Inaugural edition of The Hundred postponed to 2021
The England and Wales cricket board has announced that the inaugural edition of The Hundred has been postponed till 2021. Earlier, the governing body had taken the decision of holding no professional cricket in England and Wales until July 1st 2020 owing to the COVID-19 (novel Coronavirus) pandemic. The Hundred was scheduled to have eight men’s teams and eight women’s teams contesting in their respective tournaments.
"The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) today confirms that the launch of The Hundred will now take place in summer 2021," said the ECB in its statement. The news follows a meeting dedicated to the subject, where the board concluded it was not possible for the competition to be staged this year."
"Of course today's decision is tinged with disappointment with the amount that has been achieved over the last two years but we do recognise the country is going through something unprecedented," ECB chief executive Tom Harrison told the BBC. "We will be back next year that is the exciting thing. We have learnt an awful lot from the process of getting a competition ready but it is not possible for us to deliver it.”
The ECB has cited three key reasons for postponing the tournament without seeking an alternative of playing the games behind doors; operational challenges with restriction on global travel, the lack of staff availability with them being placed on furlough and most crucially the games being played without crowds would defeat the purpose of the tournament.
”We are envisaging it to be as we planned it," Harrison further elucidated. "We have a commitment to deliver The Hundred in the way we set out to deliver it this year. We will be having discussions with players who have been selected through the draft. It is a good thing to have more time where we can build out some of the areas where we wanted more time to think about things. We have more time to test the format and there are lots of other areas we can now concentrate that we wouldn't have had the opportunity of doing.”
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