The problem with the hundred

A ‘fresh and exciting’ new world

If you’ve been following English cricket recently, you will have heard about the England Cricket Board’s (ECB) recent attempt to “appeal to a younger audience and attract new fans to the game”: namely ‘the hundred’.

The general consensus amongst cricket fans has been that this is a bad idea (a shameless gimmick). It’s worth exploring why that is though. After all, the same accusations were levelled at Twenty20 cricket in the early 2000s and at limited overs cricket in the 70s/80s, yet both ended up becoming the most popular and mainstream form of the game.

So what’s the complaint?

The aspect that has drawn the most ire is the 100 delivery format.

Instead of 20 overs of six deliveries each (for the uninitiated, the bowler running up and releasing the ball for the batsman to hit is one delivery), they are proposing 15 overs of six deliveries each and 1 over of ten deliveries.

On the surface (despite the corporate bland-speak: “the other ten balls will add a fresh tactical dimension”), this seems a good idea. People find cricket too long and boring, so why not shorten the game and spice things up?

Before debating whether the 100 delivery format is silly, it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about what problem it’s trying to solve.

What’s really bothering you?

In England at least, it’s probably safe to say that not many people watch cricket. If you were to take a poll and ask who the England cricket captain was, significantly more would say “I don’t know” than would ask you to clarify the question by asking which format. ¹

The ECB is presumably trying to target this larger subset of the population. The ones who don’t go to matches, who don’t subscribe to Sky TV to watch matches, and the ones who don’t have an opinion on where Moeen Ali should bat in the order.

Why are these people staying home and watching football/cycling/rugby/bowls/competitive-staring instead? I suspect that if you were to ask them, the following answers would be most popular:

“It’s boring”

“It’s really complicated / I don’t understand the rules”

“It takes too long!”

It’s worth going through these complaints and seeing how ‘the hundred’ aims to solve them

“It’s boring”

The thought of spending five days watching players in whites gradually eke out a result will send most people running (even a lot of cricket fans!).

‘The hundred’ aims to counter this with fast paced action, floodlights, city based teams and other attractions. However, all of these already exist in Twenty20 cricket.

If people find Twenty20 cricket boring, they simply won’t find ‘the hundred’ interesting. If you find football boring, you won’t be enticed by the goals being made 6 inches larger. If you find snooker boring, you won’t be enticed if the black ball is made worth 10 points instead.

So ‘the hundred’ doesn’t make cricket any more interesting than the most accessible, popular and financially successful form of cricket.

“It’s really complicated / I don’t understand the rules”

This is a big problem with cricket. There are a lot of rules, and they all have lots of exceptions. If a complete beginner went to a football game, they’d pretty soon be able to tell what the goal (haha) of the game was. Imagine trying to piece together what an LBW is, or why there’s a quadrant of the field that has a restriction on the number of players who can stand within it.

In this case, “the hundred” makes things worse. 20 x 6 is arbitrary, but internally consistent. (15 x 6) + (1 x 10) makes things more complex, not less. It’s not helping.

“It takes too long!”

This is possibly the one place where “the hundred” can make sense. In the US, baseball is often considered a painfully slow sport (2-3 hours per match). The shortest form of cricket is usually longer than a typical baseball match.

So why not make it shorter? The key is how much shorter it’d be.

Cricket’s rules dictate that a Twenty20 innings (20 x 6) should take 75 minutes. With a 15 minute break in-between innings, you’re talking about 2 hours 45 minutes.

If you do some very simple arithmetic, you arrive at 75 * 100 / 120 = 62.5 minutes per innings. So, two innings and a break now comes to 2 hours 20 minutes: i.e. you’ve shaved 25 minutes off the entire match.

Of course, what most people who watch cricket know is that the time guidelines go out of the window, because, no-one is really trying to bowl the overs in time.

So in reality, you’re only shaving about 25 minutes off what is usually almost 4 hours.

For people who don’t want to spend 4 hours watching a game, how much more attractive does it make the game if you take 25 minutes off?

So is it a good idea or not?

It seems harsh to criticise the ECB for trying to make cricket great popular again. But whenever a solution is sought, it’s always worth trying to clarify what the problem is.

I have only anecdotal evidence, but I’d suggest that people want less complexity from cricket, not more. People want the matches to take less time, but there are easier ways to do that (e.g. actually force the players to bowl their overs within the allotted time).

Even if you were to reduce the match down to 100 deliveries rather than 120, there is a simpler way to do it: just have 20 five-delivery overs.

Some people will find the game boring no matter what. But a lot more could be enticed if the game didn’t have as many arbitrary stoppages. When the clock counts down the break in an NHL game, the players are back to start as soon as the countdown hits zero. Yet in cricket, there are still tedious stoppages where fielding teams converge and discuss tactics after an over, after a boundary, after almost anything.

It could be that ‘the hundred’ becomes a roaring success and I look silly, but it seems unlikely given that the ECB hasn’t tried to address any of the real issues. It could have been a honest attempt to make the game popular again, but I suspect it is more a case that the ECB has “tried nothing and are all out of ideas”.