Column: Cross Talk
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK, July 24, 2021 – Forget the absurd marketing stunt by Dennis Lillee when he played with an aluminum bat in a Test series in Australia in 1979, which he had to throw away in disgust after English players complained, or the extinct sport of Auto Polo, invented in the US in the early 20th century which was popular for about a decade; players drove automobiles, instead of mounting horses, with crashes galore.
Here’s international sport’s next big failure in the offing: The Hundred – a blatantly plagiarized, dim-witted concoction of a limited overs cricket tournament in England.
In all fairness, cricket itself has gone through massive evolutionary process, since it emanated in England in the late 16th century. After nobles realized its gambling potential, apart from crowd appeal in the 18th century, it underwent numerous avatars. It’s now only next to soccer in international popularity.
Over the centuries, it has toyed with 4-ball, 5-ball, 8-ball, and 6-ball overs, in different formats. The current 6-ball-an-over rule has been a constant since the 1979/80 seasons in Australia and New Zealand. Of course, The Hundred, which was inaugurated earlier this week, has introduced the 10-ball over.
While England came up with the Twenty20 format in 2003, for their inter-county competition, the first 50-over match was, in fact, played in 1951, in Tripunithura, in Kerala, at the All India Pooja Cricket Tournament. It was reportedly conceived by KV Kelappan Thampuran, the first Secretary of the Kerala Cricket Association.
The biggest accomplishment of The Hundred – no derivation of the American post-apocalyptic science fiction drama television series ‘The 100’ and likely won’t last the seven seasons it did – is to make a 100-ball or 16.4 over game sound grandiloquent. an extravaganza replete with garish and hypnotic lights on a scoreboard, an LED tunnel (Kerry Packer might be wincing in his grave) for male and female players of eight clubs to saunter through to the field, and a live DJ in action, to bolster the boisterousness of beer-chuggers.
Despite those sundry bells and whistles, and accoutrements (minus the cheerleaders), it seems a feeble attempt to dethrone the now firmly established and highly popular Twenty20 format cricket game, which has a World Cup devoted to it.
Here’s the bottom line: The Hundred, despite its colorful attire, and different looking scoreboard, is as hollow a product as is out there, in sports. It has no aspirations of ever reaching sporting glory, having a World Cup dedicated to it. In fact, even stats from games played in this new-fangled format will go down in the T20 record books. Its only true goal: to make some lucre for ECB, at the danger of obliterating the traditional County, Test and 50-over domestic game in England which has been whittled down considerably.
Down the road, there’s real danger of English players being aghast at the thought of playing five days in a row for one measly Test match, with 90 overs a day minimum.
‘Heck!’, future English players (who are smart in math) would think, ‘that’s playing like Two Thousand Seven Hundred over five days, at the rate of Five Hundred and Forty, a day. I could instead play at least 3 One Hundred tournaments and make more money!’
If England were to do poorly in international cricket, especially long-form cricket, blame it on The Hundred. It would also have huge repercussions on the sport itself, could disrupt Test matches around the globe, make it lose its intrinsic value for paying customers.
Perhaps, all this jostling is just vain-glory attempt by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), who were itching to replicate the “One Hundred and Twenty’ ball game they invented; forgot to patent. Like India lost out on basmati rice patent to RiceTec, and to their chagrin there’s Texmati too, to contend with.
Perhaps, the tremendous success of the IPL and Big Bash even as England’s domestic cricket languished – the sport disappeared for the masses behind TV paywalls, exited from the grounds of their public schools, got the allure of an elite sport played mostly by immigrants from South Asia or those who had the money to get their children coached – made them go bonkers. They came up with an idea which Edison might not have clapped enthusiastically at: to reinvent the bicycle, as the bi-cycle.
Imagine the consternation of the 7Up makers, if somebody were to market the same product couched as SevenUp. Oh well! To be again fair to the ECB, they did come up with the Twenty20, back in 2003 (or is that two thousand and three in their jargon?). But the question to be asked of this new bastardization of the T20 is: is it plagiarism if a writer were to write two books with almost the same plot and climax, with the second one being 20 pages less in length?
Or perhaps one could ask if England is more incensed by the departure of their royals, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, to Hollywood, or by their once-upon-a-time national sport making cricket boards rich around the world, even as it’s in doldrums in their own country?
ECB is not the only one who is trying to reinvent the wheel. There are T10 leagues, introduced first in the United Arab Emirates – and championed by the likes of Eoin Morgan and Virender Sehwag mooting it as the ideal format for cricket to find a place in the Olympics. Come next year, Sharjah will introduce the world to the Ninety–90 Bash – which most discerning cricket fans would quickly realize is comprised of 90-ball matches.
Despite the bespoke look and feel on TV and the hyper-real avatars, which the organizers hope will appeal to a younger audience tuned in digitally to watch The Hundred, the fact is that even the shorter version is no ice hockey or basketball when it comes to expected frenetic activity on the field – essential to hook younger viewers.
At the end of the day, cricket’s appeal is not just who won, but statistics of individual players, like in baseball. By shortening a game which was already apologetic for its brevity, in the form of T20, there’s danger of making the new format redundant.
The Hundred might not give enough time for a lot of cobbled players in a team to make a mark, induce false shots by batters (as they are known, for gender neutrality), and too many spinners dominating, with wickets lacking pace. Fewer spectators would feel the compulsion to watch regularly, after the initial euphoria fades.
One has to also contend with the fact that cricket is becoming as crowded as streaming apps on TV. There’s a glut of cricket globally, with international matches and domestic limited over competitions on at the same time, competing for eyeballs, and sponsors.
For new, younger audiences, The Hundred, like any other form of cricket, would also pose the dilemma of boring stretches of play, replete with monotony, and mostly predictable results. The vagaries of weather in England is another concern.
The irony is that the ECB had a real chance to effect groundbreaking change in cricket, through The Hundred. Here are at least two things they could have done and revolutionized the sport, for posterity.
- Have mixed gender teams – with at least 5 women players in each playing 11. This truly would have brought larger number of women and children to the field, made it fascinating to watch. It would also have paved the path for closing the gender pay gap, like tennis has done. The salaries in The Hundred, range from £24,000 to £100,000 for men, versus £3,600 to £15,000 for the women.
In the US, the average player compensation in 2019, for men and women, is most glaring for baseball vs. softball, with men making $4,031,549 vs. $6,000 for women; in basketball it was $8,321,937, vs $75,181; golf, $1,235,495 vs $48,993; and in soccer, $410,730 vs $35,000. Only in tennis is it relatively close: $335,946 for men vs $283,635 for women.
- Have a talented local teenager play in each of the 8 teams in The Hundred, to boost interest in the sport in youngsters, and make it popular again in public schools.
The cruel irony of The Hundred is that despite its attempt to popularize the women’s game, the women players are going to be more exposed of their limitations when playing a match on the same day their male counterparts do; feel disheartened by lesser spectators.
This was clear from the onset of the tournament. By the time the second game started, on Friday, an almost empty stadium for the women’s match was hard to ignore.
The Hundred likely won’t vanish like chariot racing from the Byzantine era, hang on for a while, finances permitting. One can only hope that it doesn’t go the way of another extinct sport – Cock Throwing – where a rooster was tied to a post and people took turns throwing sticks at it until the rooster died.
Hopefully, the sport of cricket itself doesn’t become that rooster, as The Hundred evolves.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief of www.indiaoverseasreport.com Write to him: editor@indiaoverseasreport.com Follow him on Twitter @SujeetRajan1)
