It must have come as a shock to those with such little faith in cricket to discover it exists without pyrotechnics, dayglo graphics, urban franchises and scoop shots. It must have been a shock to see that it packs houses just the same, even when Dom Sibley is batting.
It took 70 balls and more than one complete session for Sibley to make his 18 runs and yet, around the ground at lunchtime, nobody was stampeding for the ticket office demanding their money back.
There were no children in tears, or even bored to them. One late arrival with his dad, wearing an England shirt, hurried him towards the action, such as it was.
There were no pyrotechnics but the first Test between England and India was a packed house
Test matches sell out without any hype, despite the build-up to this series being very low-key
That is the beauty of Test cricket. It’s all excitement, just not of the obvious kind. The great pity of the Hundred controversy is how little belief in the game those at the helm of it have.
They truly feel it cannot survive without their bells and whistles — that cricket, left alone, is a turn-off. And, indeed, nobody has ever confused late afternoon at a mid-week County Championship game with a fortnight in Benidorm courtesy of Club 18-30. But it wasn’t like that 30 years ago, either.
Test matches, however, are different. Test matches sell out without any hype or hoopla. The build-up to this series, huge for both countries, has been very low-key.
Up against the Olympics, the British and Irish Lions tour, football’s transfer season firing up in readiness for the season, the news agenda is pretty packed. Yet what cricket chat there has been, the Hundred has dominated, just as the ECB hoped. Despite this, every available vantage point at Trent Bridge was occupied. So cricket — in white uniforms, unfolding in its own time, to its own cadences — does have value, financial as well as aesthetic.
A steady stream of cricket lovers — as well as fancy dress lions, cavemen and white rhinos — made their way between seats and bar.
The Hundred has skewed a calendar that was already imbalanced given Covid-19 issues
And, yes, there was singing and some bawdy behaviour and all the associated shenanigans that seem to embarrass the ECB so, but it was good natured and no doubt of great interest to treasurers and chief executives and far removed from the crises to which the Hundred was pitched as the only answer.
This is not to say the shortest form of the game was to blame for what befell England’s batsmen yesterday. There were England collapses long before the Hundred and they will continue, even if it failed to make it beyond its first season. Collapses have been England’s stock in trade for as long as anyone can remember.
England did not fail because of the Hundred. They were not aided by it, either, though. The Hundred has skewed a calendar that was already imbalanced given the challenges faced by England’s Test cricketers. On Wednesday, against an India side that is
