If something isn’t broken …

Each county ground has its own soundtrack, subtly distinct from every other. At the Oval there are the schoolchildren playing at the other side of the Harleyford Road, the high jet planes on the approach to Heathrow, and the gravelly shouts of “C’mon the ’rey” from the gruff fan who sits at the back of the Peter May stand. These last few days, while Surrey have been playing Hampshire, there has been a new undertone to it, murmurs, mutters, disgruntled chuntering about the England and Wales Cricket Board. It is not an entirely unfamiliar sound, but it is louder and more insistent than before. And unlike those other notes, these aren’t unique to the Oval.

As you know by now, the ECB wants to launch a new format of the sport, 100 balls a side, split into 15 six-ball overs and another, at the end, of 10 balls. Which means it would need to change the Laws of the sport. The rest of us have been chewing this over for the best part of a week now, and it hasn’t got any easier to swallow. The ECB has achieved the difficult feat of bringing English cricket into broad agreement. Almost everyone thinks its idea stinks, whether they’re from Middlesex, Surrey, Lancashire or any one of the four corners of Yorkshire, whether they love T20 or Tests. The most enthusiastic responses run to lukewarm caution.

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Which, the marketing men will tell you, is exactly the reaction the ECB wanted. Because if you already go to the Oval, this competition’s not for you, likewise if you subscribe to Sky, listen to TMS, are a county member, part of the Barmy Army or in the ballot for tickets to the Lord’s Test. When Cricket Australia was setting up the Big Bash its consultant, Dan Migala, felt “everyone in the room should feel a little uncomfortable”. If the fans were uneasy, that only meant the plans were radical. “What you have to remember,” Migala said, “is that there’s a lot more people who know nothing about this sport than there are people that love it.”

And that’s the audience the ECB is after, the many more who know nothing about the sport. This is an attempt to fix the mess it made when it sold the TV rights to Sky back in the 2000s. English cricket has never been more popular than it was in 2005, when 22.65m people watched at least 30 minutes of the Ashes series, and never been less popular than it is in 2018. The ECB’s own survey of schoolchildren showed that three in five didn’t even rank cricket in their top-10 favourite sports, and adult participation in club cricket dropped by 64,000.

So the ECB has taken Migala’s principle and run with it. It is so desperate to get back into the mainstream that it is willing to alienate, and infuriate, the millions of fans who have stuck with it so they can try and sell the sport to an audience who either don’t know it or don’t like it. And it is going to marginalise, and even scrap, the competitions which serve its existing market, the County Championship, the T20 Blast, the one-day cup, and the women’s Super League, to do it.

Which leaves it in the challenging position of trying to sell cricket to people who don’t like it, when it can’t even satisfy the people who do. In its wisdom, it has been decided that the complexity of the sport is the big barrier to entry. As England’s director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, said in a clumsy interview last Sunday, it wants to “attract a new audience” of “mums and kids in the school holidays” by making the game “as simple as possible for them to understand”. Because mums are incapable of understanding overs. Obviously.

The ECB seems to believe that the public are too simple to understand any of the Laws but the one which awards six runs for a big hit. Which is why, as Tom Harrison, the ECB’s chief executive, wrote in the latest Wisden, people who come to watch the new competition “won’t need to know the ins and out of the lbw law or even how many balls are in an over”, just so long as they enjoy watching “sixes fly”. You wonder exactly what kind of audience Harrison imagines he is pitching this to. People who won’t even notice that their favourite player has left the middle because he was hit on the pads, who can’t grasp 20 six-ball overs, but can understand 15 with another of 10, at the end.

Shrewd observers will have noticed that cricket already has a format which is designed to appeal to a mass audience, to provide sixes, wickets, and athletic catches. It is called T20, and it is the most popular form of the sport in every other cricket-playing country. The ECB actually runs a pretty serviceable version of it already. If the broadcasters need the ECB to fit games into a two-and-a-half hour window, fine, bring in stringent punishments for slow play. If the ECB wants to attract a new family audience, great, improve the facilities, stop encouraging so much boozing at the grounds, and change the marketing campaign.

Instead we have The Hundred, an idea no one in cricket likes, and no one outside cricket knows they want. Harrison and Strauss have so little faith in their own sport they don’t believe it’s fit for purpose, so little respect for their own fans they are sure they can afford to upset them, and so little regard for the general public they believe they can flog them cricket for idiots.

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