An interesting article from today's Times about how cricket is being simplified for the modern era. I guess it was a matter of time until the stately game was deemed to smart for its own good. Apparently "Mums and kids" are too stupid to be able to follow it.
Catchy new jargon dismissed as dumbing down of cricket
Elizabeth Ammon
No longer will a team be described as being 93 runs for three wickets from 10 overs. Instead it will be 75 runs from 60 balls for three outs. The competition, which will be played by eight new city-based teams set up by the England and Wales Cricket Board, announced last year it would be doing away with six-ball overs. The Hundred will feature 100-ball innings with blocks of ten balls bowled from alternate ends of the ground with the 100 balls counted down on a big screen.The ECB is hoping for a large new television audience as the BBC has the rights to show ten matches including the final live on their main terrestrial channels. Matches will be shown during prime evening slots.
To try to appeal to a new audience they want commentators on BBC and Sky to move away from the traditional ways of describing the game.
The tournament has been described as a gimmick by many existing cricket supporters who express concerns about a dumbing down and “Americanisation” of what is the country’s national summer sport.There was widespread criticism from cricket fans on social media yesterday who believe this change in vocabulary was turning the game into something more akin to rounders or baseball.
Statisticians are unwilling to set up an entire new system for the competition, however, so while during the tournament wickets will be referred to as “outs” in the stadium and as part of the television and radio broadcasts, they will still need to be recorded as wickets by scorers and in online player databases. Although a number of radical ideas, such as removing LBW as a mode of dismissal on the grounds it was too complex, have been rejected, the ECB will continue to use focus groups to determine whether there are other aspects of the game that they want to simplify.
Concepts already being used in Australia’s Big Bash competition such as “x-factor substitutions”, whereby a substitute can be brought into the team halfway through an innings, may also be considered.
The tournament will hold the men’s and women’s matches on the same days at the same venues with live entertainment aimed at children and young people in between the two matches.
There will be 68 matches played over five weeks in the school summer holidays with each team playing four home and four away matches before knockout games leading to a final at Lord’s on August 21.
The Hundred, which was due to start last year but was postponed because of Covid-19, has suffered PR gaffes. After it was announced in 2018, the organisers originally said that the tournament was not aimed at existing cricket fans and that the game needed to be simplified and made shorter for “mums and kids”.
