Crazy that England could lose Stokes to injury in Hundred
Allowing Test captain to play Mickey Mouse format of the game is down to imbeciles who run professional cricket
Any A-level economics student will tell you all about the idea of opportunity cost. Put simply, if you spent a certain amount of money on a pint of beer, then you cannot use it to buy several packets of crisps. The opportunity cost of the Hundred has been dire for English cricket since it began three years ago. You cannot play high-quality serious (ie first-class) matches at the same time that your best cricketers are cavorting in Mickey Mouse matches for the entertainment of nine-year-olds. And now we know there is an even worse cost.
As Ben Stokes was carried off the field at Old Trafford on Sunday with a suspected hamstring injury, the opportunity cost of his turning out to add some glamour to Northern Superchargers became horribly clear. Stokes is highly unlikely to be able to play at the same ground tomorrow week when England take on Sri Lanka in the first game of their three-test series. Indeed, he is highly unlikely to be able to play in any of the three Tests, so closely scheduled are they.
So, the Hundred – a format I suspect is doomed because of the rest of the world’s utter lack of interest in it, with the only just-less absurd T20 as king – has dealt a triple blow to serious cricket in this country. England have lost a superb batsman, a penetrating bowler and an adventurous captain, all because the cashcrazed imbeciles who run professional cricket thought it was a good idea to showcase him in a thoroughly pointless game on a Sunday evening. Why is this nonsense allowed to happen?
The rationale for the Hundred was that it would get people who were not interested in cricket to become so, which is a bit like saying that if you avidly read Mills and Boon romances you will end up a devotee of the novels of George Eliot, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. One or two might; most will not; and thus the great game of cricket is sacrificed to provide the lightest of light entertainment, a form of the game whose inanities do not prevent it causing serious damage.
There is a desperate effort to boost interest and investment in the Hundred. In a few weeks’ time, even MCC members, the standardbearers of tradition, will be asked to decide whether their venerable club should take a highly subsidised stake in the format. I hope they will not, and only partly because it is so self-evidently not for the good of the game.
The Hundred is scheduled to run until 2028, when the television deal with Sky expires. India, because of their sheer wealth in this respect, control the future of short-form cricket. Their own T20 is the most successful in the world and the format has now been exported around the world, notably to America. The Hundred is, quite simply, the Betamax of white-ball cricket to T20’s VHS. It will suffer the same fate.
The decline in the standard of Test cricket is rapidly killing it, and it might be a higher priority for the game’s authorities to do
Blow: Ben Stokes is helped off the field (right) after sustaining an injury playing for Northern Superchargers
what it can to stop that. The recent West Indies series might have been an embarrassment for the tourists, but it was another handful of nails in the coffin of the highest form of the game.
I have looked in vain for anyone predicting an exciting series with Sri Lanka, though with Stokes likely not to be playing the sides might be evened up a little. At least this is not an August entirely without first-class cricket to watch, as last year’s shamefully was. But what has happened to Stokes, robbing England of their star cricketer for the most futile of reasons just before a Test series, ought to be another warning to those in charge that they have to think far more strategically about the future of cricket.
It may well be that Test cricket has to be pared back to just half a dozen countries if it is to survive; but if it is to work even then there must be a shift in the balance in those countries. It means more first-class cricket and less whiteball. It means making the first-class game more dynamic, and perhaps attracting younger people to it by giving free tickets to full-time students – after all, they would not be depriving anyone else of a seat. But it also means considering two codes, as I have been arguing in these pages for years, so that men essential to our Test side do not cripple themselves in a Mickey Mouse match and prevent themselves taking part.
We can go on like this, and I fear we shall, but the game as we know it will soon be dead if we do.