The ECB’s new 100-ball format certainly has its element of farce, but it should be given a chance, writes Phil Walker.
Not that you’d think it judging from the tirades of certainty raining down on social media yesterday, but the ECB’s latest radical idea to provide an upswing for a game in dire need of one carries more questions than answers.
Surely the big question is whether anything should be happening at all. Does English cricket really need another short-form knees-up when its Test team can’t buy a win away from home, the Championship has been shunted ever-further to the margins and the game at large is buried in a surfeit of smash-‘n’-bash? How can England’s overstretched alphas combine their international commitments with poster-boy duties for a newfangled ruse that desperately needs its stardust, and will Root, Stokes, Moeen and the like get to play any of it anyway?
What does it mean for women’s cricket, after the heavy lifting to get the Kia Super League off the ground, only for that tournament to wither as the women’s game aligns with the men’s? And how can we justify another T20 tournament when we’ve already got one, and a pretty popular one at that?
In critical times – and just read those 2014 figures again – there must be some scope, morally and creatively, to try something new. Shorter games specifically aimed at families, with mooted start times of 2:30pm and 6:30pm and games finishing at a socially agreeable hour so families can get home, and TV-watching kids up to bed. A concerted joined-up marketing campaign that creates heroes of its stars, many of whom are simply unrecognisable to a majority of young people. A fresh push to establish All Stars Cricket at the heart of pre-teen participation and to align it with this easy-to-view, BBC-promoted new competition with its silly rules and its bonkers team names.
It might tank, but it’s worth a go. Cricket has always been accused, and not always fairly, of fustiness, of living off its garlanded past. For too long, those who ran the game in this country held to the belief that a successful England team and a packed-out Lord’s equated to a healthy game overall. Thankfully, and not before time, such arrogance has been punctured. Cricket is in the fight of its life.
