From broken promises to blatant falsehoods, why The Hundred is English cricket’s Brexit moment

Eighteen months down the line, quite a few people are discovering that taking back control wasn’t necessarily everything it was cracked up to be

ECB chairman Colin Graves said the revamp would make the game stronger (Getty)

A little over 18 months ago Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, stood up at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London and painted a spellbinding, gold-encrusted vision of the future. English cricket’s new Twenty20 competition was in the process of being voted through, and Harrison could scarcely contain his excitement as he rhapsodised about the new league, and all the delicious money it would generate.

“This is about growth,” he gushed. “This is a fantastic opportunity for us to create something that appeals to an entirely new audience, grows cricket’s overall audience, and enable us to control something that has real value for the long term.”

The new T20 competition, we were told, would enrich us all. Overseas broadcasters and players would be queueing around the block to sign deals with us. The cash would flow like champagne. The counties were guaranteed a £1.3 million annual windfall. Ten per cent of revenues from the new competition would be channelled directly into participation initiatives. Increased investment in county outgrounds would rejuvenate the domestic game. Best of all, English cricket was finally asserting its own independence, seizing its own destiny, taking back control.

Eighteen months down the line, quite a few people are discovering that taking back control wasn’t necessarily everything it was cracked up to be. The latest guidance from the ECB suggests that the costs of staging the new tournament have more than tripled, from their original estimate of £13 million to £41 million (not including the £1.3 million promised to each of the counties). The most recent accounts show that the ECB has shed almost 90 per cent of its cash reserves in the space of two years.

Despite signing a record broadcasting deal last summer to include the new tournament, counties have been told that there will be no extra prize money for the County Championship or T20 Blast, nor any extra funds to market it. The salary cap will not be raised. The ECB’s own internal departments have been ordered to slash costs by around 10 per cent. The elite pace and spin bowling camps have been scrapped. So too the overseas placement scheme, which sent the likes of Joe Root and Ollie Pope to hone their craft in Australian grade cricket. So too the North v South series. What was billed as English cricket’s great age of enrichment has turned into its age of austerity.

You may have spotted where this is going. And in retrospect, all that was lacking from the ECB’s lavish promises 18 months ago was a big red bus to print them on. From the broken promises to the blatant falsehoods, from the arrogant bombast to the misplaced optimism, from the divisive rhetoric to the rancorous, rapacious fallout: truly, The Hundred is English cricket’s Brexit moment.

Of course, you’ll have noticed that the competition as it stands isn’t exactly the competition the counties voted for. For one thing, it’s not T20 at all, but a 100-ball game show whose precise rules – twelve-a-side! no LBWs! a bridge to Ireland! – remain shrouded in conjecture. The ECB’s promise of “open discussion, transparency and accountability” has disintegrated into a bristling siege mentality, defined by cryptic secrecy and an almost glaucomic absence of detail. And the idea that the new competition would burnish our prestige on the global stage was neatly punctured by Virat Kohli, who has made his disdain perfectly clear. “The commercial aspect is taking over the real quality of cricket,” he lamented, but then again English cricket has had enough of experts.

The Hundred trial match at Trent Bridge (PA)

And as with Brexit, you get the feeling that the Hundred has so consumed the time and energies of its governing body that it has virtually forgotten there’s a sport to be run in the meantime. Legitimate qualms over the organisation, sporting integrity and basic sanity of the new competition are swept aside with the special sort of contempt Leavers reserve for Remainers – you lost, now get over it and start stocking up on non-perishable food items. Test cricket will be fine, because the new competition is aimed at a different audience, and everyone knows it’s physically impossible to like two different kinds of cricket. Everything will be fine. All we have to do is believe.

Even the impulses, you feel, are similar. It’s hard not to suspect, on some level, that those involved are being driven partly by a sort of weird machismo, the thrilling pyromania of scorching an entire sport to the ground and then building something entirely new. Graves’s term as chairman expires in early 2020. Harrison is already rumoured to be eyeing up his next job. Tournament organiser Sanjay Patel has spent most of his career in the world of breweries – insert your own joke here. By the time the full and devastating legacy of The Hundred becomes apparent, then its three chief architects will in all likelihood have long since departed the scene.

Is there a way out? Surely, you think, there must be some means of arresting this whole process now its full and monstrous nature has revealed itself. Surely there must be some recourse for those hoodwinked by ornate fantasies, bought off with the promise of money that doesn’t yet exist. Surely it’s not too late to press pause, to rerun the vote, to hold an informed debate, to wonder aloud whether it might be better simply to reform what we already have rather than torch it expensively to the ground. Alas this is cricket, not politics, and for the time being it looks very much like The Hundred means The Hundred.