Frankenstein cricket

What do the following names mean to you?

Northern Superchargers, Manchester Originals, London Spirit and Oval Invincibles, Birmingham Phoenix and Trent Rockets, Southern Brave and Welsh Fire.

American football teams, perhaps? Wrestling tag teams? No. They’re made-up cricket teams, franchises who will ‘represent’ the towns and cities deemed appropriate to host games in ‘The Hundred’, a Frankenstein creation of a tournament that will rumble, or perhaps ramble, on for about four weeks at the height of summer next year. I really can wait.

You can work out for yourself who the teams are supposed to represent. Welsh Fire, featuring local boys Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc and Jonny Bairstow, are Wales. There are two London teams and of course no teams in the south west, the north east or anywhere else the powers-that-be have concluded do not warrant representation. As a Bristolian with only a passing interest in Our Summer Game, I’m actually quite grateful we’ve been left out.

Cynics like me will wonder who on earth will be interested in teams that have been invented purely to make money in this nonsense of a tournament, but then I will be amazed in a few weeks when many millions of people cast their votes for Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn or next Saturday night when people tune in to ITV to watch the X Factor and I’m A Celebrity. If something is hyped up enough, people usually go for it. See also Halloween and Black Friday.

Even if The Hundred is seen to be a success, by which I mean people turn up in huge numbers to games, I am not clear how it benefits cricket. The idea will be that people who would otherwise not cross the road to watch the game would suddenly be enthused and take it up. It could happen. But what if they only game they want to play is The Hundred?

Who’d have thunk it? Franchise cricket with fake teams playing a gross hybrid form of a still great game. I hope nobody goes and that the viewing figures are abysmal. I rather fear the opposite and rather than sit alongside the real thing, it will gradually start to take over, hastening the collapse in interest in Test cricket in this country as is happening in virtually every other cricket country in the world.