West Indies all-rounder Andre Russell is one of a host of high-profile players taking part in The Hundred. Photo / Getty
West Indies all-rounder Andre Russell is one of a host of high-profile players taking part in The Hundred. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
All around the world, cricket traditionalists are groaning with the news their game has invented a new version of itself – to be even more quick-fire than T20, targeting people who don't know a daisy-cutter from a dolly.
The new game is called The Hundred, consisting of 100 ballsdelivered in 10-ball overs that can involve one or two bowlers. It will be played in England's summer by teams with silly names and team strips that make the players look like potato chip packets.
It aims to attract new audiences - with a cunning plan to change cricket's vocabulary of confusing terms which, apparently, have been repelling people who might otherwise take an interest.
The English Cricket Board (ECB) discovered this in market research with focus groups who said cricket's complex terminology was the biggest single barrier to their involvement. So the ECB are looking at changes, already suggesting using "outs" instead of "wickets".
You can see the problem: families unfamiliar with cricket arrive at the ground, the kids clutching ice creams and demanding to see a short backward square leg – which they might think is a height-challenged player with a misshapen limb and poor mental faculties.
Quite how all this will translate to previously-uninterested spectators storming cricket turnstiles or signing up for pay TV is unclear. The ECB are also talking about applying gender-neutral terms like "batters" instead of "batsmen".
"Batters" has been in use for some time already, thanks to the rise of women's cricket – but the only possibly confusing thing about a bowler taking a wicket is that a cricket pitch is sometimes also called a wicket.
But, come on, how dumb do we have to dumb society down? How many of us could not grasp the concept that when a bowler gets a batter out, that's called a wicket? As an old boss of mine used to say: "It could confuse a stupid person".
Players for the eight teams in The Hundred line up following The Hundred Draft in 2019. Photo / Getty
However, cricket does have some bewildering terms. I am married to someone who has difficulty reconciling the terms "off" and "leg". Attempts to explain this have ended with me being sent to "off", albeit preceded by another word.
Even this simple difference is not easy to explain. The offside is to the right of a right-handed batter while the legside is to the left. However, to a left-handed batter, the offside is on the left and the legside on the right.
The plain fact is that, unless the listener has played the game, trying to explain complex terms pretty much induces instant unconsciousness. It's like trying to outline "a bath coup" in contract bridge to a non-player or what the giuoco piano opening in chess means.
So, good luck re-naming classic cricket terms like silly mid-on, cow corner, square leg, diamond ducks and popping crease – the latter sounding more like a nasty injury ("he popped his crease, poor chap") than a pitch marking. LBW stands for leg before wicket, but cricket's new audience could be confused, poor dears, by the ambiguous use of "leg" in this context. So let's call it Limb Before Wicket.
As for genderless terms, fine... until you come to a fielding position called Third Man. Making this anodyne is a little vexing. After all, Third Person is a grammatical term, itself a turn-off for some.
There's a serious subtext to this lunacy, when PR and marketing people take too much notice of puzzled old darlings who don't know their long-on from their long-leg.
It's tempting to file The Hundred under Crap We Don't Actually Need, as English cricket already has a T20 competition, called the Blast. If that is not doing the job of bringing new audiences (and money) to cricket, the game really is in deep doo-doo. That is the only reason for T20's existence – aside from paying the players so much money in India's IPL, the game has to turn a blind eye when IPL commitments prevent them from appearing in the acknowledged pinnacle of the sport (test matches).
So while many of us hope The Hundred dies a lonely death in a forgotten corner of England, its last game attended only by the groundsperson and a cat called Rabbit, it may actually have a function.
If it succeeds, how much more will The Hundred cannibalise the form of the game most worth watching: tests? If it dies, what fresh hell awaits us as the game's brains trust seeks to dumb down the game even more, so the confused become the converted?
I know... let's have one batter at a time, facing one bowler, with a glover behind him and seven fielders. If the batter hits a ball, they run round the part of the field containing four safety zones where they can be immune from dismissal. Running round all four safety zones, as other batters hit, earns the team a point. Most points wins.
