ECB chief executive Richard Gould has admitted his organisation could have been “more honest” when laying out the role of attracting in private investment in their motivation for launching the Hundred.

The Hundred is now into its fourth season, with teams currently centrally owned by the ECB. That is set to change from next year, with the ECB currently in negotiations with potential investors over the sale of the eight sides in the competition. The organisation turned down a bid in the hundreds of millions to buy the competition outright in late 2022, but the topic of privatisation has been oft-discussed since, and is now reaching its head.

The ECB’s argument for the Hundred being needed was in large part that it would arrest a slide in interest in cricket, particularly among young people, and bring the game to a new audience. Speaking to Sky Sports’ Michael Atherton during the lunch break on day one of the third England-West Indies Test at Edgbaston, Gould was asked if the “principal rationale” for introducing the Hundred was “to create a vehicle for private investment” and whether it would have been better for the ECB to say from the start. Gould, who joined the ECB in 2023, agreed with Atherton in part.

“I think potentially that would have been a more honest argument,” he said. “It may have been more difficult at that point because clubs may not have wanted to have such a large slice of equity taken off them in that regard. But I think one of the great things about cricket is it’s full of nice people who want to work together, generally. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. Clubs, they want to support all 41 members of the ECB. They want to support all 18 first-class counties. And the upside of this model is sometimes professional clubs can overheat things, can get into financial difficulties, and when that happens you can lose an entire club from its community. That won’t happen under the model that we’re creating.”

The Hundred has endured a fraught few weeks, with the opening rounds of the men’s competition noticeably low key. Many star players have yet to appear, with commitments in Major League Cricket or for England interfering. London Spirit, in their opening game, fielded just one overseas player - Daniel Hughes, who is yet to play for his native Australia. Reports have also swirled over hold-ups in the investment process. However Gould dismissed these as potential investors simply trying to “negotiate through the media” and defended this as the correct moment to sell off the eight sides.

“What we’ve got to point out to some of our media friends is that there’s lots of people who are very, very interested in the Hundred and sometimes they’ll be tempted to negotiate through the media, and we will do the same,” he said. “It’s the right time now. I talked about 17 global franchise [tournaments] at the moment. It’s a very competitive infrastructure, ecosystem out there. We’re in a good position to go to market now because we’ve got a competition which is going into its fourth year, which is delivering really good crowds, which has captured the imagination, and which is also in a very mature market.

“You see a lot of these competitions taking place in areas which don’t have a strong domestic market. We have that and we have places like this [Edgbaston], like Old Trafford, like Lord’s, like The Oval. That provides a huge asset to the game. And we’ve been really buoyed by the conversations that we’ve had with the current hosts. They are pitching their lot in with this as well.”

Before joining the ECB, Gould held roles as chief executive at Somerset and Surrey. He was a prominent critic of the Hundred before its launch, including of the ECB’s approach in announcing the new format. “The reason it came as a bit of a shock is that, as counties, we were invited to a meeting at Lord's, we were sat down in a room, we were told that a fourth format is going to be issued and whilst we were in the room, the press release was sent out,” he said in 2021. "For any reasonable person, that felt like a bit of an ambush and therefore a negative response from some was going to be due.”

Pressed on his apparent change in views, Gould explained how he felt the Hundred and county cricket could work in tandem. “The Kia Oval and Surrey hosted a sold-out Blast game on Thursday and then a sold-out Hundred game on the Tuesday, so I don’t think it’s a binary issue. I think the more that we can to take the whole of English cricket in a collaborative fashion is great. There were a few eggs broken when we went through that process [of launching the Hundred], and we’re trying to fix some of that.”

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