The Hundred is cricket's HS2

HUWZAT ON WEDNESDAY: It all seems so contrived, so complicated. It makes you wonder if it’s worth the bother, frankly. Maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for us to develop our own competition

Anyone recall the movie The War of the Roses?

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play a couple in the midst of a divorce that turns decidedly poisonous. Refusing to vacate their mansion they destroy the furnishings – the stove, furniture, ornaments and dishes. Even the cat becomes a victim of collateral damage.

It reminds me of the bitter and interminable feud over The Hundred.

Someone, somewhere, is arguing about the merits of the ECB’s test-tube baby on social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – whether it’s on one of many Facebook county cricket discussion groups, or Twitter (apparently The Hundred doesn’t attract the same bile on Instagram, although as that’s mainly pictures not words, I’m not sure what to make of that).

Quite often at the heart of these debates is, in the red corner, Donald Topley, county seamer turned modernist; and in the blue, Annie Chave, champion of preserving the domestic game. 

Both lovely people, both passionate, both never tiring of debating this; they are like Oliver and Barbara Rose. And as one of my colleagues joked to me the other day, perhaps I’m like their child, in the middle of the divorce, sympathising with both arguments, torn between the two.

I wrote stories for The Sunday Telegraph in 2002 at the dawn of T20, outlining the pros and cons. Keith Moss, Yorkshire’s chairman, was “horrified”; Rod Bransgrove, Hampshire’s owner, called it “innovative”. But there didn’t seem the level of vitriol towards that then (maybe because there was nowhere near the same level of social media…)

^{The Hundred continues to divide cricket fans}

Never has anything new been hated quite so much in cricket as The Hundred by a certain faction in the game (that is how it seems anyhow).

Anybody who dares speak up for it must feel like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they run towards a hail of bullets.

Anonymous Twitterati claim to love the Blast, but that hasn’t always been the case. Championship fans at heart, I suspect really they see it as the lesser of two evils.

High-profile Hundred enthusiasts like Michael Vaughan keep championing it anyway, despite critics claiming they are only in it for the presenting gigs.

For the record I did think we should have an eight-team, elite, short-form tournament to rival the IPL and Big Bash, but my goodness I didn’t think it would be this tough to realise.

Already counties were playing wait and see, poised to euthanize if it they could. And now with the coronavirus crisis, and Tom Harrison warning of a £380m black hole for our game, that crucial moment seems to have arrived. 

The Komodo Dragons are circling the buffalo; the poisonous bite has been administered to the ankle; they are waiting for it to stumble and fall, then move in for the kill. Yet Harrison battles on. We need The Hundred more than ever, he declares – and to be fair, some of this depends on which way new chairman Ian Watmore moves.  

MORE FROM HUW TURBERVILL

Then Topley calls, and he does talk sense.

He’s upset that wives and youngsters are berated for buying tickets for The Hundred. And what’s the alternative, he asks?

“Well,” I say, “an eight-team ‘premier league’ and 10-team ‘championship’ of counties. They could do what Warwickshire did, and use city names: as I have argued before, I’m sure that would have been enough to convince uber-cool BBC commissioners that they were being given something spanking new.

“Ah,” Don says, “but that would mean a lot of the best players being in Division Two. So you would not have your elite tournament, like the IPL and BB.”

And it’s a good point...

So we chew the cud some more, and I theorise that teams in Division Two could loan their best players to Division One sides, like in speedway (something I have never got my head around, like Mo Salah guesting for Manchester United).

^{Huw Turbervill compares the project to the high-speed railway initiative HS2}

Then there are the pitches... some of the non-Test counties have smaller squares, which means inferior, ‘glued’ surfaces will have to be used.

Alas it all seems so contrived, so complicated. It makes you wonder if it’s worth the bother, frankly. Maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for us to develop our own competition.

Like HS2, so many hurdles to clear.

You have to feel sorry for the ECB too, to an extent. Genuinely they cannot win. When they had cash reserves of £73m they were criticised for not re-investing it in the game. Now that it is £17m they are being attacked for being too frivolous, and being told they should have put £40m aside for a rainy day (or a pandemic).

I’m far from convinced that The Hundred will: a) make money, and b) attract many new fans, but it’s worth pointing out why the ECB ‘only’ have £11m now. They handed ‘special fees’ of £1.3m to each of the 18 counties relating to India’s tour of England in 2018. And the counties received another £1m each for last year’s World Cup.

The Hundred increasingly seems like a doomed project, however. It will never get the love from the counties it needs.

It will either be like: Boris Johnson’s garden bridge across the Thames: costing £43m, but never made; The Millennium Dome: short-lived and little loved; or an unpopular success: like Mrs Brown’s Boys.