MUMBAI: England’s director of cricket Andrew Strauss believs that the ECB’s 100-ball tournament that is likely to be launched in 2020 will target a more “casual” cricket audience as its aim will be to draw more “mums and kids” to the game, according to an ESPNcricinfo report.
As per the radical format, the matches will consist of 15 six-ball overs and a 10-ball over to complete the 100 deliveries. The type of 10-ball over is still under much debate.
“What we’re trying to do is appeal to a new audience, people that aren’t traditional cricket fans,” Strauss told BBC Radio Five Live’s Sportsweek programme. “We want to make the game as simple as possible for them to understand.
“T20 has been unbelievably successful and it has established a very strong audience now. We want that audience but a different audience as well, who perhaps would like things slightly different. That’s the driver behind this idea.”
Reportedly, the matches will be played across seven cities and the tournament will last five weeks in the mid-summer. An essential aspect of cutting down the T20 format has been to try and ensure the matches take place within a two-and-a-half-hour window when the sport returns to live terrestrial TV, following the recent billion-pound broadcast deal.
“T20 has become a longer and longer format of the game. It is more than four hours in a lot of parts of the world,” Strauss said. “We want kids to be able to go to bed earlier and it is worth saying it is going to be on terrestrial TV. We want the more casual audience.”
