Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191 
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Apr 19, 2021 15:07:38 GMT
I don't think we can rest easy in the knowledge that Sky will take the hit if this is a failure. A while ago on here I was doing some crude arithmetic which seemed to show that The Hundred would have to be subsidised by the rest of the English game.
Or you can take Tom Harrison's word for it. The figures he gave to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport inquiry in May 2020 indicated that The Hundred is projected to make around an £11m loss in its first year once the £1.3m payments to each county are taken into account. I hope Harrison knows what he's doing, since £11m also happened to be the level to which the ECB's cash reserves had plummeted according to the most recent accounts available at that time (and I don't suppose their reserves have improved much since then).
Of course some will argue that all such competitions make a loss to begin with, but they have to become a success at some point if they're ever going to stop losing money. This isn't by any means a risk-free proposition for the ECB. And I'd suggest that Harrison's projections were likely to have been at the high end of optimistic.
The Hundred element of the broadcasting deal is already included in these calculations, so English cricket will definitely have to find some money to offset the losses occasioned by The Hundred, at least in the early years. The big question is whether it will ever deliver the promised riches, or even just be able to support itself. Much will depend upon the popularity of the baseball caps available on the merchandise site (£37 including postage).
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Post by Wicked Cricket on Apr 20, 2021 10:52:42 GMT
Bazpan, To repeat, it is a massive gamble and, of course, the ECB will take a hit if it's "a disastrous failure", but not enough to jeopardise the Board's collapse or the demise of English county cricket. SKY will take the main financial brunt. I was an early SKY subscriber being a keen fan of The Simpsons. I will never forget the moment when I learned that Murdoch was losing £1 million a day, yes a day, on SKY during the early 1990s, where his entire media empire was close to collapse. Yet, he kept going like all successful entrepreneurs/gamblers do and it paid off. I don't believe for one minute SKY will give up on The 100, if the tournament is losing money, which it almost certainly will in the first three years. How much? Who knows. The key moment will come in 2024 when SKY renews its contract with the ECB for 2025 and onwards. Interestingly, the ECB saved £25.2m in operating costs when The 100 was postponed last year as SKY had already paid the first instalment of their fee and is not seeking a rebate. Instead, the payment has been deferred to this season. www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/cricket/article-8279097/Sky-Sports-hold-payment-ECB-broadcasting-competition-postponed.htmlBelow is something to view and "salivate your sense-buds".    |
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Apr 20, 2021 12:37:30 GMT
Yes they've been pestering me as well about my expiring priority ticket window, as I bought tickets for the inaugural match at The Oval last year. This time round my cricket mates seemed to find the humour potential of a trip to a Hundred game harder to locate. At least, none of them replied to my text on the subject, and I didn't feel like pushing it. Don't know what's the matter with them as I thought it had the makings of a fine day out. Spend the day getting hammered in south London before subjecting ourselves to this appalling cricket-flavoured spectacle, which we'd confidently expect to be ripe for merciless mockery. Well I haven't yet given up on getting to a game. Perhaps it's the sort of thing that needs to be broached gently in person, now that we're allowed to see each other.
I'm actually quite looking forward to watching a game or two (perhaps just one) on TV. Although, Flintoff as lead commentator is quite an intimidating proposition. I'd almost rather listen to David Lloyd reading selected extracts from his Twitter feed in which he felt he had the better of the exchanges than the histrionic yelping of Andrew Flintoff. Still, I'm sure he's got the right dynamic for The Hundred.
I do wonder if the first edition of The Hundred might turn out to be the most successful. If nothing else, it certainly has novelty value at the moment. Whether or not it's actually any cop is quite a different matter. Assuming the new audience for cricket isn't drawn mainly from the imbecile demographic, they might find that this dopey format played between made-up teams just isn't holding their interest. Best-case outcome might be that the typical Hundred-goer thinks "There's obviously something to this cricket stuff, but I'd like to watch a less stupid version of it".
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Apr 20, 2021 13:50:14 GMT
Anyway, Hundred Schmundred. If I'm to believe the news, there's a far greater atrocity going on in the world of sport at the moment. Any time now the government will probably announce a two-minute silence to remember the victims of the European Super League.
I know little of football but I just saw a headline that resonated somewhat. Apparently the 14 Premier League clubs not in the ESL have unanimously rejected the new tournament. Cricket showed the way when it comes to resolving problems of this nature. If the 14 rebel clubs were offered the football equivalent of £1.3m then perhaps they could see their way clear to endorsing the ESL.
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Apr 24, 2021 1:43:06 GMT
Well they thought about it for more than ten seconds, and decided not to call wickets 'outs' after all. It seems they had particular difficulty imagining commentators talking about 'leading out-takers'. A Hundred spin doctor explained: "Along with our broadcast partners, we've been discussing the clearest ways of explaining the game. As such you will see 'Out' used on broadcast and event coverage to communicate the end of the batter’s innings, but we will continue to use 'wickets' as the metric which is consistent with other formats."
Can't argue with that. Whenever someone new to the game asks me what 'out' means, I usually reply "That's the way the end of a batter's innings is communicated on event coverage". And it's good that they're harmonising the wicket metric with other formats. I still can't wait to hear what the new word for 'overs' will be, as you do need a word to describe a bowler's turn ... his or her sequence of five balls. I think they're really struggling with this. I would be. I'd probably end up calling it a cluster. Or a quintet or something. We know that when a bowler is kept on for another five deliveries having already bowled the standard five, that's a Super Ten (unless that's been quietly ditched as well), but I really can't think of a suitable one-word description for five deliveries. Perhaps 'over' really can't be improved upon. Well they've been kicking this can down the road for a few years now, but they're finally running out of time to come up with something.
In the fast-paced world of the lexicon of The Hundred, 'Man of the Match' might be changed to the gender-neutral 'Match Hero'. No Match Heroines then, I take it. The same way actresses are now referred to as 'actors'. And batswomen 'batters' of course. Anyway I think Match Hero will probably stick.
Eight group-stage games are currently shown as 'Selling Fast'. Presumably the other 26 are 'Selling Moderately'. It's still early days of course, but perhaps most of the people who'd have been gagging for some post-lockdown Hundred action could have been expected to pounce upon the tickets as soon as they became available. Then again, I haven't yet sensed the marketing onslaught that the ECB have boasted will cost five times what they spend on promoting the England team's entire home programme of matches. I guess we'll know when it hits us.
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on May 17, 2021 20:00:24 GMT
Over at The Hundred it's all go on the brand-resonance optimisation. OK I made that phrase up, but 'building authenticity' is all Tom Harrison's:-
"Work is being done at the moment on the team identities. There's a lot of research into building authenticity on those identities."
This had me running back to the Australian Spirit of Cricket manifesto, just to reassure myself that they really did have the chutzpah to boast of "a long-standing, proactive approach to integrity management". It felt like a companion piece somehow.
Believing authenticity to be no more capable of being 'built' than that integrity might yield to being managed, I read on in the hope of learning what this authenticity-construction process has entailed. But Harrison wasn't spilling the beans. Instead we just got his usual drivel about how The Hundred is already a financial triumph before the first Super Ten has even been bowled (are we still calling it 'bowling'?). And an odd prediction that "We'll demonstrate an ambition behind this that is very pure". I wouldn't have Tom Harrison's thoughts.
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on May 19, 2021 1:45:55 GMT
Continuing with my popular dissection of Tom Harrison's word-choices, which I think are quite telling.
In the early days of the IPL and the Big Bash, I doubt anyone left the ground after a match saying "For me that was all about the authenticity. And the purity of the ambition". For various cultural and geographical reasons, those concepts won't have been of great concern in those tournaments. Purity and authenticity won't have come up in even the most free-associative of IPL and Big Bash marketing brainstorming sessions.
But something's making Tom Harrison start talking about that stuff now. Is he 'reaching out' to 'traditional cricket fans', belatedly realising he still needs us? Or are the focus groups telling him that even the new audience for cricket still needs reasons to get behind 'their' teams? With just two months to go until the first match, it all feels a bit late in the day. They had a whole extra year to get ready for this, and only now is Harrison reassuring us that they're frantically trying to make the teams mean something. He seems to be saying "Don't worry about the fact that these are just made-up franchises at the moment. Book your tickets now - eight of the 36 fixtures are selling fast by the way - and by the time you get to the game we'll have built some authenticity into it for you".
You may have seen yesterday's announcement that the Hundred's host grounds will each have a resident DJ who "will curate a unique soundtrack that is reflective of their city and the people". You don't need to recoil as instinctively as I do from anything that's been curated to wonder how this after-the-fact authenticity can possibly make anyone give a stuff about their nearest Hundred franchise, perhaps two counties away.
For me the most striking thing about this new competition is that even the ECB have no confidence in it. So how can they expect us to (leaving aside their lame taunts about 'traditionalists' being afraid of anything new)? They spent a lot of time trying to persuade us that the need for a city-based T20 competition was self-evident. Then they noticed that they already had a thriving domestic T20 competition, so they had to come up with a new format - any format. Didn't have to be a good one. Just different. They demanded our enthusiasm for a game involving 15 six-ball overs followed by a final ten-ball over. The final over would, they promised, add "a new tactical dimension", as though the fascinating tactical possibilities of a single ten-ball over were something that they'd been gagging to get into cricket for years, and now was their chance. Whereas of course it was just a patch once they'd alighted upon the idea of 100 balls and subsequently realised that six-ball overs don't go into 100 very neatly.
Then they noticed that the 50 balls from each end idea would result in a broken over at the change of ends. So they abandoned that, together with six-ball overs. Groups of five balls go into 100 much better so they went with that, but they'd already made so much of the ridiculous "new tactical dimension" offered by a ten-ball over that they felt obliged to retain that element. This presumably being why we're stuck with this arbitrary-seeming option whereby a captain can keep a bowler on for a second successive group of five balls. Have either the old or the potential new audience for cricket been crying out for sporadic extended overs? Is this the one thing (aside from a decimal format) that cricket has always lacked?
Then the ECB realised that a close identification with cities is actually quite divisive in the UK, so they suppressed that aspect. Hence why five of the eight franchises are instead named after a country, a cricket ground, two compass points and a river. But they must have been getting bad vibes about those connections, so now they're trying to strengthen the authenticity of the city associations!
From the overall concept to the precise detail of the playing conditions, the only reason we'll end up with what we end up with is that the music has to stop at some point because the tournament is about to start. If the ECB had another two years to tinker around with it ... to fix the latest defects that they'd noticed, and then to fix the problems that the earlier fixes had caused ... the eventual competition would be unrecognisable from the one starting in July. This being my main objection to The Hundred. It has no single, fundamental, good idea. It has no truth. Even the people behind it don't believe in it.
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Post by gmdf on May 19, 2021 7:20:03 GMT
The best thing that can happen with the 100 is a very average, uninspiring few weeks which don't bankrupt the game but do make them wake up and realise they need to involve the countries and leads to a new, better financed, version of the T20 Blast BEFORE the 100 totally collapses, taking the English professional game with it.
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Post by liquidskin on May 19, 2021 20:18:00 GMT
It's gonna be a success because they don't care what old duffers think - they've done a footie super league on everyone's arse, they have a whole new market to hit.
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Post by sussexforever on May 25, 2021 11:19:19 GMT
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jun 15, 2021 11:16:18 GMT
At last a purpose has been found for The Hundred. It will provide therapy for traumatised England batsmen. Graham Thorpe says The Hundred will help them forget about New Zealand. Of course there's also a risk that it'll help them forget about how to bat in Test matches (from an admittedly low base of remembering). We're often told that it's unreasonable to expect cricketers to switch between formats, hence the Championship being hollowed out to the margins of the season and all competitions played in concentrated blocks. That argument is conveniently ditched so as to get Test players into The Hundred for, what - three games max? Seeing as how The Hundred starts on 22nd July and the 1st Test v. India starts on 4th August. Once the Tests start I don't want to hear any batsmen chortling ruefully "I think I was still in Hundred mode there!".
Five weeks out from the start I'm still not getting much sense of the promised marketing onslaught. Since The Hundred isn't aimed at people like me perhaps this is evidence of how well-targeted the promotional campaign has been. I've seen one TV ad, on the Alibi channel, suggesting that true-crime documentary viewers might also be expected to be open to the idea of The Hundred. There must be a joke in there somewhere. Anyone on here been exposed to any Hundred marketing? Any mums and kids perhaps?
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Post by flashblade on Jun 15, 2021 17:51:58 GMT
Anyone on here been exposed to any Hundred marketing, you ask. I follow the comp on Facebook, and read their occasional posts. It’s certainly clear that I’m not part of the target audience by the way! Most of the responses are fervently anti. The occasional would be fan, after some discussion, seems to have no grasp of the domestic cricket structure. The thread leader sounds desperate at times and gushes effusively if someone sounds positive. My ambition is to monitor its failure. If you don’t agree, ask yourself why our young red ball batters can’t cope at test level.
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jun 15, 2021 21:25:41 GMT
Thank you for your despatch from the front line of the Hundred Facebook page, which prompted me to check back in for the first time in over a year. Hasn't changed much! The lamest marketing come-ons ever scripted, such as ...
"Which player in The Hundred would you have on the back of your team shirt?"
"Tell us your favourite player."
"If you could have an access all areas pass with any team in The Hundred, which would it be?"
"Who will you go with?"
... interspersed with comments like "Stuff the Hundred", "where can buy shirt", "If only the ECB made as much effort marketing County cricket."
Not to be picky, but I suppose you haven't actually been exposed to Hundred marketing so much as having wilfully gone looking for it (much like me with my regular visits to the official website). Given the colossal promotional budget, by this stage I'd be expecting to walk out of my front door to be confronted by Hundred billboards, or skywriting or something. But I haven't even seen the TV ad on the Sky cricket channels. It's all strangely low-key. What's all the money going on? Spamming Mumsnet? Banner ads on home-learning modules? Slots on GB News? (The Hundred is for ordinary people after all). I'm not convinced the new audience for cricket has even been told yet how it's meant to be spending July and August.
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Bazpan
2nd XI player
Posts: 191
County club member: Kent
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Post by Bazpan on Jun 22, 2021 21:24:15 GMT
The Hundred marketing is starting to hit its stride. These bits are from an email I received today, alongside some hectoring about the Early Bird ticket window expiring in 24 hours. (I'd assumed it already had months ago).
The Hundred is excited to announce a new partnership with The Croods 2: A New Age, DreamWorks Animation’s latest family adventure blockbuster ... The partnership builds on The Hundred’s desire to take cricket to a family audience and inspire kids to pick up a bat and ball.
That's the big difference between The Hundred and family-hostile competitions like the Royal London Cup right there. Admittedly the RLC appears to have been given a marketing budget of precisely zero, but it would never occur to the 50-over cup to enter into partnerships with computer-animated films, whereas The Hundred actually cares about kids.
Both brands will work together on several initiatives at games and in the cinema to excite families during what promises to be an unforgettable summer
If anyone takes their children to see The Croods, can you report back on these initiatives? A trip to the cinema already gets padded out enough with trailers and ads. I can easily imagine any in-cinema cricket-related initiatives outstaying their welcome instantly. Even a taster session of Kwik Cricket down the front of the stalls will test the patience of some young film fans.
Families will be able to enter competitions to win tickets for The Hundred
"Mum, we've won tickets to the Hundred fixture of our choice!"
"Where's the nearest game?"
"About a hundred miles away."
The film also celebrates the strong female characters who are heroes of the story - a message that aligns with The Hundred as a champion of women in sport
(I do like a film that celebrates the characters that have been invented for it). This is one of the main fictions of The Hundred, along with the one about restoring cricket to normal television. Proponents of The Hundred will sometimes ask me if I hate the idea of cricket being on terrestrial TV. (Hardly!). Do I want the women's game to be perpetually subjugated by the establishment patriarchy (No!). But The Hundred seems to get credited with independent agency, uniquely able to level up the viewing of cricket on TV and to treat the women's game with respect. Not like those other, elitist, misogynistic competitions we've got. But the ECB is in charge of all of them! It could stick any of the domestic competitions on terrestrial TV just by not selling them to a subscription broadcaster. It could set up parallel women's versions of any of the men's competitions, with equal billing and prize money. If it wanted to.
Rob Calder, Commercial Director of The Hundred said: “We’re really excited by this partnership as it’s something the sport and film industry haven’t done before."
True. McDonald's do it all the time though. They seem to permanently have a tie-in with some children's film on current release. Since KP Snacks are The Hundred's main sponsor it seems quite fitting that the competition should emulate the connection between fast food and films aimed at children.
(Versions of these opinions may have appeared in earlier posts).
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Post by sussexforever on Jun 23, 2021 17:06:06 GMT
During the lunchtime interval of the world test championship final on Sunday one of Sky's entire 4 min ad breaks was taken up by an advert for the Hundred. Presumably aimed at the audience of new fans who would be watching the Test match already? Or should I be realistic- aimed at Indian cricket fans who might not bother with the T20 Blast.
Another recent irritation was seeing Stokes had played his first Blast game for Durham in 3 years. Unavailable previously due to fear of being overworked and all that nonsense yet no doubt he'll be playing every Hundred game possible. Got to look after their welfare after all.
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