England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) new addition – The Hundred has been going on in full phase. The new format sees both the team face 100 balls each alongside a few new sets of rules as well. Players like Joe Root, Ben Stokes, Rashid Khan, Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis, Sunil Narine, Eoin Morgan, Moeen Ali, and Jonny Bairstow are playing in the tournament. However, former Australia captain Ian Chappell said that the T20 format is enough to take the sport into the Olympics, ‘The Hundred’ was not required as well.
However, not only men’s but Women’s cricket matches are also been playing simultaneously in the tournament where five Indian players playing across women’s teams – Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, and Jemimah Rodrigues. The Hundred is a 100-ball cricket competition that is seeing (both men and women) featuring in the tournament.
“Apart from reducing the number of balls to obtain a terrestrial television deal, the reasoning behind the Hundred could well be that it improves the chances of cricket fulfilling the Olympic dream. This is often cited as a way to spread the game’s popularity to a wider audience. Surely the T20 format could achieve that same outcome without yet another reduction,” Ian Chappell wrote in his column for ESPNcricinfo.
“Cricket is a team game ideally played by 11 members a side. Performance satisfaction is a big reason why youngsters fall in love with the game. Administrators would do well to remember that before they rush into devising shorter forms of the game. The more the length of an innings is reduced, the greater chance that there will be players “just making up the numbers”. Even those players crave occasional performance satisfaction,” he continued.
“Throughout my playing career I believed there were two possible solutions to a problem: a simple one and a complicated one. I also believed that to the benefit of Australia, England would regularly choose the complicated solution. They’ve done it again. To overcome the perceived problem of public not fully conversant with cricket, they’ve concocted another form of the game – The Hundred. That’s right, they’ve reduced by a mere 20 balls a format that was extremely popular with players and the public,” Ian Chappell concluded.
