The inaugural season of The Hundred, the ECB’s new eight-team men’s and women’s tournaments which were set to begin this summer, has been postponed until 2021 in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ECB confirmed on Thursday (April 30).
The decision is not unexpected. The ECB, who announced last week that there will be no professional cricket in England and Wales until at least July 1, have previously stated that their priorities for when cricket resumes are international cricket and the Vitality T20 Blast. Given the narrowing window available, The Hundred was always going to be tough to squeeze in.
An ECB Board meeting was held on Wednesday to specifically discuss the future of the new tournaments and it was there that the decision to delay the launch was made. The option of scrapping the competitions completely was ruled out and the ECB will press ahead with launching both the men’s and women’s versions of The Hundred in 2021.
“Of course today’s decision is tinged with disappointment with the amount that has been achieved over the last two years but we do recognise the country is going through something unprecedented,” ECB chief executive Tom Harrison told the BBC. “We will be back next year that is the exciting thing. We have learnt an awful lot from the process of getting a competition ready but it is not possible for us to deliver it.”
The ECB gave three major reasons for the decision; the operational challenges faced around social distancing and global travel, the contradiction between playing a competition behind closed doors that has the stated aim of attracting a wider audience and the difficulty of trying to deliver a new tournament across a number of venues where staff are currently furloughed.
Despite the postponement, there remain a number of issues to resolve, including whether to pay the players who were to be involved in this year’s competition and what to do about the squads for next year. Harrison confirmed that discussions were ongoing on those aspects but that the competitions will remain more or less in the same guise as they would have been this year.
“We are envisaging it to be as we planned it,” he said. “We have a commitment to deliver The Hundred in the way we set out to deliver it this year. We will be having discussions with players who have been selected through the draft.
“It is a good thing to have more time where we can build out some of the areas where we wanted more time to think about things. We have more time to test the format and there are lots of other areas we can now concentrate that we wouldn’t have had the opportunity of doing.”
There were reports last week that the ECB Board would consider whether both tournaments should be scrapped entirely in light of the financial crisis engulfing the game and the inherent risk involved in launching a new tournament in a completely new format of the game. However, Harrison believes the case for The Hundred is now stronger than ever.
“The Hundred is a profit-making venture for English cricket,” he said. “Its importance is accentuated through the loss of a large part of our summer. In no way, in the opinion of the ECB Board or most people around the game, does it dilute the impact of this or importance of it.“
This is a competition that is designed not only to become a commercial powerhouse but grow the audience of cricket around the country for young people, for diverse communities and build on what have with cricket in this country.
“That job is has suddenly become even more important. It was already critically important and is now more important than that. We will competing with a lot more coming out of the impacts of coronavirus. There will be a lot of sports competing for people’s free time. We need to be in their thoughts and making sure we are as appealing a game as we are as and we need to be going into this very competitive future.”
Despite today’s announcement, Harrison also reiterated the ECB’s long-term commitment to women’s cricket. “There is no dilution on our commitment to women’s cricket,” he said. “We have to make decisions we feel are very difficult. It doesn’t dilute the long-term strategy to make cricket a gender balanced game.
“We have a real opportunity to do that, building on the World Cup success in 2017 and the Kia Super League’s success and then the launch of the women’s Hundred in line with men’s with equal prize money. None that is going to change with the postponement of the Hundred.”
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