Was quite excited to see this but just found out that virtually all our Men's and Women's 50 over World Cup winners will be playing in this instead of the domestic 50 over tournament. Seems daft to me when there's no international equivalent of the 100. Are we saying 50 over cricket is done, despite the last world cup being utterly fantastic viewing?
I agree and I won’t be watching. Players franchised out all over the country. It’s a total mess as far as I can see.
It was inevitable that the one day game would suffer as the popularity of T20 increased. It is sad that the Royal London Cup is a competition along the lines of the Papa John Trophy; i.e for lesser teams. The One Hundred had to be different to avoid it being a second T20 competition in England. I will watch with interest to see if the gimmicks add or distract from the "spectacle". Those of us with long memories will remember that the original Gillette Cup was a 65 over competition as was the first ODI. Sadly modern sports fans do not have the attention span of their predecessors. Test cricket is played in half empty stadia apart from in England and in Australia for the Ashes.
Complete and utter bowlocks...you support your county and your country, how can you have affiliation to a franchise FFS.
I shan’t be pleased to see the likes of Root and Bairstow coming to Headingley playing for some “foreign” collective and smashing the ball into the Western Terrace. It’s all way too plastic for me
Couldn't care less, why risk injury for your county for a meaningless franchise, its bad enough seeing your county build a good side and then England call ups rip it to shreds
If its not broken then dont fix it. Another death nail in the coffin of cricket. We have t20 We have the 50 over format. We have county and test cricket. Why the need for this?
Agree with a lot of the above but it’s still a game of cricket so I know I’ll be watching if only through curiosity and potential car crash value.
I'll be watching tonight's game with intrigue. At the end of the day it's a game of cricket and if it gets more kids into the game then that's fine by me.
I don't think this is anything to do with greed, I doubt they'll make money out of it. It's to encourage a new audience to cricket.
Iirc t20 was devised by the counties to increase revenue, then pinched by the test nations when they saw the popularity. I'll be watching tonight to get the jist cos I'm going on Saturday. It's got to go some to live up to the hype.
I've read multiple articles over the last year since it was announced that seem to suggest much of the motivation by the ECB is to have another stab at creating a new format that they could protect the rights of as they had failed to do so with the T20 format. It spread before they could get the protections in place to sell global rights over and over and derive huge incomes.
Remember.. it's not 'wickets' it's 'outs' now and instead of 'overs' we have 'fives'. And something weird like every ten balls the bowling changes ends but you can change bowlers every 5 balls or something. Maybe. So at least they're sticking with the cricket tradition of overcomplicating as much as possible.