A cricket diary on The Hundred’s privatised sixth season, the IPL-style auction that brought Harry Brook a £465,000 deal, and finally admitting the format won her over completely
I have spent five full seasons of The Hundred being the exact person everyone in cricket comment sections despises, the traditionalist sighing loudly about hundred-ball formats and manufactured city franchises and the general erosion of a game I grew up loving in its considerably longer, considerably more patient original forms. I went to Finals Day at Lord’s this month purely out of professional obligation, genuinely expecting to write another mildly condescending piece about the whole enterprise. Instead I left having had, without exaggeration, one of the best single days of cricket I’ve experienced all year, and I feel I owe this format a rather overdue, only slightly humiliating apology.
Why This Particular Season Actually Felt Different From The Start
This was the first season since the tournament’s privatisation, and the board itself acknowledged the genuinely transitional nature of the whole enterprise, right down to allowing individual teams discretion over betting sponsorships given the shift away from the previous ownership structure. The March auction brought genuinely IPL-style bidding intensity to London for the first time, Harry Brook going for four hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds, the single most expensive pick in the entire auction, Phil Salt close behind at four hundred and fifty. I remember rolling my eyes reading those figures back in the spring. Watching the actual product those figures funded, my eye-rolling felt considerably less justified.
What Actually Happened On The Pitch That Finally Won Me Over
The double-header format, one ticket covering both the women’s and men’s matches on the same day at the same ground, meant I sat through a genuinely excellent full afternoon and evening of cricket rather than simply the men’s fixture I’d have prioritised in previous years. The women’s competition opening every single day of play rather than being treated as a secondary attraction changed something fundamental about how I experienced the whole occasion, forcing me, in the most useful possible way, to actually pay proper attention rather than treating it as a warm-up act.
Why I Think The Extra Overseas Slot This Season Actually Mattered More Than I Initially Realised
Expanding from three to four overseas picks per squad meant genuine global stars, Rashid Khan, Heinrich Klaasen, Smriti Mandhana, Beth Mooney, featuring alongside England’s best throughout the tournament, and the quality difference was genuinely, visibly noticeable compared to earlier seasons I’d half-watched with considerably less attention. This wasn’t simply domestic players padding out a novelty format anymore. This felt like genuinely elite competitive cricket, compressed into a shape I’d previously dismissed as unserious.
What Nat Sciver-Brunt’s Early-Season Injury Scare Actually Taught Me About How Seriously Players Themselves Take This Competition
I’d read, earlier in the season, about her managing a calf injury that had briefly threatened her T20 World Cup involvement, insisting to her specialist that she had a game on Tuesday regardless of a prognosis that clearly wasn’t especially encouraging. That’s not the attitude of an athlete treating this format as some lesser, secondary commitment. That’s someone fighting genuinely hard to be available for a competition I’d previously, condescendingly, assumed players themselves didn’t take entirely seriously.
How Finals Day Itself Actually Delivered On Every Level
Both champions crowned at the Home of Cricket, a genuinely fitting culmination for a tournament that’s spent six seasons building toward exactly this kind of occasion, Lord’s packed with a crowd that felt considerably younger and more genuinely mixed than the traditional Test match crowds I’m more accustomed to sitting among. I found myself, somewhere around the midpoint of the men’s final, genuinely invested in a result I’d have claimed total indifference toward five years ago.
What This Whole Day Has Actually Taught Me About My Own Cricket Snobbery
That five years of reflexive dismissal was, in retrospect, considerably more about protecting my own sense of traditionalist identity than about any genuine, considered assessment of the format’s actual quality. The Hundred, whatever I thought of its founding premise, has apparently spent half a decade quietly building something genuinely excellent, and it took an actual Finals Day at Lord’s, rather than another five years of comment-section sighing, to finally make me admit it properly.