It’s needy, it isn’t required and it’s making even more of a mockery of the game’s traditional elite level.
Welcome to the English and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2018. Content with the coach’s performance despite failing to win a single winter Test on important tours to Australia and New Zealand yet thrilled to be seen as market leaders by making the shortest form of the game even shorter.
Last week, the ECB announced that its flagship new Twenty20 tournament, due to start in 2020, is likely to see 15 traditional six-ball overs followed by a final 10-ball over – taking the innings to 100 balls. It’s working title is, imaginatively, The Hundred.
Nobody can doubt the continued success of cricket’s T20 matches across the globe. Since the English game introduced it in 2003 it has become the sport’s biggest sell and is a smash hit in all of the game’s biggest countries. As well as internationally with the World Cup, every year the Indian Premier League is a huge occasion, with its auction for the best players in the world inspiring many a star to become globetrotting players in their own right – without the need to tie themselves to one club. Australia’s Big Bash continues to grow in popularity with the world’s best players, too.
It’s left the original competition, England’s T20 Blast, floundering. Hence the introduction of the ECB’s second T20 competition. It was said to be a like-for-like replica of the Indian Premier League with players the world over invited to play for the new eight selected sides. T20 Blast in its current guise, which involves every traditional county in the country with two divisions – a North and South – would remain untouched.
That last point remains true, but instead of mirroring what has worked so successfully in Asia and Down Under, the ECB want to discover a new format once more. It smacks of desperation and of greed. It’s simply not needed – what is wrong with the thrill of T20 as it is? It makes it easier, of course, to see where the priorities of the suits at the top of the game lie – and it isn’t the future of Test cricket.
In England, more than anywhere else, Test cricket remains sacred. It remains the pinnacle for the majority of supporters. That’s not true anymore in fellow superpowers India or Australia where the game’s shortest form, largely impacted by their money-laden T20 competitions, rules the roost. You only have to look at the attendances of their respective Test matches compared to 20-over-a-side internationals, or even 50-over games. Sell outs for the latter two…. You can count the audience given a minute’s break in play when it comes to Test matches – the Ashes aside, providing Australia are winning.
You need only witness the woeful performance of England’s batting lineup throughout the majority of the summer. The consistent collapses in Australia, followed by the brutal 58 all out on the first morning of the first Test in New Zealand.
Only three players secured a batting average of more than 40 through 10 Ashes innings – and one of them, Alastair Cook, remains woefully out of form but saw his combined total rise virtue of a standalone high score of 244 not out. That aside, it was slim pickings even from England’s most Test of batsmen.
Too many English players now are brought through on the desire for quick runs and big hitting. It’s what has happened with the advent of T20. Look at James Vince, his eye-catching quick 30, featuring all of the shots, and then he’s out. That’s great at T20 level – it does nothing for his side in Test matches. Mark Stoneman is more Test-like in his game, but even he has showed a lack of bottle and fight to stick in and grind it out. There is an impatience at the highest level of the game, born by the fast-paced shorter formats. England are no longer breeding Test match cricketers. The Hundred will only make that more redundant. Two of the Three Lions’ current stars Alex Hales and Adil Rashid, at a time when the country are crying out for a top-order batsman and star spinner at Test level, have turned their back on red-ball cricket for good to concentrate on limited overs fare. They will no doubt travel the world over bringing in the money to the detriment of their counties Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire of course. More will follow.
You can’t blame the cricketers, you can’t really blame the counties either. County championship cricket doesn’t attract crowds. T20 cricket, and you’d certainly imagine The Hundred will too, does pack out stadiums. It brings in revenue that prevents clubs making certain losses every year. It has revolutionised their earnings and enables them to pay greater wages. Cricketers face a short career so of course they will chase the money and the stardom T20 brings.
But the traditional game will suffer because the unique skills required to play Test cricket – mental toughness, bravery and doggedness, as well as a huge amount of skill – are increasingly marginalised. There isn’t the time to hone such skills in the fast-paced world of constant cricket, constant changes of innings and a bowling attack whose figures are hard to look at as they go to all parts of the ground.
That only Eoin Morgan of the currently playing professionals was consulted – he being a limited overs specialist – is another worrying trend. The men in suits are making the decisions, and the game’s greatest level is in doubt once again.
