We literally just wanted to rehash our favourite Hundred joke in the headline. Now we have to follow-through with some semblance of an article.

Just as a quick recap for those that don’t know, Manchester Originals are…

• The ones sponsored by McCoys
• “Laughing in the face of limits” (possibly delirious from medication)
• “Raising the bar forever higher” (but presumably very slowly because otherwise you eventually reach a point where height is meaningless and the bar’s just floating around in space)

A couple of years back, they were also new. But that’s no longer the case. These days the original Originals are old Originals and as a result of this year’s draft, we now have new new Originals.

The setup of franchise cricket means it is actually incredibly hard to identify who these people are. That’s because the draft system means you’ll frequently see teams trumpeting the signing of players who already played for them.

As far as we can work out…

New Originals (aka new new Originals)

• Josh Tongue
• Laura Wolvaardt
• Amanda-Jade Wellington
• Kathryn Brice
• Katie George

Original Originals who are no longer Originals

• Kate Cross

We could be wrong and we’re not especially bothered if we are. As we said at the top, this article had fundamentally served its purpose three words into the headline.

• Observations after half-watching the Hundred on TV with a couple of kids milling about the place
• We have one big question about The Hundred TV graphics
• The Hundred Finals 2022 match report

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We watched some of The Hundred last night. We watched it the way we have watched so much cricket over the years: with the sound down slightly too low while having a conversation about something entirely unrelated. The experience reminded us that the on screen graphics remain a major source of interest for people who haven’t watched the competition before.

There are two main ways of watching cricket:

1. Actively, paying attention
2. Passively, almost ambiently

We like both, but the second is arguably more significant. Cricket is great for dipping in and out of and talking over the top of. It can provide a more social viewing experience than many other sports.

You don’t catch up with friends by watching a great film together. You catch up by watching Bula Quo! Nothing suppresses the social aspect of the viewing experience like having any desire whatsoever to follow what’s going on.

So that’s kind of how we watched Welsh Fire Men against Southern Brave Men: theoretically following the game itself, but mostly just talking about other things or remarking on tangentia.

Tangentia like the TV graphics.

We mentioned the runs scored/needed versus balls faced/remaining sidebars last year. What we didn’t mention then was how they grow and then shrink as the game progresses.

So runs is the left sidebar and balls is the right one. In the first innings both go up. In the second they go down.

It struck us that in the first innings the right sidebar knows its destination is 100, so it can pace itself accordingly. The left sidebar though doesn’t know where it’s going to end up. It could finish at 129, as it did here, or it could finish at 200 or 80.

We wrongly assumed that it would finish exactly at the top of the screen so that midway through the second innings you could easily see what fraction of the target had been knocked off. This would involve a lot of careful recalibration throughout the first innings so that the bar wouldn’t creep up too slowly or shoot up too quickly.

That’s not the way it works though. It just moves at a standard pace and stops wherever it happens to be when the 100 balls are up. This may initially seem less exciting but it does raise the exciting possibility that a team could score so many that their team name would go off the top of the screen. That should definitely be the main goal for every team every season.

Our one big question isn’t to do with that though. It’s to do with the graphics relating to individual players that appear at the bottom.

Our question is… does every player get their own icon?

No, you’re puerile.

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We tried to get the lay of the land with The Hundred about to get underway. Amid all the earnest stat-fuelled previews and grave warnings about how franchise cricket has already eaten international cricket and really only needs to digest it now, we spotted a video about a cricket ground that has a boundary moat filled with sea creatures. That’s more our area, we thought. We’ll report on that.

The Space Bowl is a marketing gimmick for The Hundred, obviously. But the way we see it, if you’re going to do a marketing gimmick, base it around the uninhibited insanity of seven-year-olds.

Here are the key points

The stadium is located in space

As someone who was seven in the 1980s, this seems the obvious starting point because we were raised on cartoons that were pretty much all set in space, frequently for no clear reason whatsoever.

The Transformers were aliens. The Thundercats were aliens. He-Man was (presumably) on an alien planet. Ulysses 31 was Greek mythology in space.

That seems a lot already, but then there was Bucky O’Hare, which was about a war between an interplanetary republic of mammals and an empire of toads ruled by a computer system. And with both BraveStarr and the Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, it was an era that could sustain not one but two programmes about space cowboys.

So yeah, blank sheet of paper, deciding on a location… of course you go for space.

Rooftop garden with wildlife

The key detail here is the roof. This is a ground in which Shahid Afridi could hit a 12. Full marks for providing that possibility.

A rollercoaster that takes you around the stadium

Sounds fun, but honestly not sure they’ve thought this one through. Does it make stops? Can you ask to get off at Stand E? By the end of the day will it basically just be a rammy receptacle for litter and drunk middle-aged men being shuttled for yet another piss?

Hopefully it’s just a fun rollercoaster that doesn’t make stops.

Disco lights around the pitch illuminating the stadium

An alternate interpretation of that old cricket classic, “bad light”.

Giant cricket glove screen to showcase the action

The more you think about it, the more you realise that ‘flat’ is a very boring shape for a screen. We saw a giant radio telescope being employed as a screen the other day.

We’re not entirely convinced the ECB’s Minecraft contractors have entirely delivered on the concept here though. Looks like a totally normal screen displaying an image of a glove to us.

Rainbow arch covers stadium

Wait, where’s the roof gone? So it’s not a complete roof. It’s just around the tops of the stands. Oh well.

Our son recently coined the phrase “toast rainbow” which is a very cute way to get away with not eating your crusts.

Boundary moat filled with sea creatures

100% brilliant idea, but again, the contractors have let the kids down a bit here. They’ve included fish and turtles when it’s obvious they meant plesiosaurs and mosasauri.

Giant cricket ball VIP seats

Not delighted about having special seats for VIPs, but then they do appear to be potentially lethal, so maybe it’s okay.

Team changing rooms under a see-through glass wicket

Well this is inviting a lawsuit. Lets be generous and assume it’s frosted glass.

Could be tough to bat on when you’re up top though.

A stage for DJs and musicians to entertain

Stadium cancelled. All praise retracted.

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We don’t really want to be an ambassador for the Hundred and nor are we in the #opposethehundred camp. Our natural habitat is the muddy middle ground, taking ineffectual potshots at both sides.

But let’s for now bypass the argument about whether the competition represents the future or death of the game today (it’s neither) and instead highlight a couple of things that may or may not tell us something about the 100-ball format and possibly even the other formats too.

We watched the first match, between the disappointingly-still-accurately-named Oval Invincibles and the Manchester Originals the way Hundred matches are meant to be watched: distractedly.

6.30pm start

The matches are scheduled at theoretically family-friendly times. Speaking as someone with a very young family, this is actually rather uplifting to hear, because 6.30pm to 9pm is currently the most frenetic period of the time.

Half-six is almost exactly the time that smaller family members go energetic-mental and this then segues into energetic-and-emotional-mental before ultimately descending into extreme emotional fragility. This means it’s time for bed and then that takes probably an hour and then we make tea.

So, you know, we probably had an opportunity to properly pay attention to the last few balls, but we honestly didn’t have any ability to do so by then.

So, all in all, big tick for the Hundred for indirectly floating the notion that evenings won’t necessarily always be quite like this.

Attracting the attention of kids

As established, our kids are younger than what we presume is the target demographic. All the same, our son, who is one, spent a proportion of the match waving a foam cricket bat around threateningly. Would he have done this if the Hundred weren’t on TV? Quite possibly – but then we can’t rule out the possibility that his sister maybe went and got the bat in the first place after noticing there was cricket on TV.

Was that what happened? Was that the way things unfolded? Who can honestly say they were properly paying attention?

In terms of the impact on our daughter, who is four – she spent a period jumping on the sofa shouting “A Hundred [X]s” a lot, where [X] was any number of different everyday items wholly unrelated to cricket.

Would she have been shouting “20 [X]” if it had been a T20 match? Maybe, although we put it to you that 100 is fundamentally a much more powerful number than 20.

Runs v balls (and TV score graphics)

One of the main things we learned during the match was that our main TV is apparently on the wrong picture mode.

The BBC was showing runs on one side of the screen and balls remaining on the other and most of this was off the edge of our screen.

This form of scoring – runs scored/needed versus balls faced/remaining – is the kind of thing that offends some long-standing cricket fans because they are conditioned to seeing runs-hyphen-wickets.

We quite like it though. Wickets are the most valuable currency in Test cricket, but in the 100-ball format they aren’t even going to come into play most of the time. Limited overs cricket is ‘most runs wins’ and in this format the 100-ball duration of an innings – not wickets – is the main threat to scoring as many as you can.

So yeah, runs v balls.

If the BBC need to change anything in their default scoring graphics, it’s to strip away all of the batter, bowler stuff. It is nice to know the batter’s score and the bowler’s figures, but not crucial.

Show those details intermittently, sure, but having them on screen all the time only adds complexity. Pare it back to the essentials. Keep things simple. How many runs are needed? How many balls are to go? Throw in the other stuff as and when you need it.

Scorecards

Mostly things look the same, but we love the Hundred’s bowling cards.

This one’s taken from the BBC website.

Isn’t that just fundamentally better than displaying things in overs in the shorter formats?

The above is basically what we turn a one-day bowling card into in our head every time we look at one anyway. “6.67 an over – that’s more than a run-a-ball,” we think to ourselves.

And then we look at batting strike-rates and try and work out what 144.56 is in runs-per-over. Batting and bowling stats seem to have evolved independently. Nothing agrees.

In the Hundred, batters make X runs off Y balls and bowlers concede X runs off Y balls. Honestly, put everything else aside a minute – is that not better?

Commentary

We didn’t really hear much of it. We had the sound turned down fairly low so that we didn’t get irritated at trying to hear and then not being able to hear.

Crowd

It was definitely a less bevvied-up, more family-friendly crowd. We’ve been in cricket crowds that have gone the other way and it can be decidedly not nice. The sport could do with a lot more at this more relaxed end of the spectrum. Seemed like they were pretty into it too – which was by no means guaranteed.

Was it a Hundred crowd though, or was it a women’s match crowd? It’s widely accepted that the latter tend to have shorter queues at the bar than men’s matches. We’ll get more of an idea on this one as the tournament wears on.

Free tickets may have helped shaped things too. Although at least now a precedent has been set.

Broadcasting schedule

Well this is not good, is it? The next women’s Hundred match on the BBC doesn’t come until August 10 and even then it’ll only be on the iPlayer. The next one broadcast on normal TV will be the ‘eliminator’ match (you can think of it as a semi-final) on August 20.

The situation with the men’s matches is better, but still not great. The first BBC TV match is tonight (Thursday, 6.30pm, BBC2) and then there’s two more on Saturday and Sunday, both at 2pm.

We get the same timings again the following weekend, then there’s a fallow weekend, but with evening matches the following Tuesday and Wednesday. Then there’s a Saturday evening match. Then another Tuesday evening match. Then there’s the final on Saturday August 21 at 2pm.

It’s not exactly ‘appointment to view’ is it? The best place to watch the tournament is in fact Sky Sports Cricket, which you’d have to say is not exactly a channel for people who don’t know much about cricket but who could maybe get into it.

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A lot of people think that The Hundred is ludicrous. To these people, we ask: “Have you not seen 300? That’s truly ludicrous.”

The film 300 (which we’ve just this minute found out isn’t actually called “The 300”) is about 300 Spartans attempting to fend off over 300,000 Persians.

Not great odds of success, you’d have to say. 300 people against 300,000 also feels like like the situation the ECB’s marketing department is currently facing. (Probably quite a lot worse actually.)

But the true ludicrousness lies in the detail. The Hundred brings us crisps, slogans and gibberish.

What does 300 offer?

300 stars Gerard Butler as King Leonidas. Gerard Butler is not an especially subtle actor and King Leonidas is not an especially subtle role.

Here is King Leonidas doing ‘thoughtful’.

Here is King Leonidas about two seconds later doing ‘angry shouting’.

Here is King Leonidas telling his mates, “Tonight we dine in hell.”

And it’s not just King Leonidas. Here’s Xerxes arriving in a manner that would put even Allen Stanford to shame.

We could probably draw some parallels with how the ECB sees itself here, but that feels a little like low-hanging fruit.

Basically the whole of 300’s fully ludicrous from start to finish. There’s also a tremendous amount of blood. (You can draw your own parallels there.)

If The Hundred is anywhere close to being a third as ludicrous as 300, it’ll actually be tremendous fun. We therefore conclude that The Hundred will probably only be about 10 per cent as ludicrous as 300, which puts it right on the cusp of being fun, but not necessarily over.

First published in October 2019 (which is a measure of how long this whole interminable Hundred preamble has been going on for now). Sign up for our email if you want find out what we actually think about the thing once it finally gets underway.

Say what you like about the Hundred, but it’s giving us Sarah Taylor when we otherwise wouldn’t have Sarah Taylor. The former England wicketkeeper is returning to professional cricket after joining Welsh Fire, having previously retired from cricket in 2019.

We wonder how many times this year we’re going to start a sentence, “Say what you like about the Hundred, but…”

We also used it a couple of weeks ago to point out how runs-per-100-balls strike-rates will make a good deal more sense in a format where innings last 100 balls. It’s a construction that seems to neatly fit our editorial position, which is that, yes, there’s obviously stuff to dislike about the Hundred, but have you noticed that there’s also stuff to like?

Sarah Taylor playing professional cricket is unequivocally A Good Thing.

Because they spend so much more time up to the stumps, wicketkeepers are far more important in women’s cricket and Taylor is the best of the lot.

Why is she the best?

Oh, you know, little things like trying to run out two batters at opposite ends with basically the same movement.

Things like taking catches off spinners at slip.

Things like her mad keeping drills.

And of course, most frequently of all, things like stumpings that have happened before a normal person would even have caught the ball.

That last one happens quite a lot.

Male wicketkeepers are not especially influential figures any more. For about 80 per cent of the time, they’re just stoppers; little more than out-fielders in gloves. There’s rarely much to be gained from picking someone who performs the role with a bit of artistry.

It’s different in women’s cricket.

Women’s cricket is the best place to see wicketkeeping and Sarah Taylor is the best wicketkeeper to see and she’s in the Hundred.

Feels like we’re due an update on the Hundred.

The big news this week was Manchester Originals coach Simon Katich writing an open letter to fans in which he appears to consider his team to be much the same entity as Lancashire County Cricket Club.

You can see why he’d think this. Both teams will play at Old Trafford and unlike several of the other Hundred teams, the Originals will represent Lancashire and no other county.

Of far more interest to us, Katich’s letter featured the first official accidental comedy use of the word ‘Originals‘, when he said, “the Originals are an extension of this great county.”

The original extension. The original after-the-fact add-on.

Separately, the ECB has also announced some playing conditions.

A number of people remain violently angry about the Hundred and these people are outraged that they’re doing away with the convention of a new batsman going to the non-striker’s end when someone’s out after skying it and the two batsmen have crossed – but this is not the most interesting news. This is not even nearly the most interesting news.

The most interesting news is the time-out and it is the most interesting news because it begs a fiendish philosophical question, which we’ll come to shortly.

We’re hugely enamoured of time-outs. Everyone knows they’re really just an excuse for an extra ad break, so it’s fun to see exactly how the organisers and broadcaster are going to lie to you about them.

The convention is to call them ‘strategic time-outs’ because that makes them sound like so much more than the cessation of cricket. The trick then is to get the commentators to talk about them as if they’re momentous, game-changing events rather than just nothing happening for a bit.

The IPL has managed to make time-outs seem so vital that they actually have an official strategic time-out partner. This is amazing. These are brands that want their name to be associated with (a) cricket not happening and (b) everyone groaning about watching the exact same palette of adverts for the thousandth time that week. (It’ll be interesting to see how they talk up time-outs on the BBC, where there are no ads.)

The big Hundred strategic time-out news is that they’re going to be two-and-a-half minutes long and this is where we start asking questions that surely cannot be answered.

Two-and-a-half minutes without cricket during a game of cricket. That’s just… cricket, isn’t it?

We don’t know about you, but we probably wouldn’t even notice if we watched cricket for 150 seconds and didn’t see any cricket. It wouldn’t for even one moment occur to us that the cricket had stopped and that we were no longer watching cricket.

You might think that cricket is a game of bat and ball, but is it? Is it really?

We put it to you that cricket is actually a game of 150-second spells of inactivity that are interspersed with very brief ‘time-outs’ where someone bowls a ball and someone else maybe hits it or maybe doesn’t.

A brief history of what’s been wrong with the County Championship in the fairly recent past, the present, and in a couple of years’ time…

• Not a good enough standard
• Not a good enough standard and played at the wrong times of year
• Not a good enough standard and played at the wrong times of year and also at the same time as another competition which will have dibs on most of the best players

The last of those seems to be on the cards going by an interview with Ashley Giles in the latest issue of The Cricketer.

Giles says that in 2021, they might not play the 50-over tournament at the same time as The Hundred. They might play some of the County Championship at the same time as The Hundred instead.

George Dobell reports that the ECB may try and acknowledge that these midsummer Championships fixtures have been diminished by halving the points available.

The temptation here is to take issue with the detail – the halving of points, the prioritisation of one competition over another – but it’s the same story as always. There is too much domestic cricket in the UK and somehow, miraculously, the addition of a fourth competition (and format) hasn’t resolved this.

We’re not purely blaming The Hundred (although plenty will). It’s not a new phenomenon. The whole, horrible, confusing huge-plate-of-food-dropped-on-the-floor mess that is the current domestic season has come about because it’s easier to introduce additional things than it is to take anything away.

In 1890, it was suggested that county cricket be divided into first, second and third classes with eight teams in each.

We think this is a good idea even now as it would blur the divide between the professional and amateur games, but of course no-one wanted to risk losing first-class status so it didn’t happen.

Despite many, many, many changes, nothing really changes. Imagine trying to reclassify counties as second-class in a world where people still can’t come to terms with two divisions of first-class cricket and the crazy notion that the second division is somehow inferior.

It’s just not fair, they say, trying to impose a hierarchy in sport – and this is how you end up with ten teams in the top division playing 14 games next season.

Maybe they could play nine games? No, no. You need to be playing plenty of first-class cricket because first-class cricket is the main thing. Everyone knows that.

At the same time, 50-over cricket is important in the lead-up to a World Cup, so that’s why it may get priority over the Championship from 2021. The T20 Blast is important for the counties because it gets people into the grounds, so it gets priority too.

Because of all of these competing priorities and the fact that each of them has to somehow involve all 18 first-class counties, they came up with the idea of a new, simpler tournament, with fewer teams.

The Hundred was envisaged as a simple, straightforward competition that ran from one date to another with no changes of format and every player you’ve heard of somehow involved in it.

It’s a noble and logical goal. And then you have to crowbar it into the county season without diminishing anything else.

Something has to give, but nothing ever, ever does.

Let the compromises begin!

Has The Hundred moved you to descend on Lord’s armed with a pitchfork and a flaming torch?

No?

So you’re a fan then?

No, you’re not a fan.

So what exactly is your position?

If you’re basically in a shrug of a holding pattern then Steve Smith is your unlikely spiritual leader.

Here’s a few more words that explain what we’re on about here.

The player draft for The Hundred took place on Sunday night. It was broadcast on Sky and streamed live on the BBC website.

What was the situation?

Each of the eight teams had already picked a red-ball contracted player and also a local ‘icon’ (because whatever your thing is, it ain’t shit these days unless you can use the word ‘iconic’ about it in some way or other).

• Trent Rockets have Joe Root, Alex Hales and Harry Gurney
• Southern Brave have Jofra Archer, James Vince and Chris Jordan
• Northern Super Chargers have Ben Stokes, Adil Rashid and David Willey
• Welsh Fire have Jonny Bairstow, Colin Ingram(?) and Tom Banton
• Oval Invincibles have Jason Roy and both Sam and Tom Curran
• Manchester Originals have Jos Buttler, Matt Parkinson and Saqib Mahmood
• London Spirit have Eoin Morgan, Rory Burns and Dan Lawrence
• Birmingham Phoenix have Chris Woakes, Moeen Ali and Pat Brown

You’ll notice that we went through the teams in a weird order. That’s because that’s the order in which they made their picks during the draft.

Each team had £960,000 to spend and 1m40s to make each pick. (You could call it 100 seconds if you wanted, but we like to be difficult about these sorts of things.)

Some teams were always going to piss away their money on a handful of star players before desperately plugging the gaps later on; others recognised that overseas stars were ten a penny (239 put their names into the presumably gigantic hat) and invested more cannily.

This website is only really interested in the piss-money-away-on-stars strategy.

How things panned out

There are many ways to analyse how the draft panned out and who might consequently have the best squad.

The method we’ve decided on is to look at how much each team spent on overseas stars because this is quicker and easier and not necessarily a great deal worse than ‘doing the job properly’, which is a thing that we hate to do.

As we said above, there were *plenty* of very good overseas players available for lower prices, whereas there was a much steeper drop off in local talent. Spending all your dough on overseasies would therefore seem to have been a relatively inefficient way to invest.

The maximum any team could have spent on overseas stars was £350,000 because you’re only allowed three of them and there were strict wage brackets. (Quick side point: Everyone had the same budget. It’s striking that The Hundred makes more effort to ensure equality between its sides than county cricket does.)

Trent Rockets, London Spirit and Southern Brave all spent £325,000, but Northern Superchargers went that little bit further and actually maxed out.

At the opposite end of the scale, Manchester Originals spent £235,000 and Birmingham Phoenix spent £200,000, so we’re tipping one of them for victory in the inaugural tournament next year.