Welcome to 'The Hundred' and the ECB’s chamber of circular logic

The ECB may be excited about its chained circus freak of a competition but at present, you’d struggle to find anyone else who is

The ECB have come under fire for their plans to revamp the game (GETTY IMAGES)

The old saying goes that a camel is a horse designed by committee, and so we can only guess at which grotesque and misshapen member of the animal kingdom would most accurately characterise the monstrous abomination that the England and Wales Cricket Board’s new 100-ball competition has become. The headless platypus? The dementor spider? The four-fanged vampire squid, with three fangs in the conventional position and the fourth fang to be deployed at a random location according to the wishes of the opposition fielding captain? If nothing else, there are some cracking potential franchise names in there.

The latest wheeze by the ECB has come in reaction to the fierce criticism of its original idea, which was to have a single 10-ball over at the end of each innings. Now the suggestion is that teams will deliver 10 balls from each end, which can be bowled either by a single bowler, or by two bowlers delivering five balls each, or by 10 bowlers each delivering a single delivery in a randomised order, but through the medium of interpretative dance. I may not quite have read the press release all the way to the end, no.

On the face of things, you might find it a touch perverse that the ECB’s new simplified, “mum-friendly” version of the game is to create a format that not even cricket’s lifelong obsessives can truly grasp. Or that their response to the widespread backlash over the 10-ball over was not to scrap it, but instead to have an entire innings of them. But in many ways, this is entirely in keeping: just another week in the ECB’s chamber of circular logic, where everything makes sense as long as people keep nodding their heads and saying the word “exciting” over and over again.

Colin Graves says the revamp will make the game stronger (Getty)

What this demonstrates above all is that the ECB has become beguiled by the myth of its own primacy. A body putatively in service of the game - its players, its fans, its regions and roots - has somehow convinced itself that it is the sole and insuperable guardian of the game, and not just administratively, but ethically. Not only does it instinctively know what’s best for cricket, but importantly nobody else can. After all, they’re not the ECB. They haven’t seen the slideshows. They haven’t spoken to Mumsnet.

And so, over a period of months and years, we have moved to a position where what the ECB wants is by definition virtuous, and so virtue must by definition be anything the ECB wants. Voices in opposition are disregarded, derided, or even - in the case of one prominent cricket journalist - threatened with legal action. Internal dissent is sidelined or steamrollered. A culture of obfuscation and stealth, verging at times on misinformation or casual mendacity, has taken a slow and unshakeable grip.

And at the head of it all sits chairman Colin Graves, the ECB’s straight-talking, very stable genius. Like many of the ascendant strongmen of the political sphere, Graves is obsessed with polling, in thrall to big money and big power, intolerant to the point of hostility, of the slightest hint of disagreement. “I’ve just been re-elected to the board 41-0,” he insisted two months ago. “Forty-one nil. Make sure you put that in.” ECB insiders have long joked that the board’s name actually stands for “Explaining Colin’s Behaviour”.

The T20 Blast has proved popular with fans (Getty Images)

The latest leaked plans on the 10-ball over are just a small part of a wider trend. There was the initial claim that players had been consulted over the 100-ball format, which later turned out to mean just three players. One of them, Worcestershire’s Daryl Mitchell, was later told by chief executive Tom Harrison that the format was still open to negotiation, only to see Graves claim on television that it was definitely set in stone. Then there is the lack of openness over compensation payments made to major grounds in years when they are not hosting Tests. Graves claimed no payments had been made; Glamorgan’s accounts suggested quite the opposite.

We should call this what it is. The opposite of transparency is secrecy. The opposite of honesty is dishonesty. And from the extensive non-disclosure agreements that shrouded the start of the process, to the paranoia over leaks, to the frequently conflicting messages emerging about the new tournament, the ECB has forfeited the right to any benefit of the doubt. If it can be this casual with the truth when it comes to players or its own county chairmen, you can well imagine where you stand in the pecking order.

We’re barely halfway through what has been a magnificent summer of cricket. A star-studded County Championship. Spectacular crowds for the Royal London 50-over tournament and the Vitality Blast. A five-match Test series against India whets the appetite. Next summer, a home World Cup and men’s Ashes series could propel cricket to the very front of the national consciousness.

There's scarcely been a better time to be an English cricket fan (PA)

In other words, there’s scarcely been a better time to be a follower of English cricket. And yet, from the way the ECB talks about its existing audience in opposition to its new, target audience, you would be forgiven for thinking we existed in two different universes. We do talk occasionally, you know. We go to the same pubs and schools, we live in the same houses. Some of us are even members of the same family. We could have helped spread the word of this new competition, brought friends along, sold it via word of mouth, instead of what we’ll probably be doing, which is sniggering in the background as frazzled captains puzzle over their bowling options and an entire section of the cricketing public hopes the whole thing falls flat on its face.

The ECB are making it up as they go along. They’re making it up as they go along because they can. You could call it the natural corollary of a board that has become so beguiled by its grand vision of the future that it has all but abandoned its stewardship of the present. But even that’s too grand a description of it. It’s blundering, pure and simple: a well-meaning idea that has long been stripped of all merit through incompetence, incoherence and a simple lack of faith in its own product. The ECB may be excited about its chained circus freak of a competition. But at present, you’d struggle to find anyone else who is.