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Post by gmdf on Jul 23, 2019 16:45:39 GMT
Two things that ODIs do offer is the public spending much longer at the venue, which presumably equals spending more money, and an easy way to fill 8 hours on the TV sports channels. It's also worth bearing in mind that while a spectator might pop up the road to their local cricket team for an afternoon or evening T20 lasting no more than 3 hours, many would be less likely to travel greater distances for that...but would if a full day's play was on offer. |
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Post by Wicked Cricket on Jul 26, 2019 9:19:13 GMT
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Post by flashblade on Jul 31, 2019 10:09:32 GMT
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Post by philh on Jul 31, 2019 11:29:54 GMT
I expect they had to jump through a few hula hoops to be sponsor. I wonder how long it took Kevin McNair, the marketing director at KP Snacks, to come up with this: “KP Snacks prides itself in innovative approaches and this offers us a great way of mattering more to more people. We can’t wait to work with the teams to celebrate the diverse and inclusive nature of The Hundred.” |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191 
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jul 31, 2019 11:45:31 GMT
Yes, I wouldn't want to get stuck in a lift with McNair and Rob Calder (commercial director of the Hundred). The conversation might get rather monotonous.
McNair: “We can’t wait to work with the teams to celebrate the diverse and inclusive nature of The Hundred.”
Calder: "The Hundred will offer world-class cricket to a diverse range of communities and KP Snacks share that vision and opportunity."
McNair: “We are delighted to be partnering with the Hundred to help encourage families to get active through cricket."
Calder: “We’re thrilled to be partnering with KP Snacks to help grow the game of cricket and get families active."
After all that the ECB have said about their new competition, I still don't think I've seen it explained anywhere just how the Hundred will get families active, and in what way it will be more diverse and inclusive than the cricket we've already got.
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Post by flashblade on Jul 31, 2019 11:55:17 GMT
I expect they had to jump through a few hula hoops to be sponsor. I wonder how long it took Kevin McNair, the marketing director at KP Snacks, to come up with this: “KP Snacks prides itself in innovative approaches and this offers us a great way of mattering more to more people. We can’t wait to work with the teams to celebrate the diverse and inclusive nature of The Hundred.”
It's absolute garbage, isn't it?  My favourite response on the ECB Twitter feed: "This is turning into an episode of W1A." |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jul 31, 2019 12:33:34 GMT
In Eoin Morgan's "Something's got to give" address, he also said “Anybody I speak to who loves sport but not necessarily loves cricket is crying out for a tournament that he or she understands. Eighteen teams going for a long period of time does not make sense.”
I hope these sports-lovers don't find out about football. That's got more than 18 teams per division. And it goes on for nine months!
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Post by flashblade on Jul 31, 2019 13:04:19 GMT
In Eoin Morgan's "Something's got to give" address, he also said “Anybody I speak to who loves sport but not necessarily loves cricket is crying out for a tournament that he or she understands. Eighteen teams going for a long period of time does not make sense.”
I hope these sports-lovers don't find out about football. That's got more than 18 teams per division. And it goes on for nine months!
I suspect Morgan feels pressured into making supportive statements, but he knows that we know his arm is being twisted. |
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Post by Wicked Cricket on Jul 31, 2019 13:13:14 GMT
www.thehundred.com/newsThe tournament is beginning to take shape. Here is a brief summary (I am sure there is additional information). It will start in July, 2020 and last for less than a month. We know where the 8 City teams are located (Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, London x 2, Cardiff, Southampton); 2 of the Coaches (Katich and McDonald) have been chosen; there is now an official team sponsor; the draft is on October 20th (not forgetting the Women's tournament draft on another day); each side can have a squad of 15 players, so there is no-more than 120 cricketers taking part in the men's competition of which around 20 will be O/S and 100 English(?) Players will be divided into five salary bands - £120,000, £100,000, £80,000, £50,000, £25,000 - with each franchise picking three players from each. New features include a time-out period for the bowling side that is no-more than 150 seconds; The format will be made up of ten 10-ball overs, which can be bowled by one or two bowlers, in clutches of either five or 10 consecutive balls. A bowler has up to 20 balls per game. The 100 tournament will be broadcast live by Sky Sports and the BBC; tickets go on sale in the Autumn; O/S players will not be allowed to play in the OD Cup, which will run alongside this new competition. FinancialThe budget for “event production” - fireworks, pyrotechnics, dancers and the like - runs to around £6 million for the first year; The ECB’s on-the-ground marketing budget is around £800,000, per franchise, per year. Each franchise only plays four home games, so a budget of £200,000 per fixture. To put that into perspective, a large county like Surrey could spend £80,000 on marketing for an entire T20 season; tickets are set to be competitively priced - £20 has been mentioned as a potential price point.
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Post by sussexforever on Jul 31, 2019 15:22:21 GMT
I can't see this being anything other than a pathetic failure.
So £6m on fluff? The kind of stuff we have in T20 that those who come for the socialising and drinking environment love, the very bit they wanted to move away from? I just cannot see ticket sales being close to the Blast. Why on earth couldn't they just have got a deal with Sky/C4 and chucked a similar amount of games on FTA. Nothing wrong with that competition whatsoever.
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Post by flashblade on Jul 31, 2019 16:28:52 GMT
www.thehundred.com/newsThe tournament is beginning to take shape. Here is a brief summary (I am sure there is additional information). It will start in July, 2020 and last for less than a month. We know where the 8 City teams are located (Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, London x 2, Cardiff, Southampton); 2 of the Coaches (Katich and McDonald) have been chosen; there is now an official team sponsor; the draft is on October 20th (not forgetting the Women's tournament draft on another day); each side can have a squad of 15 players, so there is no-more than 120 cricketers taking part in the men's competition of which around 20 will be O/S and 100 English(?) Players will be divided into five salary bands - £120,000, £100,000, £80,000, £50,000, £25,000 - with each franchise picking three players from each. New features include a time-out period for the bowling side that is no-more than 150 seconds; The format will be made up of ten 10-ball overs, which can be bowled by one or two bowlers, in clutches of either five or 10 consecutive balls. A bowler has up to 20 balls per game. The 100 tournament will be broadcast live by Sky Sports and the BBC; tickets go on sale in the Autumn; O/S players will not be allowed to play in the OD Cup, which will run alongside this new competition. FinancialThe budget for “event production” - fireworks, pyrotechnics, dancers and the like - runs to around £6 million for the first year; The ECB’s on-the-ground marketing budget is around £800,000, per franchise, per year. Each franchise only plays four home games, so a budget of £200,000 per fixture. To put that into perspective, a large county like Surrey could spend £80,000 on marketing for an entire T20 season; tickets are set to be competitively priced - £20 has been mentioned as a potential price point. "The tournament is beginning to take shape"  |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jul 31, 2019 23:51:14 GMT
I imagine for many people one of the main obstacles to supporting the Hundred project is that, right from the start, the ECB themselves haven't seemed sure what exactly it is that they like about it. Initially they asked us to believe in an unarguable need for a city-based T20 competition, clearly intended to emulate the success of the IPL and the Kentucky Fried Chicken Big Bash League. If you thought that sounded great, and urged others to get behind it, the ECB then proceeded to make you look foolish by getting out of city T20 futures like it was the worst idea anyone had ever had.
They remembered they already had a thriving and lucrative T20 league. It would be crazy to have two T20 tournaments in the same season. What they were now calling the 'New Competition' had to be different. Eventually they came up with the 100-ball format, pretending that the "fresh tactical dimension" of the final 10-ball over was the whole point of it, and that was why it had to be 100 balls. Even the most avid franchise fan would be starting to wonder at this point, but perhaps you'd go along with the fresh tactical dimension if you believed in the overall project. Meanwhile the ECB were preparing to pull the ladder up on their supporters once again.
Overs were now old thinking, and posed an insurmountable intellectual challenge to the hoped-for new audience for cricket. Six-ball overs would be replaced by nameless groupings of five and ten balls, counting down from a hundred. Some people think the franchise project will succeed in spite of this stupid format. The only people who claim to be actively in favour of it tend to be ECB officials, centrally-contracted players, and Hundred coaches. When did you read someone not on the ECB payroll enthusing about the playing conditions for the Hundred? But cricketers, coaches and board executives are just normal people. They're not some strange subset of humanity that's genetically predisposed to relish counting down from a hundred in sporting contests. It's inconceivable that they all like it as much as they say they do, while no one else likes it one bit.
The city aspect of city-based T20 didn't have much legs either. Before long the ECB were announcing that the teams would have no geographical connection. This might have been the least divisive idea they'd had yet, but they weren't convinced. Suddenly cities were back on for some reason. It's probably all there in Sanjay Patel's secret 100 million data points. Further market research tipped the ECB off that tying teams to named cities was likely to alienate far more people than it would attract, so they've been backing out of the city-based concept ever since. At the last count the Hundred is three-eighths city-based (and there's a resentful, apologetic feel even about that).
Then there's the matter of who this competition is for. It was oddly reassuring to read the Steve Elworthy quote that Flashblade picked out: "It is about me trying to understand what that promise is. What is the tournament? And that is what I am trying to get to grips with at the moment." Aren't we all?!
Naturally the ECB want to increase their audience as much as possible, but in the beginning the franchise project definitely had existing cricket fans in its sights: 'You enjoy the Blast. This is going to be bigger and better, like the IPL'. Overs would still be overs, just that the one at the end would become distended. I don't know when it was that the ECB grew weary of 'obsessives', as they call us, but they weren't planning a rigorous cricket tournament when they were giving serious consideration to adding a fourth stump and eliminating LBW. This would have been a whole other kind of entertainment (albeit one with a strong cricketing flavour).
As ECB's Director of Cricket, Andrew Strauss made our exclusion explicit with comments such as "We want the more casual audience" (obsessives not welcome!); and "What we're trying to do is appeal to a new audience, people that aren't traditional cricket fans."
Cricket fans are back in style now. ECB Chief Executive Tom Harrison's admonition that “There may be some requirement to do some mythbusting here” wasn't the least patronising way to welcome people who like cricket back into the Hundred fold. But he did go on to say “The new competition is designed to appeal to cricket fans first and foremost"; and "There's no sense that this is not for cricket fans". Which was right neighbourly of him.
Out of all of this there just isn't a sense of one good idea being followed through. The ECB have been conceiving and abandoning ideas on the fly throughout, while despairing of anyone who hasn't got with the programme as it stands on any given week. The only constant is their craving for money. Proponents of the franchise project will obediently chant slogans such as "Plug the £150m county black hole!", and "£1.3m a year for all!" as though this is all free money that automatically materialises once you promise people a franchise league. But one look at the figures Wicked Cricket posted above (or a different breakdown I attempted a few pages back) will show that the whole project is really quite financially precarious.
The broadcasting contract for 2020 to 2024 is worth £1.1bn, of which £200m is for the Hundred. If the ultimate justification for the Hundred is that cash-strapped counties will have money chucked at them, couldn't the ECB have settled for a £900m broadcasting deal, and not had the Hundred with all its terrifying costs and all-round financial jeopardy, and still made substantial contributions to county funds? But of course it's not really about that ("future-proofing the county game", in Tom Harrison's words). Supporting the counties is just camouflage. The prime directive is the enrichment of the ECB.
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Post by flashblade on Aug 1, 2019 7:56:32 GMT
Great summary, Bazpan.
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Post by liquidskin on Aug 1, 2019 18:22:22 GMT
It's Ringcycle and it's all gonna go tits-up. We ain't got over a billion people who all love cricket and it's not even the number two sport in the country, let alone number one.
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