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Ben Stokes injuring himself in meaningless Hundred is one of English cricket’s dumbest moments
England have lost a superb batsman, a penetrating bowler and an adventurous captain for first Test because of an imbecilic, parochial format
www.telegraph.co.uk
12 August 2024 • 12:00pm
Simon Heffer
Ben Stokes left Old Trafford on crutches after seemingly pulling his hamstring while going for a quick single in The Hundred CREDIT: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
Any A level economics student will tell you all about the idea of opportunity cost. Put simply, if you spent a certain amount of money on a pint of beer, then you can’t use it to buy several packets of crisps. The opportunity cost of The Hundred has been dire for English cricket since it began three years ago. You can’t play high-quality, serious (i.e. first-class) matches at the same time that your best cricketers are cavorting in Mickey Mouse matches for the entertainment of nine-year olds. And now we know there is an even worse cost.
As Ben Stokes was carried off the field at Old Trafford on Sunday with a suspected hamstring injury, the opportunity cost of his turning out to add some glamour to Northern Superchargers became horribly clear. Stokes is highly unlikely to be able to play at the same ground on Wednesday week when England take on Sri Lanka in the first game of their three-match series. Indeed, he is highly unlikely to be able to play in any of the three Tests, so closely scheduled are they.
So The Hundred – a format I suspect is doomed because of the rest of the world’s utter lack of interest in it, with the only-just-less absurd T20 as king – has dealt a triple blow to serious cricket in this country. England have lost a superb batsman, a penetrating bowler and an adventurous captain, all because the cash-crazed imbeciles who run professional cricket thought it was a good idea to showcase him in a thoroughly pointless game on a Sunday evening. Why is this nonsense allowed to happen?
The rationale for The Hundred was that it would get people who were not interested in cricket to become so, which is a bit like saying that if you avidly read Mills & Boon romances you will end up a devotee of the novels of George Eliot, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. One or two might; most won’t; and thus the great game of cricket is sacrificed to provide the lightest of light entertainment, a form of the game whose inanities do not prevent it causing serious damage.
There is a desperate effort at the moment to boost interest, and investment, in The Hundred. In a few weeks’ time even MCC members, the standard-bearers of tradition, will be asked to decide whether their venerable club should take a highly subsidised stake in the format. I profoundly hope they won’t, and only partly because it is so self-evidently not for the good of the game. The Hundred is scheduled to run until 2028, when the current television deal with Sky runs out. India, because of its sheer wealth in this respect, controls the future of short-form cricket. Their own T20 is the most successful in the world and the format has now been exported around the world, notably to the United States. The Hundred is, quite simply, the Betamax of white-ball cricket to T20’s VHS. It will suffer the same fate.
The decline in the standard of Test cricket is rapidly killing it, and it might be a higher priority for the game’s authorities to do what they can to stop that. The recent West Indies series might have been an embarrassment for the tourists, but it was another handful of nails in the coffin of the highest form of the game. I have looked in vain for anyone predicting an exciting series with Sri Lanka, though with Stokes likely not to be playing the sides might be evened up a little. At least this is not an August entirely without first-class cricket to watch, as last year’s shamefully was. But what has happened to Stokes, robbing England of its star cricketer for the most futile of reasons just before a Test series, ought to be another warning to those in charge that they have to think far more strategically about the future of cricket.
It may well be that Test cricket has to be pared back to just half a dozen countries if it is to survive; but if it is to work even then there must be a shift in the balance in those countries. It means more first-class cricket and less white-ball. It means making the first-class game more dynamic, and perhaps attracting younger people to it by giving free tickets to full-time students – after all, they wouldn’t be depriving anyone else of a seat. But it also means considering two codes, as I have been arguing in these pages for years, so that men essential to our Test side do not cripple themselves in a Mickey Mouse match and prevent themselves taking part. We can go on like this, and I fear we shall, but the game as we know it will soon be dead if we do.
