Observations after half-watching the Hundred on TV with a couple of kids milling about the place

Posted by
5 minute read

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.

Speaking of accessibility, feel free to follow King Cricket on Twitter or sign up to get our articles by email.

If you like the features we do here at King Cricket and you’d like us to do more of them, please flip us a coin or buy us a pint each month via Patreon. The more we get, the more of this sort of vital reportage we can do. Cheers.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

19 comments

  1. I watched about 10 minutes of it (during he first innings, if we are still allowed to call it that – I noticed the word ‘wicket’, or at least the abbreviation thereof, was still used) on my laptop, it took about 8 minutes of to understand which numbers were the team total and which related to particular bowlers.

    I didn’t really get the towers bit, although maybe it would have made more sense during the run-chase period.

    1. Would align the batter and bowler perspectives a bit more if they’d done so, and in many ways it makes more sense to distinguish the physical structure of the “wickets” from the act of dismissal (which may not involve the wickets at all).

  2. The best bit about the graphics is the line drawn through the batters names on the scorecard. It makes it look like they’ve been removed as part of an assassin’s revenge list, and it made me giggle

  3. ‘Energetic-and-emotional-mental before ultimately descending into extreme emotional fragility’ is my default state when watching cricket anyway.

    Ps #opposethehundred

  4. Except you can’t watch it on Sky Sports Cricket because that channel has now been renamed to Sky Sports Hundred, despite it not always showing The Hundred but always showing Cricket.

  5. Sky are also making every women’s game and some men’s games available for free on their YouTube channel. That should definitely help with the discoverability of it all.

  6. Haseeb Hameed scored the best Hundred of yesterday and I’ll hear no evidence to the contrary. Mostly because this site is visual not audio.

      1. I love Pavel Florin’s accent. He’s been doing some commentary for ECN and it’s a bit like having early-career Schwarzenegger telling you what an important wicket it just was. He does sound genuinely disconsolate when he sees a drop, which I particularly like. Plus the shout-outs to all the Romanian kids watching, in Romanian, which is possibly a bit optimistic but I think is a lovely touch.

  7. In other news, Daisy and I spent an abbreviated day at Lord’s today – report to follow.

    In other, other news, I saw this report on the BBC News website and wondered whether our own Deep Cower is going to apologise for his moniker: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57961870

    Not that I am associating our friend Deep Cower with the latest hapless UK Health Secretary.

    1. I apologise freely for everything, Ged, and am glad to do so in this case as well. It is one thing marriage has taught me well.

  8. I completely agree with your sentiments KC. My one bugbear is the commentators who mark butcher aside seem to be ridiculously overexcited the whole time. Listening to KP and ‘Doully’ the other night was painful.

  9. I started reading this post and got to the third picture after reading about the kids bit. (Before going further, I should mention I was sleep-deprived at this point). For some reason, I saw the banner in the picture to read ‘CapseyCross’. I imagined this to be a picturesque, yet desolate railway station somewhere. On a bench were an 80 year-old Ian Bell and Rahul Dravid (again, I was only semi-conscious) waiting for the train. Neither were carrying a newspaper. Bell was animatedly detailing how one has to stand up tall and smother the spin (or something like that) so the close-in fielders don’t have a chance. Rahul seemed to smile and agree – he was half-asleep.

    All this made me extremely happy before I woke up and got back to work. So thank you for this post, KC.

    1. Dravid had a considerably more wrinkled face than Bell in that half-dream. In case you were not wondering.

      1. On the topic of Ian Bell…

        …Stuart Broad and Bumble were banting the other day about having their names attributed to something at their home ground. Bumble was reminding Stuart that there is already a Jimmy Anderson End at Old Trafford and wondered whether there were such plans for Broady.

        Stuart demurred and his repost was to wonder what had been named at Old Trafford in Bumble’s honour.

        Bumble mumbled about one of the smaller boxes in the media centre.

        But all I could think about was the notion of renaming one of the Edgbaston ends (presumably the pathetically monikered “City End” after Ian Ronald…

        …The Bell End.

        I was wide awake, btw. Loved your semi-conscious dream piece, Deep Cower. All apologies accepted.

Comments are closed.