Hundred reasons why it was shameful to ditch The Oval
FOR those of us blessed to grow up south of the river in London there was only one place to watch cricket as a kid – The Oval. You could sit on the grass by the boundary rope back when I attended my first Test match in the summer of 1973, thrilled by the chance to see Garry Sobers in action.
We took the 93 bus and the underground from Morden to reach paradise and the next year it was a Pakistan team captained by Intikhab playing against England.
A couple of summers later a wilful neglect of school lessons was involved in going to the Benson and Hedges Cup semi-final between Surrey and Kent.
How could you not fall in love with cricket at The Oval and its iconic gasometer? This was the ground where Don Bradman made a duck in his last innings and has been the scene of so many farewells – from Viv Richards to the emotional exit last year of Alastair Cook.
This is a modern arena steeped in history. The first ever FA Cup Final was played there in 1872 and the whole nation stopped the day
England recaptured The Ashes in 2005. It is woven deep into the fabric of our sport, and now it stands at the heart of a conflict about the future of English cricket.
Far away from the one-day international action in Barbados there has been a flurry of meetings about the new city-based tournament being created to re-energise cricket and deliver new audiences for our national summer game.
ECB bosses want revolution. They want this competition that starts in the summer of 2020 to be The Hundred, played with 10-ball overs and time-outs during play.
By promising county clubs an extra £1.3million in annual revenue they thought they had delivered the allegiance of an army of sceptics. There was a 17-1 vote in favour of the playing conditions.
The trouble was the single dissenter. That was Surrey, the country’s most powerful cricket club, the reigning county champions and provider of so many new young talents to the England team like Ben Foakes, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and the Curran brothers, Sam and Tom.
Surrey was the only county with the strength of mind and wealth and honour to stand up in public for common sense. They deserve our profound praise and admiration for rebelling at a crucial moment for the game, a moment when the ECB must be noisily and furiously challenged in its monstrous gamble on The Hundred. The reaction of ECB chairman Colin Graves was petulant and thoroughly shameful. He demanded retribution; he demanded The Oval be removed from the list of venues for the competition. Graves is the worst kind of leader – one who will brook no dissent.
It was a preposterous idea.
How could cricket possibly ditch The Oval, which will soon be England’s biggest ground with a 40,000 capacity, serving a catchment area of many millions of people?
That would be a monumental folly – never mind a mighty insult to what would become a lost generation of kids growing up south of the River Thames in the 21st Century.
Graves didn’t get his authoritarian way.
Instead, the counties and his own ECB board forced him into a humiliating climbdown. It should be just the start of the fightback by all cricket lovers against the horror of The Hundred. It is not too late – as Surrey have shown.
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