How coronavirus scuppered the fast-paced world The Hundred was designed for

Inaugural tournament will have incubated for four years before it sees the light of day

If there is one thing to take from The Hundred being the first competition the England & Wales Cricket Board took off the schedule, it is that it is regarded as the most valuable.

Just as you might look for the possession dearest to you before you flee a burning building, the ECB have taken their prized new competition under its arm to safety from the wreckage that is 2020. The Hundred will have incubated for four years before it sees the light of day. With so much resting on its opening success - or “leveraged against it” if you are of the anti-Hundred persuasion – this is just the first of many steps to much-needed clarity.

One by one, statements from sponsors came through. Quickest out the blocks was official team partner KP snacks. After ECB chief executive Tom Harrison had done the rounds on the major broadcast shareholders Sky and the BBC, their marketing teams followed suit. Everyone is sticking together. As they should.

Players will want assurances around the 80 per cent of their respective pay which was due at the completion of the tournament. Not guarantees, per se, but those without central contracts will look for a further portion of their remaining pay to be released, say, at the start of next summer. For the men’s competition, the trickiest issues centre around personnel.

Cricketers with Kolpak registrations that will be rendered obsolete at the end of 2020 will be particularly on edge with a total of 14 were picked up in the draft as “local players”. Their places in county cricket will largely be catered for with the introduction of an extra overseas slot across the 18-team formats, but that gets a little trickier when it comes to The Hundred where teams like Welsh Fire and Manchester Originals have more than one Kolpak in their ranks.

The Hundred has been postponed until the summer of 2021 (PA)

Given how much international cricket is due to be rescheduled, not just from this English summer, the availability of overseas talent, and indeed England players, may not be as extensive as originally planned. All this considered, perhaps the wisest move would be a redraft when the 2021 landscape has taken shape.

The women’s competition was not quite as far along with around 12 of a squad’s 15 confirmed across the eight teams but postponement is a greater strain on its participants, especially with plans to have 40 non-England players on contracts aligned to eight regional hubs put on hold. Though the new regional 50-over competition is still on the table for 2020, The Hundred represented the sole source of income for certain players this summer.

This is where the biggest blow will be felt. Not to the pocket of Dane Vilas, but the lives of those who pay in sacrifice just to play. As Yorkshire’s Kate Levick, who was due to be part of the Northern Superchargers, stated on Twitter, “It’s not 100k for 4 weeks work for us; it’s money to keep a roof over our head, food in the fridge & the dream alive a little longer.”

Some will argue that as sports use this time to take stock, the ECB should think long and hard about whether The Hundred really is necessary. And while that was always unlikely to happen, being headstrong in its aims to improve the game’s inherent social inefficiencies is no bad thing.

But is there a chance The Hundred, as a concept, might be out of place in 2021’s landscape?

It was three years ago the format was dreamt up, one with such limitless potential that many of its brainstorms were left on the cutting room floor. A 10-ball final over, the use of an orange ball, adaptations of the LBW law - just three bits of blue-sky thinking that did not quite make it up the flag pole. Indeed, next year - the “second” season - had been earmarked for further tweaks to the game’s fundamentals, such as rolling substitute fielders.

The premise of 100 balls was set alongside societal change: of the digitalisation of how we consume our media and how quickly we want it. Yet a month into lockdown and our behaviours have changed immeasurably.

More of us are reading and cooking and falling back in love with both. The slowness of present-day life will take a while to shake, and it is worth considering how much of this will become the norm beyond quarantine, especially if this is all we know for another few months yet.

Take Fortnite for example – the simple-to-pick-up shooter video game which has enjoyed immeasurable popularity and has been referenced by Sanjay Patel, managing director of The Hundred. It is seen by many governing bodies as a case study in how sport must shed its complexity and offer gratification as quickly and as often as possible to engage this new audience.

On Wednesday, while the ECB rubber-stamped The Hundred’s delay until 2021, Fortnite’s creators, Epic, went live on “Park Royale” – a new map on which there is no combat but a series of smaller challenges, mini-games and even queues to access the most popular “Battle Royale” format. It is, essentially, a lobby where users can relax with friends without feeling the need to immediately indulge in the madcap kill-fest that is the game’s main pull.

It would be verging on torturous to manipulate this comparison with Fornite and cricket and say they’ll be streaming through the gates when the County Championship returns next summer because someone on the internet wants to take their time before celebrating a headshot with The Running Man. The domestic game drastically needed a shake-up and a lot of well-intentioned time, money and effort has gone into trying to ensure this was it. But you wonder if this pandemic has not just scuppered The Hundred’s grand opening but altered the very world it was designed for.

A competition tailor-made for the perennially rushed will now be brought to market just as society has developed a new appreciation for time's unbound richness.