The hateful Hundred is putting cash before cricket

The cricket at Cheltenham last week was reassuringly old–fashioned. In the last session of the fourth day, Gloucestershire’s bowlers took a flurry of wickets to beat Middlesex by 164 runs, watched by spectators who assemble at the college ground each July from all over England to renew a much-loved ritual. ‘Proper cricket,’ said a chap from Slad.

They were joined, as ever, by dozens of retired cricketers, fed and watered in one of the tents which ring this most evocative of grounds. Little wonder those former players choose to hold their annual gathering in Cheltenham. Here they can bear witness to championship cricket as they once played it; a traditional sport matured over 150 years of custom. The Cheltenham festival is almost a definition of England in high summer.

Prepare for the great schism. Next week a new tournament called The Hundred arrives, trailing clouds of glory, at least in the eyes of its backers at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which has thrown its war chest at a venture designed quite deliberately to attract a younger, urban and more ‘diverse’ crowd. What’s not to like? Everything.

Instead of the ‘over’, that familiar sequence of six balls bowled by one person, which punctuates the game, there will now be ten lots of ten balls, counted down from 100. Apparently the idea of an over was so off-putting to young folk brought up on football that it had to go. Similarly, the batsman is now called a ‘batter’, and third man, a fielding position, has become ‘third’. We don’t want to be thought sexist, do we?

The players, drawn by lots last autumn, will represent not the 18 first-class county clubs rooted in ancestral loyalties (Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Worcestershire) but eight city franchises based at the established Test match grounds in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds and Manchester, as well as Cardiff and Southampton.