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Post by flashblade on May 10, 2018 16:28:12 GMT
Some observers have noticed that the ECB, chastened by the near-universal derision for The Hundred, are starting to refer to it as a 'concept'. Actually it was always described as a concept, even in the beginning (three weeks ago). But the tone has changed. Initially this concept was presented quite grandly. There was an implied invitation to admire the vision and whatnot ...
"The 100-ball concept ... will now be further developed"
"We will continue to [show leadership, provide challenge and follow a process] as the concept evolves"
"it’s time to take the concept wider as we build the detail"
There was no 'might' or 'could' about it. This was definitely going to happen, and no uppity, entitled stakeholders were going to stop it, or even have a say in it.
"The competition will be based on the simple format of 100 balls for each team"
"Each team will face 15 traditional six-ball overs with an additional ten balls that add a fresh tactical dimension"
In their latest statement the ECB seem to have lost some of their swagger. The term 'concept' now seems to be performing a similar function to the phrase "just bouncing ideas around":-
"Today's meeting ... gave us constructive and valuable feedback on the 100-ball concept"
"It was invaluable to talk through the concept"
"This is a concept that we're discussing with the groups that matter the most"
The PCA's Daryl Mitchell has confirmed that the ECB "are very keen to stress that it is still a concept". At this point they don't seem very sure about it at all. They might be wishing that this Hundred thing would just go away, and perhaps all that they can now salvage from this episode would be the positive impression created by a willingness to listen to players, etc., and act accordingly. For that to happen, 'concept' would now have to mean 'passing fancy' rather than 'fait accompli'. ("You wanted transparency, so now we're having all our stupidest ideas in public").
Perhaps, like me, the ECB are starting to feel nostalgic for the good old days of City-based T20. Sure it would still have involved made-up teams with no geographical connections that meant anything, but at least it would have been proper T20 in the classical tradition. Still, it feels like a heavy thing for the ECB to do. Backing down and admitting they were wrong aren't things that come naturally to them. If they were to abandon The Hundred, they'd probably want to take their time over getting around to it.
In which case, Surrey might have put them in a bit of a tight spot with their offer to host a trial game of The Hundred in September. It took the ECB a fortnight to acknowledge Surrey's letter, and they've yet to decide whether to take them up on it. Rightly or wrongly, I sense a taunting, mischievous quality to Surrey's offer. Regardless, it would be perverse of the ECB to actively prefer not to road-test The Hundred at some point. That doesn't mean September at The Oval would necessarily be the way they'd want to do it, but if they decline Surrey's offer they might need to at least allude to some preferred programme of trials to seem credible. Right now, top ECB evasion experts are probably crafting a response that doesn't neutralise any exit strategies they may wish to deploy at some point. Not a letter that I'd want to have to write.
Excellent post, Bazpan. |
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Post by Wicked Cricket on May 14, 2018 15:35:21 GMT
Nick Hoult of the 'Telegraph' secures himself a juicy exclusive with Colin Graves (just published 20 minutes ago), where amongst other things, Graves suggests there has been a failed coup to topple him by his opponents in the County game. Graves also threatens to strip Surrey of the right to host the proposed 'Hundred Tournament' after the club branded the tournament laughable and insists the competition will help cricket reach a lost audience that have been put off by the sport’s ‘fuddy duddy’ image. Hoult writes, "Emboldened by the backing he received last week at the ECB board's AGM - where he was re-elected unanimously - Graves is in a fighting mood, wanting to get on the ‘front foot’ and answer his critics." So, beware George Dobell and ESPNCricinfo! Re: The proposed "100", Graves is quoted, "It is exciting and I think it is fantastic opportunity to launch a new form of cricket. It is not at the expense of the others. We all want county cricket, Test cricket and T20 but it is something to attract a new audience and expand the reach of what we do." Under the ECB Chairmanship of Giles Clarke, The Daily Telegraph and Nick Hoult were usually given the juiciest exclusives and the same has happened again. This is a must read. Is Graves a cricketing visionary or simply lost his wickets? Over to you. www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2018/05/14/ecb-chief-colin-graves-hits-back-hundred-critics-reveals-failed/ |
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Post by philh on May 14, 2018 15:55:27 GMT
The one thing that the Telegraph article does have is a graphic indicating the structure of the summer programme. It has the source as "ECB Development Update", which, rightly or wrongly, I assume, means that it is official.
It seems that the 4 day programme will not change much with a lot of early and late season games and a few in June and July. The Hundred will run alongside the 50 over tournament in July and August, meaning that the 50 over tournament will become a mix of non-T20ers, 2nd XI players and youngsters. The T20 Blast will shift to late May to mid-July to be followed immediately by The Hundred. I can see even greater temptation for those more skilled at the shorter form of the game to abandon 4 day cricket, particularly if they can get a contract in India before the T20 Blast starts.
One of the problem is that the English summer is pretty short. There are only so many blocks of weeks available. 4 day games in November, perhaps?
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Post by gmdf on May 14, 2018 16:51:48 GMT
I think this article is more in the spirit of the '100' competition: Here |
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Post by Wicked Cricket on May 18, 2018 7:00:17 GMT
Andy Nash has another "pop" at Colin Graves. Perhaps, he and Surrey's Richard Thompson are the antagonists that Graves referred to when he talked of a failed coup by his opponents? I would agree with Nash that cricket "is at a crossroads" and it's good to know that our own Rob Andrew is having an influential say in the matter with his proposal of a County Conference which Michael Atherton has supported this week. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/44148246 |
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Post by philh on Aug 24, 2018 16:13:36 GMT
There's going to be a trial in September of the new 100 ball format. Presumably, this is to test that Mums and kids like it. It's taking place at Trent Bridge for men and at Loughborough for women. The BBC have published this article - www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/45294390. The bit that is strange is this: The new five-week competition would take place alongside the existing T20 Blast, which the ECB says will be unaffected by the proposed format changes. 'Unaffected' seems a strange word to choose. |
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Post by Wicked Cricket on Sept 14, 2018 9:21:35 GMT
Colin Graves once more defends his and the ECBs stance on the '100 Ball Tournament' option and explains again why they are going down this route. The Board have also filed for an overseas trademark on the name which is a brave decision as it means they 'could' demand payment from other international cricketing boards that want to play a version of this format. Flashblade writes for his personal Forum signature: "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" John Maynard Keynes Now the furore dust is settling, I am warming to the "100 Ball". This is a brave and bold move by the ECB led by a Chairman whose own entrepreneurial track record is highly impressive. What a coup for English cricket if it does become the success that Graves believes it will be. There are various positives involved. The increasingly successful Vitality Blast will keep its own "120 Ball" identity. The tournament's present momentum will be undiminished as the "100 Ball" is being marketed to a different group of people. ie. Those who may never have been to a cricket match before. The interest worldwide can only improve the ECBs fortunes, particularly if they charge for the use of the name; but like any bold and brave business decision, it could blow up in the ECBs face. Yet, does this matter? SKY have already signed a 5 year contract where they will pay the agreed sum of £1.1bn. Each county will be given £1.3m a year for five years. So, if the '100 Ball' becomes a laughing stock it will be SKY with egg over their face and not the ECB or county cricket who are the outright financial winners. All in all, the '100 Ball' is a win-win for English cricket. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/45515806PS: The first trial begins this Friday. |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191 
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Sept 14, 2018 20:03:11 GMT
Regarding two of the three key feedback areas - flow and duration of the game, and tactical innovation - no intel has yet escaped from the women's trials of English cricket's upcoming win-win. But perhaps you can gauge the player enjoyment metric from Elizabeth Ammon's photo of Loughborough in the rain.
pbs.twimg.com/media/DnDv9HmXoAAxtLk.jpg
More from her in tomorrow's Times, assuming she's still at liberty. If that's your paper, maybe report back? (To the extent that you feel is legal).
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Sept 14, 2018 22:54:46 GMT
Couple more thoughts on The Hundred.
Calling two consecutive five-ball overs by the same bowler a 'Super Ten' is stupid since the idea is that a captain would spontaneously decide to keep that bowler on for a second batch of five balls because his first five had gone well. So there'll be no "Let's get ready for a Super Ten!" at the start of a ten-ball over. Spectators will only become aware that they're witnessing a Super Ten when a bowler delivers his sixth consecutive ball. I think it's going to feel a bit low on drama. (Admittedly I'm often unaware that a Powerplay has taken place until there's an announcement saying it's just ended, and I'd been assuming all along that they were simply the captain's preferred field placings).
Unless actual electric shocks are to be administered, 'Shock Clock' is an embarrassing term for a countdown timer to encourage prompt tactical decisions by captains. (Do umpires currently employ a 15-second Shock Clock for timing out reviews, or do they just look at their watches?)
Why are these trials being conducted behind closed doors? ECB - always with the paranoid secrecy. As important as player enjoyment is, spectator enjoyment must also count for something, you'd hope. These trials should have been widely publicised so that anyone could go along, see what they made of the fundamental format and the experimental match scenarios, and make their comments. Not just existing fans, but also the mums and kids who will form the new audience for cricket but don't know it yet. They're going to have to have their horoscopes read to them at some point, and this would have been a good place to start so they could say whether or not The Hundred still has too much cricket content for their liking. Keeping spectators away from these trials isn't just treating fans with the ECB's customary contempt. It gives the impression of an organisation too ashamed of this crummy format that it's cornered itself into to let cricket fans witness its frantic attempts to patch it up.
Here's the ECB's trademark application for The Hundred. There's very little information, but still slightly amusing if you're the kind of person who has a bit of a giggle at seeing someone lay claim to words like 'hundred'. (I'm aware that any intellectual property lawyers on the forum would find nothing in that to laugh at).
trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00003296487
The application has been opposed by a company called The Hundreds Is Huge Inc. They sell clothes under the 'The Hundreds' brand. Well there's a bit more to it than that. It's a "2-part project that houses a Classic Californian Streetwear brand and media platform dedicated to Global Street Culture". You can see why they wouldn't want their customers to think they had anything to do with that other johnny-come-lately The Hundred.
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A.S.
2nd XI player
Posts: 60
County club member: Kent
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Post by A.S. on Sept 15, 2018 9:12:07 GMT
Regarding two of the three key feedback areas - flow and duration of the game, and tactical innovation - no intel has yet escaped from the women's trials of English cricket's upcoming win-win. But perhaps you can gauge the player enjoyment metric from Elizabeth Ammon's photo of Loughborough in the rain.
pbs.twimg.com/media/DnDv9HmXoAAxtLk.jpg
More from her in tomorrow's Times, assuming she's still at liberty. If that's your paper, maybe report back? (To the extent that you feel is legal).
Elizabeth Ammon reports today that yesterday’s Hundred turned out to be the Seventy Four or the Fifty Five, depending on which innings you are referring to. All over in 92 minutes. I guess that if you had paid say £25 for ground admission you might be mildly irritated with paying about 20p per ball bowled or, put another way, 27p for each minute of “action”. |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Sept 15, 2018 17:05:25 GMT
I guess that if you had paid say £25 for ground admission you might be mildly irritated with paying about 20p per ball bowled or, put another way, 27p for each minute of “action”.
Cricket-watching charged by the minute. Kind of like motel rooms by the hour. I'm not being facetious in suggesting that this would be in keeping with the context-free zeitgeist of The Hundred. We're already going to have teams you've never heard of, with no geographical connection, and about which you couldn't possibly care, playing a format which makes it impossible to compare performances with any other known cricket. Even balls have now been unmoored from overs. The general idea seems to be that nothing should mean anything to anyone or have any significance in the context of anything. (It's more inclusive when no one cares a toss any more than anyone else does). So why not encourage the time-poor new audience to nip in for just a few minutes of The Hundred ("Quid's worth, please")? Enjoy the rest of your day.
The model could be park chess. Observers (and, indeed, players) stop by for a while before moving on, knowing neither how the match reached this point nor how it will end. They're just consuming pure, in-the-moment, chess action. Audiences for The Hundred aren't going to be all that invested in the outcome. It would all be about spectator throughput: people swinging by to take in a few sixes, a slower-ball bouncer and a tactical not-quite wide or two, before departing to get on with the rest of their busy day.
I saw Graham McKenzie get into a no-ball groove in a Kent v. Leicestershire John Player game at Folkestone. If I remember rightly, the over was eight balls longer than normal and went for 31. Of course this was before we knew enough to call it a Super Fourteen.
What'll they call the Super Over now that they've spent the word 'super' on something far more mundane? Well that's the least of their problems. And I keep forgetting that overs are old thinking. Since cheeky trademark applications are in style this week, I might see if I can get first dibs on 'Hyper-Ball'.
Here's a funny, if unrelated, thing. When I type 'Jennings' into a text message (as in "At this point I'd be happy if Jennings just offered a stroke to a straight ball once in a while"), the predictive function on my non-smartphone assumes I mean 'lemmings'.
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Post by gmdf on Sept 17, 2018 13:12:31 GMT
I was there too.... Seem to remember that he finally bowled off about 2 paces, and STILL produced a no-ball! Was it Bill Alley who was the Umpire? If so was there an element of inter-State rivalry?  |
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Post by flashblade on Sept 17, 2018 14:14:36 GMT
We can all see that the new competition is still in a continuous state of design - to put it politely.
- The ECB announced that they had sold the broadcasting rights to the new T20 competition around June 2017.
- There were then a series of announcements to the effect that the competition was only a concept, and that the detail needed to be developed and refined.
- Then in April 2018, they announced that it wouldn't be a T20 comp - it would be a Hundred Ball format, not aimed at existing cricket lovers.
- They are now testing the format, with a view to tweaking the details.
- Goodness knows where we will end up.
My point is that I wonder if the broadcasters are going to get what they signed up for? Surely they expected it to cater for existing cricket fans, plus 'the mums and kids', not just the latter.
Will the broadcasters complain that they are not being given what they'd agreed to pay for? Will they laugh at the 100 format and force a reinstatement of T20?
We live in interesting times . . .
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Sept 17, 2018 22:11:09 GMT
We can all see that the new competition is still in a continuous state of design - to put it politely. - The ECB announced that they had sold the broadcasting rights to the new T20 competition around June 2017. - There were then a series of announcements to the effect that the competition was only a concept, and that the detail needed to be developed and refined. - Then in April 2018, they announced that it wouldn't be a T20 comp - it would be a Hundred Ball format, not aimed at existing cricket lovers. - They are now testing the format, with a view to tweaking the details. - Goodness knows where we will end up. My point is that I wonder if the broadcasters are going to get what they signed up for? Surely they expected it to cater for existing cricket fans, plus 'the mums and kids', not just the latter. Will the broadcasters complain that they are not being given what they'd agreed to pay for? Will they laugh at the 100 format and force a reinstatement of T20? We live in interesting times . . .
I'm picturing Colin Graves strutting around Trent Bridge like Apollo 13 Flight Director Gene Kranz, barking "Work the problem, people!"
Anyway yes, a continually intriguing aspect of all this is where the broadcasters stand. It's hard to believe the ECB would have come this far, and have left themselves so little room for manoeuvre, without the broadcasters' endorsement of this format. But I find it equally hard to believe that Sky and the BBC actively prefer a competition that cannot be taken seriously. You don't have to gratuitously stick the boot into The Hundred to make the point that the format is a trivial one. The ECB made that official by explicitly aiming it at people who don't like cricket, and by even contemplating adding a fourth stump and getting rid of LBWs. The broadcasters thought they were getting the English IPL, but I get the feeling that the ECB would palm them off with a cricket-flavoured It's A Knockout if that's what took their fancy. And yet, if the broadcasters weren't happy with the way things are shaping up, you'd think we'd have heard something about it. I really can't make sense of it all.
I'm surprised the makers of this TV show haven't challenged the ECB's trademark application. Their creative work seems as though it would be more easily confused with the ECB's than would the Californian clothes designers'.
"The 100 (pronounced The Hundred) ... set 97 years after a devastating nuclear apocalypse wiped out almost all life on Earth. The only known survivors lived on space stations in Earth's orbit prior to the apocalyptic event. After life-support systems are found to be critically failing, 100 juvenile prisoners are declared "expendable" and sent to the surface in a last ditch attempt to determine whether Earth is habitable again, in a program called 'The 100'."
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Post by gmdf on Sept 19, 2018 6:28:24 GMT
Yes, that looks like it. Memories are a bit fallible! But what a Kent team: M H Denness, D. Nicholls, Asif Iqbal, AGE Ealham, +APE Knott, JN Shepherd, GW Johnson, RA Woolmer, BD Julien, DL Underwood, JCJ Dye - Luckhurst seems to have been rested (& Cowdrey, injured) but still some great players on show! |
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