The Hundred isn't the reason that the emperor has been shown to be wearing no clothes. England's batting was fragile for several years before this and often relied on the heroics of Root or Stokes or the bowlers to dig them out of disastrous holes. We fondly remember the heroics of Stokes at Headingly in 2019 but let's not forget that what happened before then was England's bowlers dismissed Australia for 179 and then England's batsmen collapsed to 67 all out. One less than they managed here today. So it isn't even the first time in recent history they've been dismissed like this by Australia! The Hundred didn't cause what happened. It is, at worst, a symptom of the wider malaise within the ECB that has seen the red ball game side-lined to the benefit of the white ball game.
That isn't to say that I don't have problem with The Hundred but my only real qualm is the bizarre decision to introduce
another format of the game. Every single objective that the ECB set out to achieve (including the most important of getting the ruddy game back on free to air television) could have equally have been achieved with a T20 franchise competition (which to my understanding is what the BBC thought they were getting). Indeed I imagine, once they've finished their, utterly justified, gloating that
@Pakenhamtrain would be able to confirm that the Big Bash ticks the various boxes the ECB were looking for including the biggies of being appealing to families and being available widely on free to air TV. Everything else about The Hundred? Brilliant. Crack on because my god the game needs to stop being hidden behind the Sky paywall.
But the ECB have got questions to answer and there needs to be fundamental changes within the game. We cannot just shrug shoulders and muddle on. There needs to be some hard conversations about the structure of the game at home and how the domestic season is shaped. It's no coincidence, for instance, that the England Test side reached it's highest ebb in the early 2010s after a decade or so of eighteen counties split into two divisions everyone playing everyone twice with four-day games spread throughout the season. Since then we've fiddled with first messing around the second division (they used a different ball for a while) before starting to really tinker with the scheduling (games shoe-horned into the beginning and end of the season which reached an extreme last season but had been going on for a while before hand) and then the format with ditching divisions and having an asynchronous schedule with teams playing each other an odd number of times, etc etc.
Is it any surprise that players aren't able to bat well? Most of them spend their time batting in the worst conditions for batting so never get to actually make big runs all that often. Whilst it is starting to infect bowlers as well as they're not used to bowling on anything other than spicy spring and autumn decks so don't have to work out how to prise wickets out on a flat deck!
This is quite apart from actually grappling with the inclusion issues particularly with regards to race but also socio-economic status as well. English cricket is not only very white but it's also very middle and upper class. Think of all the talent we're letting bleed out of the game because people don't "fit" a certain mould.
I honestly don't really know how to square this circle. But I'd suggest a starting point would be to look at the domestic structure and consider whether or not it's fit for purpose. I'd suggest that it isn't at all and has been thoroughly broken in recent years. Of course if nothing changes then it's almost certain that the white ball game will also start to collapse in the next few years as the 50 over competition has basically been relegated to secondary status alongside the County Championship and even the Blast has been significantly marginalised.
Again, The Hundred is important to the long term future of the game in this country, we can't just wish it out of existence as the game does need something like it (just for the love of god make it a T20 tournament). But there needs to be a rebalancing of the domestic season and unless/until the ECB are willing to get to grips with that then things like what happened today will keep happening with depressing regularity.
. I still don't think they are really as bad as their awful Ashes performances so far suggest, but it's getting harder and harder to maintain that opinion.
