Absolutely it’s a guess. I don’t think we could do anything else at the minute but getting offered up to 6 free tickets for every Originals game is not a great sign, I’m sure you’d agree.

I’ve enjoyed it also. It’s not been helped by Covid and the raft of players who pulled out but it’s still be a decent watch. If it is to be a raging success in the future though something will need to give with the scheduling. Once Buttler, Bairstow, Stokes etc went off to play for England (a break in Stokes case) it lost a bit of shine for me. I want to see those guys involved and the best players from other countries but it’s unbelievable the amount of cricket they’re playing nowadays. They can’t fit everything in or not properly at least.

SPARK (a local Telco provider) is showing all the Hundred here in NZ...They are the broadcaster for RLWC 2021 (2) (?) as well as the Premier League, Champions League and all the european comp stuff.
Now I have no idea how much they paid for the rights, but they won't be free from SKY UK, given we have SKY NZ, part of uncle Ruperts Cabal.
The ECB are listed as another sports shown on this channel, so it looks like they've got a good working relationship with the games ruling authority.......as many have said, this 100 comp may well have cost heaps and they may have been giving away free tickets by the bucket load, but it has been shown live in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, India, Pakistan and even the USA.....so there's some money coming in, even if it's not from ticket sales. Then, there's the venues. In many cases owned or leased by county Cricket entities who are controlled in turn by the ECB.....so when 19,000 are reported to be at Edgbaston, that's 19,000 chances to sell beer, wine, cokes, burgers, sandwiches and merchandise.
It may fail....like the London Monarchs, but I can assure you that my nephews loved going to Monarchs games and for a couple of years they didn't miss a game....if the Hundred can get people into the habit of a 3 hour event, then they're on to a winner. As I've said, US300 MILLION is the Buy in for the Indian Premiere League....if the ECB could sell it's 8 sides for 5% of that number, it's already bigger than Superleague

It's not a dig at Warrington, you don't choose the fixtures, it's a dig at the unbalanced nature of having a random extra fixture. The teams who don't have a strong traditional derby opponent have had an easier ride generally. This year someone is getting an extra game against Leigh whilst Saints have to play the mighty Catalans. That isn't fair and all I was suggesting was to replace it with a tournament of 8s or 9s so it's a better event and less unfair. But as ever the paranoia about my username just comes through and everyone goes on the attack without even reading anything I wrote, which isn't remotely controversial.

In many previous seasons, a game against Catalan at Magic would be as good as 2 points.
A bit more of a test this year.

You're judged by what you write, that's quite enough to generate the sort of responses you get, there isn't some vast conspiracy.

Still, compared to most of redvee you're positively rational.

I don't think it is. I'm not suggesting there is a mass conspiracy, just a group of regular posters who lack the intelligence to discuss issues and just obsess over little details to justify attacking. What I wrote about the Magic Weekend fixtures was correct and yet there was a chain of idiotic posts criticising it and completely missing the point of the post.

If its not a dig at Warrington then why mention them? Especially when what you claimed turned out to be complete nonsense. If the fixtures are random then i think we've been dealt a bad hand in the past 7 years. Wigan 3 times, saints 3 times and cas the year they finished top. Easy ride are certainly the words that spring to mind there!

I'd be careful with that rhetoric. I've heard tales of posters being banished for such heretic overtures.
The point of the thread was I believe to highlight that whilst were considering how to squeeze the same revenue from the same source, cricket is doing something different.
The bottom line here is reducing the top tier to 10 and rebranding the second tier is akin to swapping deck chairs on the titanic...

Interesting listening to the BBC RL podcast, Adam Pearson talking about the hundred as a good example, and that RL needs a new product, looking at that shorter version of the product that seems to be the vogue in sport at the moment. He kept saying the sport would be dead in a year if we don't... and gave lots of things we "need" to do. All I hear is short term fixes, nobody talking about the long term strategy of getting more people playing and watching.

I was also interested to hear Cricket journalists discussing the hundred on TMS, they felt the hundred wasn't really a success when it came to the men's game, and that they had sacrificed the domestic one day competition to run it, but with the amount of money and reputations on the line the ECB are basically all in on the hundred so it has to succeed, and they will keep pushing it no matter what the outcomes this year.

Pearson really does seem to be floundering, throwing out just badly flawed ideas like shortened versions of the game (based on what evidence?) and, once again, the disastrous idea of private equity. Hopefully Hull FC can get some serious ownership back involved at some point because he just seems to miss the point of the game's problems over and over and it's starting to be damaging.

The traditionalists said the same thing about the increase of the one day and T20 games compared with the more traditional 4-5 day county games. Some people don't like change. RL cant be accused of significant long term change just 'cheesy' short term headline grabbing adjustments that they go back on. Franchises, Middle 8's. P&R........

I have no issue with change at all (I regularly attend T20 matches at Lancs) but I'm not a fan of the 100. There's plenty of of room for 50 & 20 over Cricket but the Hundred is just a gimmick too far IMO. The England test team is already suffering with the barrage of white ball Cricket affecting players ability to build a long innings and the techniques of a lot of the crossover players (who play all formats) is really suffering. There needs to be a balance with white ball Cricket and I don't think we've found it yet.

One of the reasons I support my county team is because generally it's packed with local lads with the odd overseas star and a few players brought in from other counties. When you see the likes of Liam Livingstone starring for Birmingham Phoenix and Saqib Mahmood at Oval Invincibles it's just not the same. Add in the generally cr@p commentary teams (obviously put together to tick "diversity" boxes) and influx of Reality TV muppets acting as some sort of pitchside reporter and sorry but it doesn't really float my boat. And don't get me started on "Match Hero's"..... cringey AF!

T20/Hundred cricket worked as it took what was originally a 5-day game, then a game that lasted all-day, and made it into a 3-hour game.

Having a 2-hour game of RL isn't the problem. Cheapening it to a 7/8/9 player game would make the product worse. I don't think it'd attract any new fans.

If RL had the marketing campaign for a new structure that he Hundred had, it'd be a game-changer. Having both Sky and BBC going to bat for you, to use a cricket term, is a huge advantage . . . but also probably extremely expensive.