Eoin Morgan has warned that unless English cricket is prepared to accept change – primarily the introduction of the controversial 100-ball tournament from 2020 onwards – the sport may die out.
Speaking about The Hundred, in which an eight-team tournament will be played using a shorter version of the sport, Morgan insisted its simplified scoring system will help break down cricket for the uninitiated.
The England one-day captain said: “Participation levels have been going down and we need to do something different to change the sport’s reputation and the perceived barriers. If we stay rigid and don’t change then the sport will die.
“One of the most complicated things is if you go to a cricket ground and don’t know what’s going on, you look at the scoreboard for an indication but there’s so many numbers and names. So you eliminate that part of the equation and break it down to its simplest form.”
As a centrally contracted player, Morgan’s support might be taken as a given but the 31-year-old is also an independent thinker unafraid of going against his employers, not least when missing the 2016 tour of Bangladesh owing to security concerns.
Morgan was one of three players consulted before The Hundred’s curiously low-key announcement last week along with his women’s counterpart, Heather Knight, and Worcestershire’s Daryl Mitchell, the chairman of the Professional Cricketers’ Association.
A lack of wider communication from the England and Wales Cricket Board has frustrated PCA representatives. They will now meet the governing body on 8 May and are likely be shown a video produced by the creative agency FutureBrand that is said to demonstrate how The Hundred will differ from existing county competitions. The video has so far been seen only by a small audience
Morgan added: “The Hundred sounds different. I have a lot of friends outside cricket who would never come to a match but have already said they enjoy that there is a bit of noise around it, because it’s upsetting people that already come to a game and that is the point of the product.”
