The Hundred is a glorious anti-cricket

When my son was a young boy, around 8 or 9, we lived in North London. I would pick him up from school and take him to Lords at teatime, where the entrance fee was £5 for adults and free for children. We would watch all sorts of less popular matches, the most memorable being a young Bangladesh Test team who played with enthusiasm and lost six wickets during our two-hour visit. This was good old cricket, half-empty stands, occasional waves of applause, all charmingly calm, with a few bursts of mild excitement. The colour scheme was definitely green and white. This is, to be honest, my favourite type of cricket.

Fast forward to a few Sundays ago; my son is now 25 and we were back at Lords, this time for the technicolour, bells-and-whistles final of the Hundred tournament. It felt like a historic occasion. At the end of the fourth season of England’s answer to the Indian Premier League, the epitome of the country’s latest attempt to inject modernity into the game, it felt as if the future had finally and safely arrived.

The women played first, in front of the largest crowd ever for a women’s hundred game, over 22,000 of us, and it was a great game, four needed from the last three balls. Deepti Sharma of London Spirits hit the ball high in the air for six, over the head of Welsh Fires star bowler Shabnim Ismail. Fireworks, blasting music and general razzmatazz.

There was a break with Zara Larsson, the blonde bombshell who won the award Sweden has talent (no, me neither), belting out her pop anthems from various stages, one of which was driven around the ground on a golf cart-like structure, as more fireworks went up and Southern Braves Jofra Archer and Chris Jordan practiced their bowling with all the godlike athleticism of Noah Lyles warming up for the 100m. For the Oval Invincibles, England’s T20 World Cup hero Sam Curran was bounding around, ready to go.

As the ground filled up and the men’s game got underway, I pondered the oft-asked question of whether this was actually cricket. And if not, does it matter? The boom-boom-wizz-bangery of the thing was relentless; there were no complicated strategies or variations, and the sound of leather on willow was drowned out by the noise. Tea was replaced by the Robinsons Strategic Timeout. The Hundred, a simple race for runs in a hundred balls, is exciting but is a dulled and crude version of the game, pimped up for carnival.

In the end, the Oval Invincibles lived up to their name and retained their trophy. In the meantime, I was convinced, by the crowd in particular, that The Hundred is just crickety enough to be cricket, and will be the saviour of the English game and not, as the detractors claim, the destroyer. That is to say, the crowd was engaged and enthusiastic and, most importantly, it was youthful. Children, some as young as 6 or 7, were everywhere, many of them carrying miniature cricket bats, all signed by their cricket heroes. One girl, as sweet as a daisy, had signed her own bat on the grounds that I might one day be famous. My own daughter, aged 11, had her bat signed by a group of players and was then chased by a group of boys asking for her autograph. Real boys! Who would have thought?

More than half a million tickets sold for this year One hundred matches and two million have been sold in total in the four-year history, putting the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in a good position to sell shares this autumn. The idea is to raise 100 million or more, much of which will be used to support the more traditional cricket matches, the county games and the like that fuddy-duddies like me prefer. If it works, the ECB will rightly congratulate itself on a triumph achieved in the face of vociferous opposition.

It’s not just about the money, though. It’s about the culture of cricket, and about ensuring that the families who come to Hundred matches are encouraged to sample the superior world of maiden overs, of three slips and a gully, of afternoon-long longs, of slowly building run rates and disastrous batting collapses. I’m optimistic that in recent years I’ve seen the youngsters in my own family embrace traditional cricket with as much enthusiasm as the generation before them. The twenty-somethings have queued for seats on the fifth day of Test matches and devoted lazy Sundays to listening to Test match specialSo it is possible.

The Hundred is loud and brash and in some ways anti-cricket, but with a favourable wind and all that investment, I bet it will be a gateway that will lead a new generation to the green and white; to real cricket as Blowers, Tuffers and Aggers would understand it.