The Hundred, A Wrecking Ball Through The Blast

 

Counties blame The Hundred for 'very slow' ticket sales for Vitality Blast


Ben Rumsby - Telegraph

The Hundred is being blamed by counties for “very slow” ticket sales for the Vitality Blast.

Ahead of Wednesday’s start of the domestic game’s flagship Twenty20 tournament, several counties have reported lower than usual take-up for the first full season in which it and The Hundred will coexist without limits on crowd sizes imposed because of coronavirus.

Ticket sales for the second edition of The Hundred, meanwhile, were said to be going well in comparison, with the England & Wales Cricket Board accused of prioritising what one source branded Tom Harrison’s “legacy” project.

The controversial competition has once again been handed a prime slot in the school holidays, which the Blast has been stripped of for the first time since 2016 in order to prevent the two overlapping.

A source at one county told Telegraph Sport: “It’s showing that a lot of the stuff that counties were saying would happen about The Hundred – and the ECB said wouldn’t happen – is beginning to happen.

“The key thing to this is to compare it with Hundred ticket sales. It shows that the ultimate priority that is given to The Hundred in terms of scheduling and in terms of moving the summer around to fit the window of The Hundred in is having an impact on other competitions, undoubtedly.

“It’s not ideal. We’re working hard – the marketing teams are working their socks off.

“The ECB have been relatively supportive in terms of the stuff that they’ve done for us but the key thing is that they’re obviously selling Hundred tickets at the same time.

“The game needs to look at how you do this sort of stuff and have firmer agreements in place around what happens with The Hundred and what happens with T20.”

A source at another county branded Blast sales there “very slow indeed”, saying that was the case almost “across the board”.

This season’s county fixtures were only published in late January – two months later than usual – but the shortened sales window has not prevented Finals Day on July 16 selling out.

An ECB spokesperson said: “We are investing more resource into marketing the Vitality Blast than ever before, while the counties have worked expertly to sell the largest number of tickets per day for the competition in its 20-year history.

“There has been a reduced number of trading days to sell Blast tickets this summer – due to the earlier start of this year’s competition and the forced delay of the fixture announcement – but we continue to work closely with the counties to drive ticket sales.

“With the opening matches just days away, starting with a repeat of last year’s final between Kent Spitfires and Somerset, we are looking forward to the high-quality cricket and vibrant atmospheres up and down the country that has made the Vitality Blast much loved by fans for two decades.”

How to save the Vitality Blast without ending The Hundred

Tim Wigmore - Telegraph

The counties can’t say that they weren’t warned. Just as many had feared, sales for the Twenty20 Blast have declined compared to 2019, with many supporters preferring The Hundred instead.

It isn’t hard to understand why. Compared to the T20 Blast, The Hundred has three salient advantages. First, with fewer teams, full involvement of England’s specialist white-ball players and more overseas players, the quality is higher. Second, the tickets are cheaper: tickets for Hampshire’s opening T20 Blast match at the Ageas Bowl are an eminently reasonable £24, but it costs as little as £12 to go to Southern Brave Hundred games - which are double-headers featuring the men’s and women’s teams - at the same ground. Third, the schedule is better: The Hundred is player throughout August, with the group stages exclusively in the school holidays.

Add it all together and you have better quality cricket at a more attractive time of year for less money - marketed more aggressively to boot, thanks to the England and Wales Cricket Board’s investment in promoting The Hundred. The upshot is that the T20 Blast, the world’s original T20 competition, begins its 20th season in a state of considerable angst.







Yet fatalism should be avoided. The outstanding support for football’s National League - five teams in the fifth tier last season had average attendances of over 5,000 - attests to British fans’ embrace of sport at lower levels. If the National League can happily co-exist alongside the Premier League, then, the T20 Blast ought to be well capable of thriving alongside The Hundred.

But some tweaks would give it the best chance of doing so. The most obvious, perhaps, is recognising the scarcity principle: demand for something increases if it is rarer. Trimming the group stages back from 14 games per side to ten - and reintroducing the old model of three divisions of six - would take away the need to stage matches at the start of the week; next week, there are six Blast games on either Monday or Tuesday. With five home games apiece rather than seven, counties could spread their marketing efforts less thinly: indeed, some county chief executives think that they could maintain the same net attendance with two fewer home games, as most fans only attend a couple of Blast games per year.

The league stages could also be freshened up. Rather than the regional model, or drawing groups by lots as has been done in the one-day competition in the past, the groups could be a combination of both. Local rivals - like the Roses match, Middlesex-Surrey, and Somerset-Gloucestershire - could be guaranteed to be kept together, but their opponent varied to create new intrigue and narratives. Remarkably, in 20 years of the Blast the two most successful counties in English cricket history - Yorkshire and Surrey - have never met.

More than anything, perhaps, the future of the Blast depends on how it can work with The Hundred. After all the largesse spent on establishing The Hundred, the least that the ECB could do in return is invest more to protect the Blast: tie-in ticket deals across the two competitions would be a start, including for counties who don’t have a host Hundred venue. For all the long-term importance of The Hundred, with 18 teams rather than eight, the Blast can take cricket to corners of the country that the new competition cannot. The two competitions can work in unison to accelerate player development, with players emerging in the Blast and then using The Hundred as a bridge to overseas T20 leagues and ultimately the England team.

Regardless of what many would prefer, the success of The Hundred is now intertwined with the success of English cricket. And - for most its players and many of its fans - The Hundred is dependent upon the T20 Blast. Just as English football can sustain professional teams operating in very different ecosystems, so English cricket ought to be able to do the same.