It was after the Hundred’s inaugural season last year that Don Root, the 86-year-old grandfather of England’s Joe Root, wrote a letter to the Cricketer magazine that suggested he was less than enthusiastic about the sport’s rather glitzy, format-busting new competition.
“The Hundred is among us — so is Covid and it’s just about as welcome,” he said.
Don wasn’t alone in regarding the Hundred as a virus of sorts, the devil’s spawn even, the names of the teams alone — Birmingham Phoenix, London Spirit, Manchester Originals, Northern Superchargers, Oval Invincibles, Southern Brave, Trent Rockets and Welsh Fire — probably enough to put off a traditionalist like himself.
David “Bumble” Lloyd wasn’t quite as opposed to the whole thing, conceding that he quite enjoyed its first season, but he did wonder out loud when the competition would include a team called the “Doncaster Dipsticks”.
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There was no sign of the Dipsticks at Edgbaston on Sunday where a girl/boy double-header between Birmingham Phoenix and Manchester Originals was taking place, the opening contest attracting a crowd of 14,978, the biggest-ever Edgbaston attendance for a women’s match.
The place was jammed with kids, with no shortage of the female form of the species either, which was a primary goal of the folk who dreamt up the Hundred: to attract people outside “the mainly white, affluent, middle-aged male, with an average age of 50″ demographic, which, their research told them, is the sport’s chief constituency. Quite why research was needed here they didn’t explain.
Now, the mainly white, affluent, middle-aged male, with an average age of 50, often gets a bad press, as if he’s the cause of all the world’s woes, when he’s only responsible for 86-ish per cent of them.
But if non-glitzy white-ball cricket is his port in the storm of life, then you had to feel for him on Sunday, right from the garish opening graphics and stat-a-rama fest which made the screen look much like a screenshot from Sonic the Hedgehog back in the early 90s.
The Birmingham Phoenix kit, meanwhile, resembled a Fruit Salad sweet, while one of the umpires had a pink ponytail that matched the pink sleeves of her very loud outfit.
The Love Island people, allegedly, all wore jeans with holes in them, while the 2002 Big Brother winner donned ‘a white boob tube and striking pair of patterned shorts for the outing’
Then there was the occasional reference by our commentators — Nasser Hussain, Natalie Germanos, Charles Dagnall and Simon Doull — to “batters”, the organisers’ preferred terminology for the sake of “inclusivity” (which prompted a meltdown in the Daily Mail’s comments), and, worse, power plays, time-outs, power meters and overs that could last 10 balls, rather than six. And ear-splitting popular music greeting every four, six and wicket (or “out”), and Sky people interviewing fielders in the course of the game.
Manchester Originals’ Lizelle Lee, for example, had a furry microphone stuffed down the front of her top which allowed her natter with Simon when she should have been focusing on Georgia Elwiss racking up the boundaries, the South African instead chatting about how well her baby was sleeping in England and how she was tempted to leave him there when she returned home.
If Don was watching — which is unlikely — he might well have called social services, or if he had attended — which is even more unlikely — the Hundred game between Oval Invincibles and Northern Superchargers earlier in the month, when some Love Island contestants and the winner of the 2002 Big Brother were the guests of honour, he might well have called the police.
The Love Island people, allegedly, all wore jeans with holes in them, while the 2002 Big Brother winner donned “a white boob tube and striking pair of patterned shorts for the outing”. Don would have been forgiven for concluding that this just wasn’t cricket. Certainly not as he once knew it.
The thing is, though, the Hundred is a blast. Literally. It’s kind of what pool is to snooker, an abbreviated version of a sport that, for some people, is a cure for insomnia. Or a CliffsNotes version of an interminable novel that leaves you losing the will to live by chapter three.
From the opening over, it’s a slugfest, there’s no time to be getting the feel of the wicket and such like, you have 100 deliveries to whack the bejaysus out of the ball and hope you can limit the opposition to fewer runs. All the while talking to the Sky people about your child-abandoning plans. What’s not to love?
Tune in, Don, stop being a dipstick.
