Long gone are the times when cricket had just two formats, three-day county games and five-day Test matches. The one-day Gillette Cup, which began in 1963 and later had various changes of name, was the first departure from the original set-ups. There are now a number of domestic competitions run by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), all with the aim of increasing audiences and sponsorship. The earlier versions, with long matches and lots of draws, were no longer up to the job.
There is still a men’s county championship, with two divisions and promotion and relegation. The Blast T20 competition (twenty overs per innings) is divided into two groups, North and South, supposedly ‘historic county rivalries’, and the One-Day Cup is a 50-over contest. From the coming season, women’s county cricket will be structured in the same way.
But the biggest innovation is the Hundred, a 100-ball competition launched in 2021, and based on cities rather than traditional counties. The teams are in Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds, London (two sides), Manchester, Nottingham and Southampton. They have names such as Welsh Fire and Trent Rockets, presumably intended to sound exciting and perhaps intended to echo rugby league names such as Leigh Leopards and Warrington Wolves. The aim, according to the ECB, is ‘to open cricket to more families and young people’.
The Hundred has resulted in a great deal of take-over activity, with teams being sold off, in whole or part, to other companies. Yorkshire, for instance, sold their entire Hundred stake in Northern Superchargers to a group that already own an Indian Premier League side, while 49 percent of shares have been sold in both the Birmingham and Cardiff teams. The owners of Birmingham City Football Club now own part of Birmingham Phoenix (see last month’s Action Replay on companies owning several sports teams).
At the international level, too, there are a variety of competitions, run by the International Cricket Council (ICC), founded in 1909 as the Imperial Cricket Conference. In February and March this year, the ICC Men’s Champions Trophy was played, for the first time since 2017. The delay was due to security reasons, with the Indian team refusing to travel to Pakistan, the intended hosts, for matches. It was decided that India’s games would be played in the UAE, including the semi-final and final, which India won. Some people objected that it appeared to be India that were running the tournament, rather than the ICC. There were also calls for England to boycott their match with Afghanistan, given the Taliban’s attacks on women’s freedoms and the disbanding of the country’s women’s team in 2021, with women’s sport in general being prohibited. So, not for the first time, politics and profit inevitably find their way into sporting competitions.
Paul Bennett
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