A ‘cannibalised’ cricket event? Mediatisation, innovation and The Hundred

Abstract

Attending and consuming events are integral to many peoples’ leisure lives. However, as the literature attests, events represent significant sites of contestation over who does and does not belong. This paper explores such contestation in the notoriously elitist and traditionally exclusionary sport of cricket, and specifically The Hundred; the most recent attempt to democratise the sport by appealing to a more demographically diverse spectator base. It uniquely blends extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (n = 33), and a synthesised theoretical framework of mediatisation, media events and digital leisure studies, to argue that the apparent success of The Hundred in attracting and including new audiences has been enabled by incorporating elements of media spectacle. We therefore, use The Hundred to further delineate the processes described in the extant literature, and extend analysis of the ‘digital turn’, by drawing attention to the tensions between the speed and trajectory of these developments and the constraints imposed by cricket’s history. We illustrate how digital and analogue leisure remain highly interdependent, and argue that the ongoing contestation of game forms championed by different cricket stakeholders makes it improbable that The Hundred can achieve its twin goals of being economically viable, while increasing the popularity and, ultimately survival, of other cricket formats.