As The Hundred reaches its culmination, Ben Gardner considers how different the competition will look in a year's time.
Things can change quickly in the Hundred. The 10-balls-from-an-end nature lends itself to extending swings of momentum. If two of the first four balls of a six-ball over go for six, a captain can at least calm themselves with the knowledge that a break is soon coming. In the Hundred, you’re less than halfway to a proper break. Trent Rockets’ captain David Willey found this out the hard way last week, in a clash between the sides who would finish in first and second in the group stage that ranks among the Hundred’s most thrilling.
It was he who called for a strategic timeout with the game in the bag, Oval Invincibles needing 102 from 40, Sam Curran 12 balls in and without a boundary. He took the ball himself afterwards, and the carnage started: three sixes from the next five balls, and still five balls left before a change of ends. The equation was still in Trent Rockets’ favour, and he handed the ball to Sam Cook, a man you could trust more than anyone else in the country to land it on a spot. Instead he lost his radar, conceding six wides before his first legal delivery, which was pumped for six by Curran. Then came a four and two more sixes, the first a no ball. Forty-nine runs had come off seven legal deliveries. Few games in cricket’s history can have switched from completely won to totally lost so quickly.
Strip everything else away, and this was proper sport. The Hundred has its detractors, and there remains justified ill-feeling over its conception, the untruths that were spun and the bridges burned in ramming it through. While the money it has brought in is vital for the wider game, its effect on the schedule also rankles some, especially those for whom county cricket is the thing. Eight One-Day Cup games in August feels thin. But the Hundred, now, is here to stay. So why not enjoy it?
If you do open yourself up to it, and forget about everything else for a second, you might just find that you like it. It is, if nothing else, an enjoyable way to spend an evening or a weekend day, decent value for money, and, anecdotally, with a better balance between family fun and booze-fuelled hijinks than the Blast had in its heyday. And much of the cricket is genuinely good and interesting in a way that deserves analysis.
Trent Rockets, Andy Flower’s all-rounder army, have the most interesting team construction, regularly picking eight bowling options and Sam Hain, a specialist batter, and hardly a renowned six hitter, at No.9. And yet it works. Sometimes what you want at the final knockings of a tough chase isn’t a guy who can hit a six one in every four swings, but a hard-nosed strike-rotater who knows where the gaps are, especially in a competition where a set batter can get stuck at the wrong end in a late collapse. When Trent Rockets had lost two in two to leave 14 needed off five against Welsh Fire, Hain got Joe Root back on strike, watched him blast 10 off two and then belted four to seal victory. That was the second of consecutive fifties for Root, and in Trent Rockets’ group game, he showed why the Flower model works, coming on for his first bowl of the season on a pitch assisting turn and conceding eight from 15 balls. That’s what options give you.
The Northern Superchargers narrative revolves around English cricket’s golden boys, Zak Crawley and Harry Brook, the anointed and the embattled. Crawley is second on the run charts, a game made for white-ball cricket clicking into place, often with the man now in charge of England’s limited-overs sides at the other end. They will face Trent Rockets for a place in the final.
Just as interesting are the teams that don’t fire. On paper, Manchester Originals have everything you’d want, overseas pedigree in Heinrich Klaasen, perhaps the world’s best T20 spinner in Noor Ahmad, a prodigy in Rachin Ravindra. Their English contingent includes Jos Buttler, Phil Salt, and James Anderson. Sonny Baker and Josh Tongue, two quicks yet to fully nail T20 cricket, have had breakout campaigns. And yet the whole has been less than the sum. Sometimes you need more than star power.
20 wins in 26 games since the start of the 2023 season.
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) August 28, 2025
Can Oval Invincibles back up their dominance with another trophy this year?#TheHundred pic.twitter.com/zor0RVV1pz
Nowhere is that more clear than at Oval Invincibles, home of the undercard. Will Jacks and Saqib Mahmood are the only two in the side who can call themselves England regulars, and even they have only gained that status recently. But there is a level of quality across the board that has made them the standout team of the Hundred’s first phase. Perhaps for those not in England’s plans there’s an added hunger, either to prove a point, or because this is the highest level these players will play at. It was in last year’s final that Mahmood announced he was back, working over Kieron Pollard before going onto re-establish himself as an international fixture. Now it’s where Jordan Cox and Curran have made their exclusion from England’s September squads look more ill-judged by the game.
As the competition heads to a climax, enjoy this Oval Invincibles team and the current shape of the whole event while and if you can, because from next year, everything could look very different. The ECB will cede central control of the eight teams to the host counties and private investors over the winter, but already we have some idea of what’s coming. Tournament director Vikram Banerjee has told ESPNcricinfo that squads will be overhauled next season in a search for “competitive balance”. “I'd like next year to be a bit of a reset,” he said. “All these leagues do it over time.”
All these leagues do it, and the Hundred, now, is one of these leagues. To stand out is to risk ridicule. But is this what works in British sport? The success of the Premier League, the industrial complex that whirs into action after every Manchester United disaster suggests that what home audiences really like is the hard-earned rise and the sudden fall, dynasties built over an age and crumbling in a season, rather than an artificial levelling of the playing field. But the early noises suggest that what the new owners want is not to build something that appeals to the English cricket fan, but that fits in with their raft of franchises. Northern Superchargers will likely become Sunrisers Leeds, a name construction that exists nowhere else. Newcastle Falcons became Newcastle Red Bulls, not Red Bull Newcastle. Manchester Originals will be the unoriginal Manchester Super Giants.
Most tellingly, Oval Invincibles, the side with the best record and strongest branding in the Hundred so far, are set to be renamed MI London, reportedly against the wishes of majority owners Surrey, with the Ambani Group, 49 per cent stakeholders, winning out. This is what has been given up. The ECB may claim to run the competition as a whole, having just given away the teams. And the counties may have voted it through, and signed up to allow these owners in. But when it comes down to it, whose voice will really count? The cash-strapped counties and governing body, or the billionaires who built their fortunes by winning these kinds of negotiations? And will their decisions be made to benefit the English game or themselves? Things can change quickly in the Hundred. We’re about to find out which way they will turn.
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