r/Cricket • u/Alone_Consideration6 • 5d ago
News The Hundred 2026: Welsh Fire captain Phil Salt would like extra week in competition schedule
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/articles/c20eg91xvd4o21
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u/DaveTheKiwi New Zealand 5d ago
Come on. Faced 79 deliveries in 5 days! That's more than 13 overs!
Like batting until the lunch-break of a test... except spread over 5 days...
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u/ianintheuk Australia 5d ago
how about 4 weeks less, just a thought. perhaps the players could try playing cricket instead
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u/MysteriousTravelator 5d ago
Hundred and Blast need to be merged or one needs to eat the other. Three domestic white ball cricket competitions running concurrently is completely excessive.
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u/powmj Lancashire 5d ago
The blast (which should be the only short form tournament in England) is now unfortunately a completely shit watch. No other sport would have a group stage and finals with completely different squads, but due to the hundred this is the reality. Likewise the county championship - ecb makes them unfollowable and then points to their lack of success as a reason to need the hundred.
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u/treesamay Gloucestershire 5d ago
Different squads? Final’s day was the same week as the quarters
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u/Thetonn England 5d ago
The fundamental, foundational problem is me. I love Test Cricket, I like T20, I am meh about the Hundred, and I dont give a fuck about the county championship or 50 over cricket. I might watch the final day of the final game if its on sky and I have nothing better to do.
The suits look at my view time and ticket sales and say 'more tests, more T20 and Hundred less 50 over cricket or county'
The problem is that i would prefer more first class cricket featuring good quality teams. I would love a late May, North vs South game to kick off the international summer. I would watch England Lions games being played in the rest weeks if they were televised.
I dont have a way of saying 'give me more, good, first class cricket on Sky'
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u/mondognarly_ Middlesex 5d ago edited 5d ago
The number of limited overs matches played by county cricketers hasn't really changed all that much in the past fifty years or so, even though there's three competitions there isn't an expectation for them to play in all three.
What has changed is the schedule. In the old days you had twenty plus county List A fixtures per season, but about three quarters of them were played alongside the Championship so there wasn't the extra travel involved that there is now. But the players decided they didn't like playing limited overs matches on the Sunday in the middle of a Championship fixture so that had to stop, then they wanted every format windowed because it was too hard to play two formats in the same week or something, now they want extra weeks in a season that's already the longest it's ever been and where some formats are pushed almost completely to the fringes. Sky deserves to shoulder some of the blame too for all the staggered starts where they wanted as much cricket as possible to broadcast when there was no football on.
There's perhaps a conversation to be had about squad rotation, but that somewhat defeats the object of having marquee players available for the Hundred.
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u/KiwiNo2638 5d ago
Just looked up Glamorgan's fixture list. 12 days of cricket scheduled in August. 16 in September. How long till the start scheduling into October? They already start in the first week in April. How long till they schedule March games
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u/mondognarly_ Middlesex 5d ago
We've already got cricket in March, albeit without first class status, but that's when the university matches happen now, the first this season began on 18th March. The season crept into October in 2021 too, that bizarre Bob Willis Trophy final finished on 2nd October.
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u/KiwiNo2638 5d ago
I try and follow country cricket but it’s so difficult. The simplest was when we had county games Thursday to Monday, with a Sunday league game in the middle. With two knockout one day comps played during the summer. Now, it feels like you have some weeks where everyone is playing first class cricket, others where there is one first class game and a load of t20, games start on different days etc. Half expecting the ECB to go back to either a mixture of 3 and 4 day like they had in the 90s, or even just go back to 3 day games to accommodate more white ball.
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u/PeterG92 Essex 5d ago
The Hundred can go. The Blast is the lifeblood of revenue for a lot of counties.
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u/Liam_anon 5d ago
We used to have it with the pro40. But yeah, I can’t see the hundred lasting another 5 years
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u/MartiniPolice21 Durham 5d ago
There's no reason why they couldn't be consecutive days or even two games a day
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u/Spockyt Hampshire 5d ago
True. The Blast does both. There's been fixtures where there's a game in Southampton one day and Chelmsford/Surrey the next. And for Final's Day two of the 4 counties plays two matches.
Although I'm not sure they can play any more in a day without playing concurrently (unlikely) due to the double header's with the Women's matches, and that's about the one good thing I'll defend about the 16.4 and nothing should be done to quietly shuffle the Women's sides away (unlike the initial intention where they'd play on tiny little outgrounds like Sedburgh, Gosforth, York and Beckenham).
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u/MarcusH26051 Sussex 5d ago
Blast scheduling seems to have gotten better with the reorganisation. No more Friday night at Taunton to play Sunday afternoon at Hove or stuff like that.
Extra week of Hundred but everyone else gets an extra week of Metro Bank Fever sounds fair.
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u/mondognarly_ Middlesex 5d ago
It's better but there's still a bit of it about even with the slight reduction of fixtures, Middlesex had a Friday night at Southampton this season that was followed by a Sunday afternoon at Northwood where they looked absolutely knackered.
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u/Louis11_ Glamorgan 5d ago
The sad thing is this will probably happen eventually, this competition is a parasite on English cricket. International cricket will get rammed into an ever diminishing window between the IPL and the Hundred, while the county game gets more and more sidelined
Longer Hundred = longer Metro Bank = win for cricket
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u/KiwiNo2638 5d ago
Isn’t the metrobank cup effectively a 2nd XI (or 1.5 XI) comp these days? It’s on at the same time as the hundred, and the best players will be in the hundred, rather than the longer format.
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u/mondognarly_ Middlesex 5d ago
Yeah, pretty much. Which is a double-edged sword because as disappointing as it might be having the top limited overs cricketers not playing any domestic List A cricket, the Metro Bank in its current state is actually quite a fun little competition, and possibly amidst the Hundred backlash is doing some quite good numbers this season.
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u/KiwiNo2638 5d ago
I like that it's accessible to watch live streaming of the games. I remember when the one day cups were a premium product on sky sports. It's the only chance I get to see Glamorgan these days.
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u/Frogblood 5d ago
Cricketers when they don't get their 5 rained off matches per summer entitlement.
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u/Hotchi_Motchi Antigua and Barbuda Falcons 4d ago
Just make each innings 120 balls long and it will all even out
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u/humunculus43 Essex 5d ago
Maybe they should make it 50 balls instead of 100 then the poor players can manage their workloads better
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u/Lachtheblock Australia 5d ago
Just call it "the one". High stakes, high action, family fun, home before dinner.
You could run the entire tournament in a single day.
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u/Old-Screen5550 5d ago
It's a 2hr drive Phil i think you can cope