Changing a sport to engage the young is chasing a mirage

The ECB’S Hundred, which is aimed at enticing ‘mums and kids’ to cricket, is following a trend beloved of marketing executives, but they are building on shaky ground

If there is one mantra burning in the thoughts of sports administrators it is “adapt or die”. The morbid fear of a game disappearing under a tide of “social change” – smartphones, basically – has wrecked many a night’s sleep for those charged with keeping their activities “relevant”.

Sneering at new formats and gimmicks is easy enough, and understandable in an age when the world is reinvented every night by digital technology.

This sense of waking each day to new machines, compulsory new ways of communicating with your gas supplier, is unsettling in ways we have yet to understand. So, for many cricket followers, there was no need to tamper with a model that was already a boiled-down version of forms of cricket that are condemned as anachronistic.

If T20 was a nod to the reality of Test and even 50-over cricket’s popularity slide, does T20 really now need a truncated, souped-up version of a truncated version? Is cricket now a Russian doll – a race for miniaturisation? News that a 10-ball over will be introduced as part of the new 100-ball tournament from 2020 makes you wonder whether TV viewers will end up being asked to vote on who should bowl the next ball.

Or whether the cricket will end up as one ball per side. Not The Hundred but The One.

The revelation that the parenting website Mumsnet was consulted on ways to make the new competition more attractive to “mums and kids” in the school holidays has led many to accuse the England and Wales Cricket Board of patronising women with the suggestion that they need a simpler format they can “understand”.

The more you look at The Hundred, the more it becomes proselytising aimed at “the young” – that strange tribe whose tastes are supposedly incomprehensible to their parents, and who fester in a digital twilight, hooked on screens.

Disregarding the fact that we were probably equally unfathomable to our own parents, my generation regards “the young” with pained bafflement. What is it they want? How can we extract them from cyberspace and make them want to play ball games in the park all day and come home with muddy knees (grass stains are no longer loathed by parents but hailed as signs of life in their device-frazzled offspring).

The Hundred is expected to run from 6.30pm to 9pm and feel less like a stag trip, with reduced emphasis on spectators getting wasted on Greene King IPA. Sorry, revellers, but there is some sense in this. The absurd lateness of evening sport has been a personal obsession, and not only when the local clock is approaching