developed a series of national and international professional forms, first-class games, including five-day tests, 50 one-day overhead each side games, and twenty-20 matches. But while Twenty20 was a pioneer in professional sport in England, the Cricket Board of England and Wales (ECB) believes that a shorter format is needed to bring a new, younger, and ethnically more varied audience to the sport.
The Cent ends the traditional six-ball match, but as a former captain of England Michael Vaughan, “A reminder that the Hundred is merely a cricket game. New rules. New rules. A few less delivery ..but the finest gamers to play .. !!! What shouldn’t be. It’s just cricket. I’m not going to get all the hate.”
Instead of the format, however, it’s the potential impact of The Hundred that worries many in English cricket.
Instead of relying on the 18 county structure currently in place, The Hundred will have eight specifically constructed franchise teams, all with men’s and women’s sides.
In fact, a tournament that one critic described as a ‘tempt to steal the number of counties’ begins with an autonomous women’s match between the Oval Invincibles and the Ovals in South London.
The 100 was supposed to begin in 2020 but its introduction was postponed by the coronavirus epidemic.
- Cancelations –
Covid-19 still plays a role in the ECB, with many of the big-name overseas players it hoped the ECB would have taken part, as Australian David Warner and Glenn Maxwell, Australian Kane Williamson of New Zealand, Kagiso Rabada of South Africa, and Shaheen Shah Afridi of Pakistan were no longer involved in the women’s contest, as are Australian’s Meg Lanning, Ellyse Perry, and Alyssa Healy.
Derbyshire had to cancel her last two matches in the popular T20 Blast recently because the epidemic meant that they couldn’t have a strong enough XI.
And with numerous first-choice players now redirected to 100, as the existing county program continues, there’s a danger that another infection may devastate the program.
The ECB has been criticized for being patronizing when it says that the hundred is targeted at “mothers and children,” the impression that cricket is too hard to understand.
But, as the ECB has used up the bulk of its reserves of £70 million ($96 million) for marketing the hundreds, it could probably not afford to fail.
Some matches will be shown on terrestrial TV, where crickets have mostly disappeared in the United Kingdom from free to air coverage since the 2005 Ashes.
Nonetheless, ECB CEO Tom Harrison is sure that the Hundred will provide revenue and prominence essential to English cricket’s future.
“Before you evaluate what the Hundred brought with it, you have to evaluate what may have happened if we didn’t,” he told us.
“You must look at the opposite side. Actually, that’s a scary setting. This isn’t an open-air television and it’s a big investment in the game that we couldn’t bring, “He added that.
He stated, “We just have to ensure that the health of our sport is dependent on those two things in a very major way at the back of our mind.”
“We can do whatever we can to balance that great dependency so that we can remain safe and safe as a sport, to keep us investing in things we love, county cricket, test cricket, international cricket, 4 days cricket champions, and 450 pros who are playing cricket men, they are crucial in our long-term survival,” he added.
“The Hundred is totally embedded in this approach to deliver,” he said.
