A hundred apologies: Why cricket’s barnstorming new format deserves a long innings

Ed Cumming thought he’d finally seen the back of the endless vain attempts to broaden cricket’s appeal. Then he went to a Hundred match...

Southern Brave’s George Garton walks off the field after being caught by London Spirit's Joe Denly (PA)

I was rude about The Hundred. A real bastard. It wasn’t just because the new tournament would add even more congestion to a packed summer to the “Detriment of the Traditional Forms of the Game”. The whole thing was just so funny. I laughed at the spurious revamp of the traditional counties, which turned them into eight teams based around cities. I howled at the new made-up names, which sounded like a joke about Americans taking over the sport. The “Northern Superchargers” was an Elon Musk infrastructure promise to Newcastle. I could have sworn I once bought a T-shirt in a Thai market with “Manchester Originals” emblazoned on it.

When I saw that the teams were all sponsored by different KP Snacks, I wondered why they hadn’t just gone the whole hog and given the team snack names. Everyone could get behind the Southampton Skips, surely? The Peterborough Pringles? The Mumbai Bombay Mix? As the opening fixtures drew nearer, evidently not sold out, I scoffed at the increasingly frantic marketing emails luring me into buying tickets with the promise of musical acts I had never heard of. This new and thrilling cricketing format is enough to win everyone over, the campaign said, but Becky Hill is playing at the opening night just in case.

The desperation of it all was risible. It also felt familiar. Hadn’t we already put up with the Kent Spitfires and Notts Outlaws and cheerleaders and live music and ritual human sacrifice in the name of luring viewers to our domestic T20 format? Hadn’t every attempt failed? Why couldn’t we simply accept that our humble Blast was not going to compete with the Indian or Australian super leagues? Give it up, lads. If you keep stripping the game down, eventually it stops being cricket. If the main problem is the sport itself, no amount of boundary-side fireworks will fix it.