[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Anybody watching it then?

Yeah I watched it, I struggled to get my head around the concept at first while watching the Manchester Originals bat but when the Oval Invincibles went in for their innings it started to make sense. The graphics for the scorecard are the only problem in my opinion. 100 balls is technically 16 overs with 4 extra balls but over's don't exist and the bowlers can bowl either 5 balls or 10 balls and the umpire holds a white piece of card up to single change of bowler. The umpires did get a bit confused at one point over free hits.

I recorded it and just got through watching now. A lot of what I predicted seems to be true, especially with regards to the desperate pundits; I was especially impressed by the absolute div who was gushing about "a filled stadium" whilst standing in front of a backdrop of stands that were visibly half-empty at best.

The scorecard graphics have definitely been tailored for simpletons, though I think they've done well with the DRS display, where all the available camera angles are simultaneously onscreen, and the third umpire doesn't have to fanny about asking for them. If this technology has been on offer for some time then it's poor that other formats of the game haven't used it before, because it clearly streamlines things and keeps the game ticking over.

As for the overs thing, pre-tournament I was under the impression that the final ten balls of an innings would be from a single bowler, mandatory. Have they scrapped that? Because Manchester switched bowlers with five balls to go. And if that's the case, then really, it's just T20 with five-ball overs instead of six, isn't it? Having the option to keep a bowler on for ten consecutive balls is the only difference in that regard, and it's hardly revolutionary stuff.

All in all, after one match I remain firmly of the opinion that streamlining T20 and making it accessible would have been better than this.

[WakeyTerrier]

I've tickets to go watch the Northern Superchargers double header on the 31st which will take in the both the Women's and Men's games so i thought I'd give it a watch last night.
Tickets for our fixture were either £16/25 or £30 which is good value and £5 for ages 6-15, free for under 5's. Last nights crowd of around 7000 was a good turn out for the ladies game.
Twenty 20 Cricket used to be cheap until the clubs realised they could easily sell out at a higher price.
These games have also deliberately been scheduled for the school holidays

From the men's point a view I don't get what it brings to the game that Twenty20 doesn't already bring.
I can however see this being a good thing for the Ladies, it will increase the profile of that side of the sport and project the better players into the spotlight

I was impressed with the standard of the ladies game, and as opening games go it was a decent watch.

As for the Telly production, the graphics are a bit in your face and the pointless women they kept going to on the BBC was well...pointless. Box ticking for the sake of it.

[Tobias Chuddlewick]

Apparently it was much easier and quicker to buy a pint than ice cream and pizza's.

Sorry , but these things need to be reported .

[WakeyTerrier]

Apparently it was much easier and quicker to buy a pint than ice cream and pizza's.

Sorry , but these things need to be reported .

Might not be the same tonight for the Mens game which I understand is sold out

[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

From the men's point a view I don't get what it brings to the game that Twenty20 doesn't already bring.
I can however see this being a good thing for the Ladies, it will increase the profile of that side of the sport and project the better players into the spotlight

Yeah, I said somewhere further up the thread that I think it'll be a net positive for women's cricket, not least in increasing the number of players who are able to turn full-time professional. And the existing women's T20 tournament definitely wasn't fit for purpose. That said, I've seen crowds of a similar size at women's T20 in the past, and considering this was the curtain-raiser to a new tournament and new format in the week when the Covid shackles have just been taken off, 7000 is... not what it could (and arguably should) be. [EDITED TO ADD: I've just seen that 7000 is actually a record number for a domestic women's match, so I stand corrected on that. But I stick by the position that as a tournament and format opener in hot weather during Freedom Week, it should have been a bigger crowd, not least because a sizeable percentage of those 7000 were apparently NHS workers given free tickets.]

I'd expect the men's opener to be a sell-out, but there are reports that Glamorgan have been giving tickets away to local clubs for Welsh Fire games, because they're just not shifting them. The pop acts being touted as half-time entertainment are B-list at best; I had to look up last night's, who turned out to be a reality star who had one #1 back in 2014 and a handful of forgettable non-top-10 hits since. Was this all they could afford? Or did the decent acts all say no?

And the guidelines to commentators appear to state that they're in no circumstances allowed to use the word "overs", because apparently that would confuse all the poor jellybrains who are put off cricket by big words. Just a thought: if you're expecting that newbies will get to grips with the LBW law without alteration, then maybe they have the intellectual capacity to deal with the concept of balls delivered in batches, too? If they were making a simplified form of football for non-fans, would the FA say "we're going to leave the offside rule exactly as it is, but under no circumstances is anyone allowed to use the words "free-kick", "penalty" or "goal", because we don't want to confuse people."?

[spireitematt]

I think The Hundred is aimed to be more family friendly and also aimed at getting more women interested in watching cricket. Are people put off going to watch T20, One day and Test matches because of the heavy drinking and rowdy fans?

Couldn't they have created T10? Have a double header of games of women and men on the same day?

What about mixed teams of men and women? That would have been interesting.

[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

T10 is already a thing in the Middle East, and there's a very real sense around the Hundred that the ECB wanted something brand new that they could own all the rights and licensing to, because they let T20 slip from their grasp in that regard. (Also, there's an argument to be made that once you shorten a game beyond a certain point, it becomes less interesting as a contest; taking a wicket means nothing when the batting team can afford to lose one every over, and there's barely any time for twists and turns to develop in the balance of play).

The drinking culture is probably a factor, but Edgbaston has had the right idea for years in designating separate party stands and family stands, and stewarding them accordingly. No idea whether other grounds do that, but it's a simple concept that should satisfy everyone. And I've felt for years now that modern cricket walks the perfect line between accommodating the good-natured rowdiness (and booziness) of a football crowd minus the violent knobhead element, whilst allowing space for the more prim and prudish lot with a stick up their bum and generations of snobbery behind them. (This is in stark contrast to rugby union, where the latter type still rule the roost with a permanent chip on their shoulder about football, and a determination to keep anything that reeks of football fan culture well out of their sport).

Mixed-sex teams work at village level, where you've got young lasses in their physical prime competing against blokes like me who've acquainted themselves with one too many pork pies through the years, but at the highest level, top male athletes are always going to outrun and outhit top females. While it's occasionally okay in a charity context (like Soccer Aid), in an actual competitive situation it would be deeply unfair for the women to feel like they're token representatives in every match, hearing groans from the crowd when their shots don't reach the boundary or they don't sprint fast enough to cut off a four, etc. They deserve to be best in their own field, by their own standards; they just need a boost to establish themselves and attract the kind of crowds that women do in sports like tennis.

[themaclad]

Remember the Hundred is designed to attract people who do not like cricket by playing a game of cricket, those attending would be cricket fans otherwise they would not be there

[spireitematt]

Watched the men's match tonight. I enjoyed it but I feel like it's still lacking something. The other thing is there are 8 teams and a majority of people in the country can't really support or follow a team locally. Why have London got 2 teams? But every other region has 1 team.

Trent Rockets - Nottingham
Northern Superchargers - Yorkshire, Cumbria and Durham
Oval Invincibles - London
London Spirit - London
Manchester Originals - Manchester, Lancashire
Welsh Fire - Wales, Glamorgan, Somerset, Gloucestershire
Southern Brave - Hampshire, Sussex
Birmingham Phoenix - Birmingham

People in Derbyshire aren't going to follow or support a team in Nottingham are they? Same goes for people who live in Liverpool and Merseyside they aren't going to follow the Manchester Originals. What about Scotland why haven't they got a team? Same goes for people who live in Cornwall and in the West Country.

Like Maclad said the whole point of The Hundred is to appeal to people who don't like cricket but to get them interested, but then you've got to ask yourself if people don't like cricket then why would they like The Hundred?

It's a format of cricket which I believe would appeal to Americans.

[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Watched the men's match tonight. I enjoyed it but I feel like it's still lacking something. The other thing is there are 8 teams and a majority of people in the country can't really support or follow a team locally. Why have London got 2 teams? But every other region has 1 team.

The fairly obvious answer is that they're focusing on the places with the largest venues, which can accommodate the biggest crowds. But it does leave whole swathes of the country unrepresented, as you say. The gamble they're taking is that they'll gain more fans in the big cities who felt no connection with their county side, than they'll lose in the hinterlands amongst county fans who don't feel able to transfer their support to the nearest city. I did previously think this was a misjudgement on their part, but on tonight's match there was a vox pop with some fan going to the Oval, born and bred in Clapham, saying "it's great that we've *finally* got cricket here in the city!" Like no one's ever hosted a cricket match in London before. Honestly, I don't know how these people even dress themselves.

Still, when it comes to areas like Cornwall and East Anglia, you'll find no shortage of football "fans" wearing Chelsea or Man Utd shirts, so I suppose a lot of people in those places will just pick a winning team to support in the cricket too, if they take an interest at all. It's the traditional but non-metropolitan cricketing heartlands where people like us are going to feel left out.

It was also noticeable how many in the Oval crowd were wearing England shirts and Surrey shirts. There may have been a few cricket newbies in amongst them, but by and large - unlike the women's game - it was clearly existing fans in the majority. That may change over time, but if it doesn't then the ECB will have big questions to answer, as the people who arbitrarily decided that a 120-ball format was some kind of dinosaur game for middle-aged fuddy-duddies, while knocking 20 balls off the total magically conjures a brave new world of happy families and super-cool urban yoof.