The Hundred – Cricket Format, History, Structure, Teams, and more
The Hundred is a 100-ball cricket tournament with eight men’s teams and eight women’s teams from major cities in England and Wales. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is in charge of the tournament, which took place for the first time in July and August 2021.
The format was made to bring in younger and more diverse crowds to watch cricket. The shorter format is expected to make each game last about two and a half hours. The BBC broadcast the competition for free, and you could watch all of the women’s matches and some of the men’s matches for free on the Sky Sports YouTube channel.
The men’s and women’s teams were given equal weight in the tournament, and almost all of the games were played back-to-back on the same day at the same venue. So one ticket got spectators into both the men’s and the women’s games, and the prize money was the same for both.
History
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) first suggested in September 2016 that there should be a new city-based Twenty20 cricket league like the Indian Premier League. After early talks between the 18 first-class counties, the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA), and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), 16 of the 17 clubs voted in favor of expanding the competition, while three opposed it. On April 26, 2017, the ECB members voted 38-3 to move forward with the new competition.
The ECB’s chief commercial officer, Sanjay Patel, first brought up the idea of switching the competition from the well-known Twenty20 format to a whole new type of cricket in a private meeting with top cricket officials in October 2017. He said that the hundred ball format would be more straightforward for people who don’t know much about the competition to understand.
Format
One-hundred-ball cricket is a type of limited-overs cricket in which each team plays one innings of 100 balls. About two and a half hours pass during a game.
Tournament structure
During the summer, when school is out, eight teams from cities compete. All men’s and women’s matches occur on the same day on the same grounds. There were 32 games in the league as a whole. Each team played four games on their home grounds and four games away from it. In addition, each team played every other team once, plus a second bonus game against a team from the same region.
The teams that finish first in the men’s and women’s leagues go straight to the final. Then, the second-place and third-place teams will face off in the Eliminator, or semi-final, and the winner will move on to the final.
Squads
Each team has 15 players, and no more than four of them can be from outside the country. A draft system is used to choose players, which is common in other franchise leagues. Each of the teams in The Hundred has signed at least one England cricket player. For the 2022 season, each team can spend up to £1,000,000 on salaries.
Teams
| Team name | Home ground | Counties represented | Men’s captain | Women’s captain |
| Birmingham Phoenix | Edgbaston (Birmingham, West Midlands) | Warwickshire, Worcestershire | Moeen Ali | Amy Jones |
| London Spirit | Lord’s (St John’s Wood, Greater London) | Essex, Middlesex, Northamptonshire | Eoin Morgan | Heather Knight |
| Manchester Originals | Old Trafford (Stretford, Greater Manchester) | Lancashire | Jos Buttler | Kate Cross |
| Northern Superchargers | Headingley (Leeds, West Yorkshire) | Durham, Yorkshire | Faf du Plessis | Alice Davidson-Richards |
| Oval Invincibles | The Oval (Kennington, Greater London) | Kent, Surrey | Sam Billings | Dane van Niekerk |
| Southern Brave | Rose Bowl (Southampton, Hampshire) | Hampshire, Sussex | James Vince | Anya Shrubsole |
| Trent Rockets | Trent Bridge (West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire) | Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire | Lewis Gregory | Nat Sciver |
| Welsh Fire / Tân Cymreig | Sophia Gardens (Cardiff, South Glamorgan) | Glamorgan, Gloucestershire, Somerset | Josh Cobb | Tammy Beaumont |