Cricket doesn’t need new terms to attract fans

SIR – Some years ago, the Ribblesdale youth cricket league introduced a game based on 100 balls per innings, 20 overs of five balls. The only law of cricket that was amended was the number of balls per over.

Many of the current Twenty20 laws and rules were retained, as was the terminology. We attracted huge interest from young cricketers, parents and supporters.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has preferred to introduce unnecessary new terminology (“Wickets are out as marketers put their spin on cricket”, April 13) aimed at the very audience we so successfully gained through simplicity.

Ted Holden

Bolton, Lancashire

SIR – If I needed a further excuse to avoid the Hundred, the ECB has provided it with its imbecilic changes to the language of cricket. I hope that this wretched commercial farce is a flop.

Alasdair Ogilvy

Stedham, West Sussex

SIR – Simon Heffer (Sport, April 13) complains about the proposed use of the term outs instead of wickets.

As serious cricket followers know, laws relating to dismissals (32-40) all use this term. Wickets (law 8) are the two sets of “three wooden stumps with two wooden bails on top”. Nor is the wicket the same as the pitch (law 6), to nail another common error.

Like many who will watch the Hundred, I look forward to contests played by the world’s best players. New tactics will develop and, as with 50-over and 20-over cricket, better fielding and novel strokes and deliveries will improve the longer forms of the game.

Professor Chris Barton Stoke-on-trent, Staffordshire