The Hundred’s First Week Debrief: My Gift To The ECB’s Marketing Bods
In which one not-so-wise man: Ben Cotton, buys tickets to five cricket matches, gets to attend one of them, and gifts the ECB’s marketing department some valuable market research.
The England and Wales Cricket Board’s controversial new franchise competition is (at the time of writing) three months old. The concept of a new franchise competition was actually conceived several years ago, but it’s a sordid parent that celebrates the date of conception like a birthday. But what do you buy a short-form cricket tournament for its three-monthiversary? If you’ll allow me to throw around such a ramshackle phrase. Organically sourced market research insights from the digitally-literate 18-25 male demographic (me), of course! In some ways, I’m teetering precariously between the group that The Hundred is courting, and those that the new venture seems happy, or at least willing, to leave behind. On the one hand I’m a traditionalist; I’m a small ‘C’ conservative (capitalise that ‘C’ at your own peril). I find it pleasing that, from a distance at least, a test match played in 2021 doesn’t look overly dissimilar from those that were being played in the 1880s. I’m an apologist for a sport in which players resplendent in all-white attire (albeit now named and numbered) are watched by cantankerous old sods with garish red and yellow striped blazers using phrases like ‘googly’, ‘corridor of uncertainty’, and ‘when will Kevin Pietersen stop talking forever and withdraw from public life?’
On the other hand, I do sit somewhat uneasily amongst this crowd. I hail from a county that doesn’t have first-class status, and therefore I attach myself like an uncomfortable limpet to Lancashire. Unlike my football support, which has been thrust upon me from birth, I grasp around for emotional investment in domestic cricket like a child lost in a supermarket that is prepared to cut their losses with their genetic parents and start afresh with whichever vaguely responsible adults happen to pass them by. Even as someone who has loved cricket since childhood, domestic English cricket can be a little impenetrable. The County Championship’s structure is at best a little convoluted, at worse downright baffling - and the changes to its format have even the most devoted county cricket fans confused.
So it’s like a football league but for cricket, and played in one uninterrupted run? Well, not exactly. It has a ‘group’ stage and a ‘division’ stage, and it runs from April to mid-July, and then it disappears again until the end of August (when it’s practically too late to play cricket). Oh, and sometimes the players are playing for their counties, and sometimes for their countries, and sometimes in overseas domestic tournaments like the Indian Premier League. Warwickshire pipped Lancashire to the County Championship this year after a thrilling final round of matches, but then they played each other again in the Bob Willis Trophy in its second year. The whole thing is a pretty convoluted affair that can bamboozle even the most knowledgeable fans. I had to research the format just to write this paragraph, despite having watched most of it online, and even now I’m not convinced I’ve got it right.
If I can feel like this about the most traditional form of cricket, how is a complete beginner likely to feel? One of the unexpected results of The Hundred was the introduction of a competition that I watched grow from the very beginning. There was no history to catch up with because there was no history at all. I sat down to watch the inaugural match on BBC2 back in July and I saw the Manchester Originals face the Oval Invincibles at The Oval, and for once I didn’t feel cut off from a grander context. I didn’t sense that there was prior set-up that would remain unknown to me; there was just eleven women facing eleven women - what more did I need to know?
There’s an argument here for the importance of free-to-air television in the success of cricket in this country. The reason I can feel a little ignorant of it is because it’s been marooned for decades on subscription channels and it’s not especially easy for me to go and watch it in-person. I can’t be the only one who experiences this. I went to a state school which didn’t play cricket, I don’t live particularly near to any first-class county sides and we didn’t have Sky Sports growing up, therefore I simply couldn’t watch the sport played at a professional standard. I probably got into cricket circa 2007, and it was 2019 by the time a live cricket match involving either England or an English team was on terrestrial television. Two years later, The Hundred was beginning on BBC2 where 18 of the 68 matches would be broadcast live, including both women’s and men’s finals. Having substantial live coverage of a tournament from start-to-finish is a crucial part of engaging a wider audience, and it’s something that the ECB has neglected for many years. If you’re a child growing up under similar circumstances to myself, that’s such a powerful method of drawing you into the game.
Of course, as a self-confessed traditionalist, having a tournament comprising eight brand new teams that, in their bland sterility, probably resemble brands more than they resemble teams and historic institutions frequently irked me. But I do feel that it was an enjoyable thing to see a team that I had been able to watch from their humble beginnings. Sadly, the Manchester Originals managed to remain pretty humble from their beginning right through to their ignominious ending, but I felt like less of an imposter supporting them than I usually do following Lancashire. Clearly, watching a team play its very first fixture is something that, after the 21st & 22nd of July 2021, will cease to be a factor, but being able to follow the competition on free-to-air television will remain an important part of The Hundred’s ongoing appeal. Before the competition started, my opinion was that it presented an interesting new idea but I wasn’t sure if it would address anything that wouldn’t also be solved by putting established cricket competitions onto free-to-air television. I still do think this is true to an extent, but The Hundred has clearly shown that it does have its own advantages, and this ability to follow it from the very beginning has been at the forefront of that for me.
So now that new fans can easily watch a game of elite cricket, what are they likely to be confronted with? I think it’s certainly a truism that many of cricket’s most enjoyable aspects are also its biggest hurdles. Particularly its complexity, which makes it an absorbing trove of subtleties for the initiated, but a confusing, jargon-laden affair for the inexperienced spectator. Part of The Hundred’s mission was to make cricket more accessible to the new and casual fan. The very concept of the ‘Hundred’ serves the dual purpose of making matches short enough to fit into congested free-to-air schedules whilst making the limited-overs format more easily-understood. There’s a hundred balls to bowl in each innings. There’s no overs, there’s no sessions, or days. If you can count to one-hundred, then you already know all there is to know.
As a peculiar piece of counter-intuitiveness, removal of the concept of overs seemed to create complications afresh, and it presented commentators Michael Vaughan and Phil Tufnell with the challenge of succinctly referring to a set of five deliveries by one bowler without a convenient piece of terminology like, say, overs. The on-screen graphics were baffling to say the least, and I’m not sure they’ll have made things easier for new viewers. Slave to bold pink and green branding obligations, the player names, runs and balls displayed in the central portion of the screen were an untidy jumble of information, where near-imperceivable differences in text size were the only thing that differentiated on-strike and off-strike batters; The elongated ticker tape-style run deficit and ball counters that bracketed the two vertical borders of the television picture were sometimes partially off-screen and not always the simplest way of conveying information.
Conversely, the win predictor probabilities were likely a good way of giving new viewers an impression of which team held the momentum, and indeed we were all unfamiliar with what a par score looked like in 100-ball cricket. Personally, I think the various commentary teams did a good job of trying to keep things accessible, though some hardcore fans will doubtless have found it a little too condescending, resembling at times an educational exercise rather than a top-level competition in its own right.
The cricket as it was played, I think we can all agree, was an unmitigated success. In the period before the inaugural season, none of us really explored the possibility of the actual cricket being any good. Bogged down in a slanging match over the future and integrity of English domestic cricket, the idea that The Hundred might actually produce exciting cricket wasn’t necessarily at the forefront of either side’s mind. Once Marizanne Kapp took her mark and prepared to run in to bowl at Lizelle Lee, there was finally an opportunity to let the sport do the talking. For two-hundred legal deliveries over the next two and a half hours, we could stop thinking about the ECB, the focus groups, the market research, the state of English cricket, and enjoy a great game of cricket.
Happily, this was true for the entirety of the tournament; Game after game of exciting run chases, batting heroics, inspired bowling, physics-defying fielding, and no small amount of star power. Even the most ardent Hundred-skepetics amongst us will have enjoyed the on-field action, and the tournament’s new viewers were given the best possible advert for the game of cricket. This, I can personally attest to. ECB marketing bods listen up because you’re going to enjoy what follows.
Commandeering the television on a family holiday to watch the women’s final between the Oval Invincibles and Southern Brave, I was pleasantly surprised to see my mum take a genuine interest in the match. To contextualise the gravity of this situation, until 21st August 2021, my mum is the sort of person who, if The Ashes were being played in the back garden, would close the curtains. Yet here she was, utterly absorbed in the contest, asking me about the intricacies and the players. She wanted to watch the men’s final later on, and bemoaned the fact that she’d only discovered this exciting new tournament on its final day. Over the course of that holiday, we watched all of the T20 Blast semi-finals together and even several days of test cricket. Prior to The Hundred finals, this was unfathomable. I can’t express how unlikely these events would have seemed a few months ago, but you’ll know people who have no interest whatsoever in cricket, now imagine them avariciously consuming cricket of all formats after having watched one match. This isn’t isolated.
I invited my friend along to the Originals vs Superchargers match, calculating that the live performance by The Orielles, one of our favourite bands, would be enough to entice him along to a day’s cricket. To contextualise the gravity of this situation, if The Ashes were being played in his back garden, he’d shut the curtains and press trespassing charges. Yet to hear about The Hundred, he politely declined the offer, but later expressed on multiple occasions that the tournament sounded like something that he’d enjoy. In hindsight, it’s fortunate that he was yet to be struck by the cricket bug; that particular trip to Old Trafford was not actually a trip to Old Trafford after all. Instead, it was a trip to the Arndale Centre’s Waterstones, several dodgy pubs, and the Manchester Picadilly toilets, two whole matches abandoned due to heavy rain. Not even The Hundred can hope to address one of English cricket’s oldest problems: the fact that is played in England.
When I went to book these tickets after enjoying the first two days, I was surprised at the £16 price for a ticket to a much-maligned tournament weathering its embryonic first steps, especially given that the initial games hadn’t been that well attended. The explanation behind this was that the women’s and men’s matches for a given fixture were packaged together as double-headers.
When the Birmingham Pheonix played the Northern Superchargers, Edgbaston would host the women’s game in the afternoon, and the men’s in the evening; each ticket guaranteed entry to both contests. It was a pretty novel way of hosting simultaneous women’s and men’s branches of the same tournament, an interesting solution to the pretty unique challenge of running the two concurrently, even if it was more or less an inadvertent by-product of pandemic sport (the cancelled 2020 tournament had not combined the matches in this way, instead the women’s matches would be played across a larger range of smaller-sized grounds, intended to entice crowds from more regions).
The women’s and men’s equivalents for most sports tend to operate independently from each other. The Women’s Super League in football, the WNBA in basketball, the LPGA Tour in golf, all function largely separate from the Premier League, the NBA, and the PGA Tour, so much so that it’s common for many fans to follow one without paying any attention to the other; sadly this is usually to the detriment of the women’s competitions. In The Hundred, the two would be inextricably linked and share a platform.
Firstly, let’s get the bad but not all that surprising news out of the way first. There was, as there usually is, plenty of disparity between the two halves of the competition. Most obvious of which was the salaries, with the women receiving around ten times less than their male counterparts, though the prize money (£300,000) was split evenly between the two finals. The inequality was also evidenced in the ticket refund policy. When I went to see that ill-fated double-header at Old Trafford, had the men’s match gone ahead whilst the earlier women’s match was cancelled due to rain, I would not have received a refund. If the women’s match had been played in its entirety and only the men’s match cancelled, a full refund would have been offered. This suggests in no uncertain terms that the men’s match is considered the attraction; who cares if the women’s contest didn’t go ahead, weren’t you really here to see the men’s contest anyway? Would you complain if the warm-up act didn’t play a set as long as the headliners performed. Rain is an ever-present threat to English cricket, and this refund policy was a pretty galling way to go about it.
The rest of the picture, in my opinion, was much more positive. ‘Great exposure for the women’s game’ is the sort of phrase that gets thrown around without having any sort of prescribed meaning, so it often borders on the clichéd. Whilst I don’t claim to elucidate on my platitudes any more so than the next person, it does feel like a lot of the exposure was ‘bankable’ in the sense that it’s going to be directly and measurably beneficial to The Hundred’s players. Presently, the gap between domestic women’s cricket and international women’s cricket is pretty stark. The graduation from domestic to international is, obviously, a big step in any sport, but there’s several material factors that make it such a difficult step in women’s cricket. Take, for example, the pressure of playing in front of large crowds and television audiences. The Women’s Cricket Super League, the domestic competition replaced by The Hundred, drew a total of 27,000 spectators across the entire duration of the tournament. 15,189 fans watched London Spirit and Southern Brave at Lords. The international players who have played for England in high profile and well-attended games will have been used to such occasions; many younger and less experienced players performed in such circumstances for the very first time in The Hundred.
Prior to this competition, women’s English domestic cricket was not televised. The England cricket team’s matches are televised. Usually on Sky Sports (sometimes streamed for free on YouTube) and occasionally on the BBC. The gap between domestic and international cricket shortens slightly when the players pushing for selection are exposed to the larger crowds and national television broadcasts more regularly. Male cricketers making the same leap from county to international are always more experienced, typically being provided ample opportunity to play in such conditions for years prior to their England debuts. Whatever the format, the men have always been offered much more in this respect. They still are, but the women’s game has closed the gap a little this season. A continuation of this push can only benefit up-and-coming female players.
Women’s cricket, like the men’s, faces a constant battle to maintain the ranks of youth cricketers entering the game at junior levels. The future looks bright when you sit and think for a moment about how many young cricket fans will have seen women playing for the first time in The Hundred. Not just the core of established international players that existing coverage of England cricket provides, but a whole new cast of heroes to inspire burgeoning cricketers: Maia Bouchier (22), Charlie Dean (20), Lauren Bell (20), and Alice Capsey (17) were amongst the younger players endearing themselves to an even younger crop of fans; a younger crop of fans that look set to grow up with more (and crucially more visible) idols than any generation before them. Whilst my birth certificate might insist that I am a 25-year-old man, I can ensure you that I am, at heart, a 9-year-old boy and consequently I’m occasionally inclined to spend my disposable income on collectible cards.
Opening a pack of The Hundred trading cards some months ago, I found Amy Jones, Tash Farrant and Nat Sciver cards with Joe Root, Ben Stokes, and Kane Williamson ones. It might seem an odd observation, but when has a set of sports cards combined women’s and men’s players in the same packs? Perhaps it’s low on the agenda, but things like this can make all the difference to future generations, who will be taught less and less through both overt and covert means that women’s sport is inferior to men’s. It’s all programming, and the cricketers of tomorrow will grow up with less of it than we have. Eventually it’ll be considered ridiculous that female cricketers are paid orders of magnitude less than male counterparts; that they play on unprepared pitches; that a ticket to a double-header is basically a ticket to the men’s match.
I entered into the tournament doubtful that The Hundred would succeed in anything that couldn’t be accomplished by putting existing competitions back on free-to-air television. Arguably this is still at least partially true of the men’s game, but how much women’s domestic cricket was on television before The Hundred? This summer, I found myself watching more of The Hundred’s women’s matches than the men’s. Invested in the stars both established and emerging, I continued to watch England whenever possible. The Hundred, for all its ruffling of feathers, brought with it an opportunity for women’s cricket, an opportunity that has been hit for six by the likes of Sophia Dunkley and Evelyn Jones. The battle over English cricket’s already congested Summer will continue to rage on, but I’d like to see The Hundred return in 2022 and beyond.
Recipes
Written by Ben Cotton
Alongside his normal job, Ben Cotton does his bit for the British twaddle industry by manufacturing inconsequential codswallop masquerading as comedy for Gumf Magazine. He is also doomed to support Stoke City, the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cubs in repentance for something REALLY bad he did in a past life.
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