The Hundred, The Risks Grow

At £UK40m, the ‘Hundred' seems a risk too far.John Westerby.

The Times.

Tuesday, 2 October 2018.

PTG 2589-13026.

The costs involved in developing the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) new 100-ball competition are becoming increasingly eye-watering. The sums of money involved are now more than three times the investment counties were originally expecting to be made on the city-based competition, now likely to exceed £UK40 million ($A74m).

At a time when the game seems to be suffering from chronic existential angst, we should perhaps be grateful that such sums, generated largely through a bumper new broadcasting deal, are available to spend on marketing the game and growing its supporter base.  Yet the more the costs grow, the greater the slice of English cricket’s income being spent on the new project, the louder the question must be asked: how much would the existing formats of the game benefit from a similar marketing exercise? 

Even if the new competition succeeds, as it absolutely must for the present ECB personnel to survive, we will never know whether the same marketing spend on existing formats of the domestic game would have delivered any less in terms of a broader, younger following for the game.

It is hardly surprising that the cost of marketing the new competition has grown greater since the bombshell of a new format — adding to a game that already has three — was dropped at the start of the northern summer. Quite apart from the need to establish eight new franchises, to determine their identities, to build a new marketing strategy around them, to sell the concept to the counties and tie it in with their own development programs, the new 100-ball format needed researching, developing, experimenting and explaining.

Was it really, really necessary to add these extra layers of risk and cost when a highly successful format in Twenty20 was already available? 

The reason the new format was proposed, we are told, is that the audiences the ECB would like to reach find the existing game as “boring and complicated”. Hence the search for a modified version that makes it shorter and simpler to understand. The argument for trimming time off the Twenty20 format does hold some water. It is designed to fit a two and a half hour time-frame that would work better for a family audience, for them to make return journeys for an early evening game, allowing time for parents to get the kids back home at a reasonable hour.

But simpler? The problem with this simplified version of the game, designed to attract a broader support base, is that it is actually rather complicated. I went along to one of the trial days for The Hundred at Trent Bridge a couple of weeks ago, with various county and academy players experimenting with the format.

In case you haven’t caught up with the latest developments, the 100 balls are likely to be divided into ten overs, or “ends”, and those can either be delivered by a single bowler or split into two blocks of five. And the bowler who has delivered the last five balls from one end could then deliver the next five balls from the other. All clear?

Perhaps I’m a little slow on the uptake, but for a while I felt rather like the fictional French visitor on the famous tea towel, to whom the simplicities of cricket were explained: “You have two sides, one out in the field and one in, each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, when he’s out he comes back in, and the next man goes in until he’s out”. And so on.

Is the radical new format really so much simpler, to untrained eyes at least, to justify tinkering with a Twenty20 format that has been so successful? When I asked someone involved in running the new tournament why the ten-ball blocks are more accessible than six-ball overs, I was told that the new simplified scoreboard format — with total runs ascending and balls to come descending — made the state of play more immediately obvious, so 60 runs off 45 balls was more comprehensible than 60 off 7.3 overs, and the additional mathematical calculations involved in multiplying by six and adding three. Make up your own mind on that.

I write as someone who supported the idea of a new Twenty20 tournament, believing it could dovetail and bolster the existing county T20 Blast competition, and build a bigger family audience — younger, with a greater female representation — as the Big Bash League has done in Australia, the sort of audience that different sports in the UK have struggled to generate, with a tendency to revert to selling as much beer as possible.

When the 100-ball format was added to the picture, I was keen to remain open-minded, acutely conscious of the need to broaden the game’s appeal for my kids’ generation. Instinctively, though, the new format felt like a step too far, like the established versions of the game were being cheapened and, worse, that if the new format was a success, the growing divide between white-ball and red-ball formats would be stretched still further.

Those involved with selling the new competition say that if we are going to address the longer-term future of Test cricket, more younger supporters need to be attracted to the game through shorter formats, in the hope they will later gravitate towards the greater subtleties and time-frame of the longer game.  But the more the costs of making the 100-ball format work continue to escalate, the more it feels as though a new format for the new competition was an unnecessary step too far.

Harrison to jump ship? Costs spread!

Unease about ‘Hundred’ costs applies to other areas.
Mike Atherton.

The Times.

Monday, 1 October 2018.

Indications the costs of staging the England and Wales Cricket Board's (ECB) new ’The Hundred’ competition had risen and the projected returns fallen, details that emerged from a meeting ECB chairman Colin Graves held with County chairman last Thursday, left many of those who attended with a considerable sense of unease (PTG 2585-13009, 29 September 2018).  In the push-me, pull-you game between the ECB and the counties, there is always an element of unease, and while not all counties take the same view, what unites them all is the bottom line and the desire to see more money flow back for the betterment of the game as a whole.

Two years ago, Deloitte produced a report stating that the cost of a new tournament would be in the region of £UK13 million ($A23.5m), a figure that has been revised by the ECB recently to £UK41m ($A74m) (not including the extra payment of £UK1.3m - $A2.3m - to each of the counties). The ECB says that the Deloitte report is out of date, would not reflect the present blue-sky thinking around The Hundred, nor the investment required to make it a success, which they are absolutely determined to do. Nor does criticism of the £UK41m take into account the £UK7m ($A12.6m) budgeted for the women’s game.

The unease about costs spreads to other areas. Not unlike Cricket Australia (CA), the headcount at the ECB has gone up from 215 employees five years ago to 321 now, with an annual spend on salaries just short of £UK30m ($A54.1m) a year. The landscape has changed dramatically, of course, in that time, not least with the advent of a new tournament to administer, but each department has been told, just like their counterparts at CA have over the last year, to look at savings of about 10 per cent — more in some departments — in the next annual budget.

In the cricket department, under Andrew Strauss’s watch, those cuts are likely to come from Loughborough, the state-of-the-art performance centre that costs the ECB in the region of £UK7m a year, from which, looking at the thin state of the fast bowling, spin and batting resources, it could be argued there has been too little return on investment.

This scrutiny comes as a new County Partnership Agreement (CPA) is being negotiated for 2020-24, the detail of which has been delivered and which will be voted on in November. At the heart of the matter is this: if the ECB is focused on The Hundred to the exclusion of much else, then there will be less money for the tournaments in which all 18 Counties have an interest. Already counties have been told that there will be no uplift in prize money for the County Championship and no increase in T20 ‘Blast' matches or money for marketing it.

Derek Brewer, the highly regarded former Nottinghamshire and Marylebone Cricket Club chief executive, has played a central role in negotiating the CPA, and was brought on to the ECB board in May in a non-voting, advisory role. That such a move was felt necessary indicates another of the Counties’ concerns: the lack of engagement and knowledge at board level.

The ECB board was reconstituted early in the year to include four independent non-executive directors, again a move not dissimilar to CA in recent years. While it may be diverse and full of individuals with legal, banking and media expertise, there is precious little cricketing knowledge, or feel for the county game. While a recent report on the payment to Glamorgan this year suggested no evidence of a failure to fulfil fiduciary requirements, it suggested an “overuse of informal process” — in other words a lack of oversight from the board (PTG 2584-13008, 28 September 2018).

During the final of this year’s T20 ‘Blast’ series at Edgbaston two weeks ago, two County chairmen met privately with Graves to outline concerns that the Counties were being kept in the dark and that, at County level, the leadership of the ECB was invisible. Tom Harrison, the chief executive, had spent ten days during the England summer in America on a course at Harvard and three weeks on his honeymoon. Having delivered a very large television rights deal, there were rumours that he was looking for a new challenge. Graves insists that Harrison is in it for the “long term” and that he, like other key executives, are on long-term incentive plans, which accrue in 2022.

Graves’s term in office finishes in May 2020 and while there is little appetite to give him a second term, there are some who feel he should stay on for a while to bed the new tournament in. The chief executives of the Test-match grounds are to meet on Monday, to be joined by the other County chiefs the day after, while the board of the new competition meets on Wednesday. As the ECB moves from planning stages of the new tournament to the nitty-gritty of operational detail, the former want to clip the wings of the latter and are demanding more scrutiny and oversight.

Chairmen Concerns and Graves "misgivings"

Elizabeth Ammon.
The Times.
Friday, 28 September 2018.
PTG 2585-13009.

The amount of money the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is spending on its new hundred-ball tournament is understood to be significantly higher than had been agreed by Counties when they voted in favour of the new format going ahead.  A meeting between County chairmen, convened at the Oval on Thursday by ECB chairman Colin Graves, is reported to have involved significant disagreement that left Graves angered such that he pulled out of presenting Surrey with the County Championship trophy there that afternoon.

In addition to money being spent on the ‘Hundred’, there are also thought to be discrepancies in the amount of profit the new tournament will eventually yield. It is now expected that, after a few years of operation, it will generate about £UK5 million ($A9.1m) a year, rather than the estimated £UK30m ($A54.3m) a year that the County chairmen had originally been told.  It is understood that Graves told the county chairmen that if they were unhappy with how the competition is being implemented they should use the “appropriate channels” to do something about it. Some chairmen apparently interpreted this as Graves offering to resign, although those exact words were not used in the meeting.

The ECB insisted that it was because the meeting, described by one chairman as “very heated”, was still taking place at the time that the presentation started, that Jim Wood, a non-executive director on the ECB board, was sent from the meeting in a conference suite at the Vauxhall End of the ground to hand over the trophy in front of the pavilion, instead of Graves.  Although the meeting did overrun, it would have been possible for Graves to have a short break and make the presentation.