A hundred apologies: Why cricket’s barnstorming new format deserves a long innings

I was rude about The Hundred. A real bastard. It wasn’t just because the new tournament would add even more congestion to a packed summer to the “Detriment of the Traditional Forms of the Game”. The whole thing was just so funny. I laughed at the spurious revamp of the traditional counties, which turned them into eight teams based around cities. I howled at the new made-up names, which sounded like a joke about Americans taking over the sport. The “Northern Superchargers” was an Elon Musk infrastructure promise to Newcastle. I could have sworn I once bought a T-shirt in a Thai market with “Manchester Originals” emblazoned on it.

When I saw that the teams were all sponsored by different KP Snacks, I wondered why they hadn’t just gone the whole hog and given the team snack names. Everyone could get behind the Southampton Skips, surely? The Peterborough Pringles? The Mumbai Bombay Mix? As the opening fixtures drew nearer, evidently not sold out, I scoffed at the increasingly frantic marketing emails luring me into buying tickets with the promise of musical acts I had never heard of. This new and thrilling cricketing format is enough to win everyone over, the campaign said, but Becky Hill is playing at the opening night just in case.

The desperation of it all was risible. It also felt familiar. Hadn’t we already put up with the Kent Spitfires and Notts Outlaws and cheerleaders and live music and ritual human sacrifice in the name of luring viewers to our domestic T20 format? Hadn’t every attempt failed? Why couldn’t we simply accept that our humble Blast was not going to compete with the Indian or Australian super leagues? Give it up, lads. If you keep stripping the game down, eventually it stops being cricket. If the main problem is the sport itself, no amount of boundary-side fireworks will fix it.

Then I was offered tickets to a Hundred match. The “London Spirit” versus the “Trent Rockets” at Lord’s. What’s the harm, I thought? I could have a right old giggle at the moronic circus. By the time I settled down to the Test series against India, the proper cricket that began this week, I would be able to dismiss the new short format of the game with confidence. Rather than going on prejudice alone, I’d have confirmed my prejudices were correct.

The nerves began as soon as I had downloaded the app. Although disguised by jaunty, over-designed fonts that scream “East London branding agency”, quite a lot of useful information was contained in it. My friend was able to transfer her tickets across seamlessly. We turned up in the afternoon, midway through the women’s game, to find a third-full crowd already having a jolly time of it. There were a few of the usual old geezers but also more women and children than I’d ever seen at Lord’s before, as well as a few groups of lads who looked like they’d wandered out of a football match. As the evening wore on there were Mexican waves and a few chants of “don’t take me home,” but nothing too rowdy. Since I went, Lord's has banned its traditional BYO allowance because fans were too raucous. It seems a bit suspicious, given Test-match crowds have traditionally started drinking at 11am. I wonder if the organisers see a chance to get more fans to buy drinks inside the ground.

As to the sport, it didn’t take long to realise that the tweaked format is an improvement on the traditional T20. The denouement of a decent limited-overs game is inevitably how many runs a team needs off how many balls. With those two statistics front and centre, it’s impossible not to be aware of the match situation. The Hundred’s most outlandish innovation is getting rid of traditional overs and replacing them with five-ball spells, which can be bowled two in a row from the same end. For the purists, this is tantamount to sacrilege. In fact, it works fine. Base six is a confusing numerical system for the layman. Fives and tens are simpler.

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Far from being a distraction, the tweaks to the format mostly serve to draw attention to the game itself. Newcomers to cricket are often nervous of misunderstanding some nuance or infringing some tradition, but how much of that actually matters. What even is Middlesex? I live there and I don’t know. There’s something relaxing about a new game unencumbered by historical baggage. Who cares that the London Spirit have instantly established themselves as the tournament’s whipping boys? It ought to be enough that the north London team gets to be called “London” while the south London team is called “Oval”, which is how north Londoners think of it anyway.

An old complaint about cricket is that “nothing happens” too often. Its fans have always known that the reverse of that coin is that on any ball, anything could happen. By stripping out some of the arcana and nonsense around the game, The Hundred might alienate those for whom those are beloved aspects of the experience. For millions of others, however, they have distilled the sport down to its core: the tussle between bat and ball, clear for all to see.

I was wrong. After years of criticism since it was announced, the tournament is proving the doubters wrong, game by game. I bet it will be around for a long time. It can’t have been easy for the organisers to persevere into such strong headwinds, but they were right to do so. A hundred apologies.