Explainer
The Hundred cricket rules explained, and why the over went
How The Hundred works: 100 balls, sets of five, ten-ball spells, a 25-ball powerplay, and what happens to cricket's statistics once the over stops existing.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Updated Explainer19 min read
Cricket has counted itself in overs for as long as it has kept records worth keeping. The number of balls inside one has moved about, four, five, six and eight have all been standard in some country at some point, but the unit itself never budged. It organises the bowling, the fielding, the scoreboard, the language and every statistic the sport produces. When The Hundred cricket rules were explained to the public in 2019, the headline was a round number. The actual radical decision was buried underneath it.
They deleted the over.
Not shortened it, not renamed it. Removed it as a unit of account and replaced it with a raw count of deliveries. Everything strange about the competition, and most of what is genuinely clever in it, falls out of that one choice. So does most of the anger.
What the rules actually say, in the order you meet them
The competition rules are short enough to state in full, which was rather the point.
Each side bats once, for 100 balls. The team with more runs wins. Bowlers deliver in sets of five rather than overs of six, and a bowler may bowl either five consecutive balls or ten, at the captain's discretion. No bowler may deliver more than twenty balls in the match. The fielding side changes ends after every ten balls rather than after every over. The first 25 balls of each innings are a powerplay, during which only two fielders may stand outside the 30-yard circle; after that the limit is five. The fielding side may take one strategic timeout of up to 90 seconds. A match is built to run around two and a half hours.
That is the whole format. Everything else, the free hit after a no ball, the modes of dismissal, the leg-side fielding limit, the review procedure, the rain calculation, is inherited from cricket as it already existed.
- 100Balls in an innings
- 5Balls in a set
- 20Balls one bowler may deliver
- 25Balls in the powerplay
All four are fixed by the ECB's competition rules rather than observed in play. Twenty balls a bowler means a minimum of five bowlers must be used to complete an innings.
Read that panel and one thing should look odd. There is no number for an over, because there is no over. The set of five is not an over with a ball removed. It is a scoring convenience, a point at which the scorers draw a line, and it carries none of the rights an over carries in the rest of the sport. Batters do not change ends after a set. Ends do not change after a set. A bowler is not barred from bowling the next one.
That last point is where the format stops being a gimmick.
An innings of The Hundred, ball by ball
The rhythm is easier to follow as a sequence than as a list of clauses, because the two cycles running underneath it, sets of five and blocks of ten, do not line up with anything a cricket watcher's ear is trained for.
- Balls 1 to 5, first set, powerplay onThe innings opens from one end with two fielders permitted outside the circle. The captain has already made his first real decision, because he must now say whether this bowler continues for a second set of five from the same end or hands over. Nothing on the scoreboard tells the batter which it will be.
- Balls 6 to 10, second set, same endEither the same bowler carries on, in which case he has taken a ten-ball spell and half his match allocation is gone, or a second bowler comes on at the same end. This is the moment that has no parallel in any other professional format: a bowler finishing what would be an over and simply carrying on.
- Ball 11, ends changeThe fielding side crosses over for the first time. Note what has not happened: the batters do not swap ends because of it, and they have been swapping on odd runs throughout as normal. The change of ends is now a property of the block of ten rather than of the over.
- Balls 11 to 25, powerplay closingThree more sets of five to get through before the field is released. A captain holding a wicket-taking bowler back until the field spreads has 15 powerplay balls left to cover, and every one of them is bowled with the boundary largely unguarded.
- Ball 26, the field spreadsFive fielders may now go outside the circle, and the innings changes character in a single delivery. Seventy-five balls remain and the batting side has just lost its guaranteed gaps. In a T20 this transition happens after 36 balls, so it arrives here both earlier in absolute terms and earlier as a share of the innings.
- Balls 26 to 50, the first half closesSpin and slower-ball bowling usually own this passage, because the field is out and the batters are still building. Ends have changed at 21 and will change again at 41 and 51, and any bowler used here in ten-ball blocks is burning his allocation fast.
- The strategic timeoutThe fielding captain may stop the match once for up to 90 seconds, with the ball dead, and the coach may come out. It cannot be taken in the opening 25 balls of an innings. Captains almost always spend it when the game is getting away from them rather than banking it.
- Balls 51 to 80, the squeezeThe arithmetic tightens for whichever side is behind. A chasing team knows exactly how many balls are left because the number is printed as a countdown, not derived from overs and balls remaining, and that is the single most successful piece of design in the whole competition.
- Balls 81 to 90, one block, one endTen deliveries from a single end, which a captain may hand to one bowler in their entirety. A death bowler with ten straight balls can attack the same batter repeatedly with the same angle and no interruption. No T20 captain has ever had that option.
- Balls 91 to 100, the last blockThe final ten come from the other end. If the fielding side is behind the required rate it will be doing this a fielder short outside the circle, because the over-rate penalty in this competition is applied inside the match rather than afterwards.
The structure is rule-defined. Which bowler occupies each block is the captain's decision, and the choices shown are illustrative rather than drawn from any match.
The countdown deserves its own sentence. A scoreboard that reads 43 balls remaining is legible to somebody who has never watched cricket, in a way that 12.5 overs remaining simply is not. That was the design brief, and on that narrow point the format delivered exactly what it promised.
Why five and ten, rather than any other pair of numbers
The two numbers are not arbitrary and they are not independent.
Start with 100, which was chosen because it is round and because a hundred-ball countdown reads like a clock. It does not divide by six, so the over had to go for arithmetic reasons before anybody argued the aesthetic case. It divides by five twenty times and by ten ten times, which gives the format its two nested cycles.
The set of five exists mainly for the scorers and the broadcast graphic. Ten exists for the ground. Somebody has to walk from one end to the other, and doing it every five balls would waste an enormous amount of the two and a half hours the competition sells. Changing ends every ten keeps the walking down to nine changes in an innings, against nineteen in a T20, and that time saving is a large part of how the format hits its advertised length without cutting anything a viewer would notice.
The consequence nobody planned for is that the bowling end became a block property rather than a delivery property. In every other form of cricket, an end changes hands every six balls, which means the two ends alternate constantly and a bowler is guaranteed a rest of at least one over between his own. Here, ten balls come from one end and then ten from the other, so a bowler operating in fives can be used twice in a row from the same end.
Every bar in that chart is smaller on the left, and three of the four are smaller by roughly the same proportion. The exception is the powerplay, which shrank considerably more than the innings did. That is not a rounding artefact. It is a deliberate rebalancing that almost nobody talks about, and it is covered below.
The ten-ball spell is the only genuinely new tactic in the format
Strip away the branding and the countdown and one rule remains that no other version of cricket offers: a captain may give a bowler ten consecutive deliveries.
Think about what that removes. In a T20, a batter who has survived a hostile over knows with certainty that the next six balls will come from somebody else. That certainty is worth a great deal. It lets him take the pressure passage, absorb it, and reset against a lesser bowler. It is why the whole business of hunting the fifth bowler works, and why a side's weakest bowling option is the one every batting plan is built around.
The ten-ball option deletes that guarantee. A captain who reads the game correctly can put his best bowler on for ten straight balls at the batter he most wants to dismiss, from a single end, with the field set once and not reset. The batter cannot wait it out because there is nothing to wait for. He cannot rotate the strike away from the problem, because the problem is not going anywhere for ten deliveries.
It cuts the other way too, which is what makes it a decision rather than a cheat code. Twenty balls is a bowler's entire match. Spend ten of them in the powerplay and you have half a bowler left for the last fifty balls. Spend ten at the death and you have committed to that man before you know whether the chasing side will still be in reach. A ten-ball spell that goes wrong goes wrong at twice the speed, and there is no over break in the middle of it in which a captain can change his mind, move a fielder and talk to the bowler. He is locked in for the block.
There is a third effect, less obvious and probably the most interesting. Because a ten-ball block comes from one end, a ten-ball spell is bowled with one angle. A left-armer going around the wicket to a right-hander for ten straight deliveries is running the same line into the same footmarks for twice as long as any format has previously allowed, and by the eighth ball the rough is being hit rather than created. The exact wording on what counts as a consecutive delivery, particularly across a change of ends, is one of the details the ECB restates in the playing conditions each season, so that is the document to check rather than any summary.
Captains have been slower to use the ten than the designers expected. Part of that is habit, and part is genuine: a five-ball set gives a captain twice as many decision points, and most professional cricket coaching is built on preserving optionality. But the sides that use ten-ball spells well tend to use them in the same two places, against a new batter early and against a set batter at the death, and both are cases where denying a reset is worth more than keeping a choice.
The powerplay shrank more than the innings did
Here is the arithmetic that gets skipped in every explainer of this format.
A T20 innings is 120 balls, of which 36 are powerplay. That is 30 per cent of the innings played with only two fielders outside the circle. The Hundred gives you 25 balls of powerplay out of 100, which is 25 per cent. Trim the innings by a sixth and you would expect a powerplay of thirty balls. It is twenty-five.
- Balls 1 to 25, two fielders out25
- Balls 26 to 100, five fielders out75
Rule-defined counts. Two fielders outside the circle for 25 balls, five for the remaining 75.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Balls 1 to 25, two fielders out | 25 |
| Balls 26 to 100, five fielders out | 75 |
Five balls does not sound like much. In a format this short it is a full spell, and it is five balls taken out of the cheapest scoring window in the innings and handed to the fielding side. The practical effect is that the opening batters in this competition have less protected time than their T20 equivalents, both in absolute terms and proportionally, so the format rewards an opener who can attack immediately rather than one who uses the powerplay to get in.
It also compresses the decision about the second new-ball bowler. In a T20 a captain has six overs of powerplay to fit two bowlers into, which is comfortable. Here he has twenty-five balls, which is five sets, an odd number that cannot be split evenly between two bowlers. Somebody bowls three sets or somebody bowls a ten and a five. That asymmetry is a small thing that shows up in every single match. How the equivalent restrictions work across the older formats, and why the phase boundaries sit where they do, is set out in the guide to the way powerplays are built in each format.
The strategic timeout is a broadcast rule that turned into a tactical one
The fielding side may stop the game once, for up to 90 seconds, when the ball is dead. It cannot be taken during the opening 25 balls of an innings, and the coach is permitted to walk out and speak to the players.
The honest account of why it exists is that a two-and-a-half-hour broadcast needs a break in the middle of an innings and cricket does not naturally provide one. Franchise cricket elsewhere solved the same problem with the same instrument, and nobody involved has ever pretended otherwise.
What is more interesting is that it acquired a genuine tactical function once captains had a season or two with it. A 90-second stoppage with the coach on the field is the only moment in the format where a bowling side can reorganise properly. Sides use it after losing control rather than before, which is arguably backwards: taking it pre-emptively before the last thirty balls, while you still have choices, is worth more than taking it after two sixes when you have none. Batting sides, who cannot call it, have learned to attack immediately after one, on the reasoning that a plan made in 90 seconds under pressure is usually the plan you would expect.
There is a fairness question underneath it that the competition has never quite answered. One side controls the pause and the other does not. In a format where momentum swings inside a single block of ten, handing that switch to the fielding captain alone is a real asymmetry, and it is the sort of thing the playing conditions could change from one season to the next.
The rules this competition exported to the rest of cricket
The most under-reported thing about The Hundred is that it worked as a laboratory, and two of its experiments are now in use in matches that have nothing to do with it.
The first is the over-rate penalty. Cricket's traditional answer to slow bowling sides was a fine, applied weeks later, paid by people who could afford it, and completely invisible to the person watching. This competition penalised the offence inside the match instead: fall behind the required rate and you lose a fielder from outside the circle for the remainder of the innings. It costs runs, in real time, in front of the crowd, at the exact moment when an extra man on the boundary is worth most. The idea was subsequently taken up in T20 international playing conditions after the ICC's committee looked at how it had performed in England. A domestic competition invented a sanction and the global game adopted it, which is not the usual direction of travel. The wider question of why over rates are policed at all, and why the older penalties failed, runs through the way cricket punishes a slow over rate.
The second is smaller and stranger. Under the old convention, if a batter was caught after the two batters had crossed, the non-striker kept the strike, which meant a side losing a wicket could keep its best player off strike by accident. The rule that the new batter always takes strike after a catch, regardless of whether the batters crossed, was trialled here before it entered the Laws. It removes a piece of pure randomness from the game, and it is now simply how cricket works.
Neither change required a hundred-ball innings. Both required a competition whose organisers were already committed to changing things, which is a real argument in favour of having such a competition at all, whatever you think of the format.
How bowling figures work when there are no overs
This is where the format stops being a presentational question and starts being a statistical one.
A bowler's figures in cricket are conventionally written as overs, maidens, runs, wickets. Two of those four break here. There are no overs, so the first column becomes a count of balls. And a maiden, defined as an over from which no runs are scored, has no obvious equivalent when the unit is a set of five that carries none of an over's other properties. The competition records balls rather than overs, and a scorecard reads as balls, runs, wickets, with dot balls carrying much of the descriptive weight a maiden used to carry.
The rates are the real problem. Economy rate is runs conceded divided by something, and the something has always been overs. Take overs away and you have to choose a denominator, and different publications have chosen differently: runs per hundred balls, which matches the format's own unit and makes a bowler's economy directly comparable to a team total; or a converted figure per five balls; or a six-ball-equivalent so the number looks like the one readers know. All three are defensible. They produce different-looking numbers from identical bowling, which is why the denominator matters more than the figure.
Take a constructed example with round invented numbers. A bowler delivers his full twenty balls and concedes thirty runs. Per hundred balls that is 150. Per five balls it is 7.5. Converted to a six-ball equivalent it is 9. Same bowling, same match, three numbers, and only one of them can be sensibly placed next to a T20 economy rate. If a table does not say which denominator it used, the table is not telling you anything. What each of the bowling rates is actually measuring, and which one answers which question, is worked through in the piece on economy, average and strike rate.
Two numbers survive the transition untouched, and it is worth knowing which. A bowling strike rate, balls per wicket, was always denominated in balls and works here exactly as it works in a Test. A batting strike rate, runs per hundred balls, was also always denominated in balls, and in this format it acquires a pleasing property: because the innings is exactly a hundred balls long, a team's final total is its team strike rate. A side that finishes on 160 scored at 160 per hundred balls. No other format lets you read the rate straight off the scoreboard.
Why the statistics do not port cleanly in either direction
For record-keeping purposes the competition sits inside Twenty20 rather than in a category of its own, so runs and wickets from it appear in career T20 aggregates. That decision has been argued about since the first season, and the argument is not pedantry.
Consider what a career T20 batting average is supposed to mean. It is runs per dismissal in a format where your side has 120 balls and ten wickets, which sets a particular price on a wicket and therefore a particular level of acceptable risk. Change the innings to 100 balls and that price changes. There are twenty fewer deliveries to share out, so a top-order batter's expected allocation falls, and the correct amount of risk to take in the first ten balls rises. An average calculated across both is averaging two different risk environments.
The bowling side is worse. Twenty-four balls against twenty is a fifth of a bowler's workload gone, and the missing fifth is not evenly distributed: it comes out of the phase where a captain has the least flexibility. Add the ten-ball spell, which lets a bowler operate in a way T20 forbids, and a subset of a bowler's Hundred deliveries were bowled under conditions that have no T20 equivalent at all. Merging the two produces a career figure whose denominator is a mixture of two games.
The comparison also fails going the other way, which people notice less. A batter's T20 record is a poor guide to how he will play here, because the shorter powerplay share and the ten-ball option both punish exactly the T20 skill of waiting for the right bowler. A player whose method is built on absorbing the good spells and cashing in against the fifth bowler has less of both available.
None of this makes the classification wrong as an administrative decision. Keeping one set of books is more useful than keeping two, particularly for a competition that would otherwise have records nobody could contextualise. It does mean any career figure spanning both should be read with the mixture in mind, and it is a good example of why a raw number in cricket is close to meaningless without knowing which format produced it. The wider problem of comparing figures across formats is the subject of what actually separates Test, ODI and T20 cricket.
The commercial case, stated without the marketing
The ECB's reasoning was not hidden, and it is more coherent than its critics usually allow.
English cricket had a distribution problem. The sport had been behind a paywall for years, the audience was ageing, and participation among children who had never seen a match on free television was falling. Meanwhile the county structure, eighteen first-class clubs, is concentrated in places that made sense in the nineteenth century and does not map onto where most people now live. A competition designed to reach new viewers therefore needed three things: a free-to-air broadcast window, teams attached to large population centres rather than historic counties, and a product short and simple enough that a family with no cricketing background could follow it without instruction.
The format follows from the third requirement. Two and a half hours fits an evening. A hundred-ball countdown removes the piece of vocabulary a newcomer trips on first, because "overs" is a genuinely opaque word and "43 balls left" is not. Coloured kit, music, a shorter innings and a round number are all answers to the same question, which is how you get somebody watching who does not already care.
Whether all that required a new format is the crux. T20 is already three hours, already has coloured kit and music, and is already the global standard. The counter-argument the ECB made was that a new competition needed to be visibly new to justify a new broadcast deal and a new set of teams, and that launching a T20 competition alongside the existing T20 competition would have been incoherent. That is a commercial argument rather than a cricketing one, and it should be judged as such.
The double-header did something no amount of goodwill had managed
The single best decision in the whole project had nothing to do with balls or overs.
The men's and women's competitions were built as one event. Same eight team names, same grounds, same day, same ticket, and the women's match given a broadcast slot rather than a scrap of one. A spectator who bought a ticket for the men's game got the women's game whether they wanted it or not, and a great many of them discovered they wanted it.
This solved a distribution problem that had defeated the women's game for decades. Women's cricket did not have an audience shortage because the cricket was not good enough. It had one because nobody could find it: matches at outgrounds, no broadcast, no fixture anybody could name. Scheduling it inside an event that already had an audience transferred that audience across at essentially no cost, which is a much harder thing to arrange than it sounds and which no amount of advocacy had achieved.
The financial half mattered as much. Equal prize money and a professional pay structure meant players who had held other jobs could train full time, and a domestic competition that pays is the thing that produces a deeper national squad five years later. The competition did not invent the growth of women's cricket, which was already under way for reasons that go well beyond England, but it removed the specific obstacle that was slowing it down here. The longer story of how the women's game reached this point is set out in the piece on the growth of women's cricket.
If you want a single defensible answer to whether the competition was worth doing, this is it, and it is worth noticing that it required no rule change at all. A T20 double-header would have worked identically. The format got the credit for something the scheduling did.
The criticism is not just traditionalism, and it is not just about the over
There are three separate objections and they are usually mashed into one, which lets each of them be dismissed by answering another.
The first is aesthetic. A lot of people who already watch cricket did not want the over removed, found the sets of five arrhythmic, and disliked being told the sport they follow was too complicated. This objection is real but it is also the least important, because the competition was explicitly not built for those people, and a product aimed at non-viewers is not failing when existing viewers shrug at it.
The second is about the calendar, and it is much harder to answer. An English season has a fixed number of weeks of usable weather. Inserting a month-long competition into the middle of it pushes something else out, and what got pushed out was four-day county cricket, which now largely happens in April and September when the ball seams sideways and batters have no chance of preparing for a Test summer. The argument that this damages England's Test production line is not nostalgia, it is a scheduling claim with a plausible mechanism. Why the four-day competition sits where it does, and what its calendar position costs, is the subject of the county championship guide, and the broader squeeze is covered in how cricket's fixture calendar is built.
The third is about who owns the game, and it is the one that actually produces the anger. English cricket belongs to eighteen first-class counties, who collectively own the governing body. The competition has eight teams at eight grounds. Ten counties therefore contribute to a competition they cannot host, watch their best players turn out for a team branded as somewhere else, and receive a cheque instead of a fixture. The South West is the clearest case: two first-class counties, international-standard grounds, and no team. That is not an argument about the format at all. It is an argument about whether a sport owned by its counties can run a competition that ignores them.
Notice that none of these three objections is answered by explaining the rules. The people who dislike this competition mostly understand it perfectly well.
The sale of stakes changed what the competition is
For its first years the competition was an ECB project: the governing body owned the teams, took the risk and distributed the proceeds. That ended when stakes in the eight teams were sold to private investors, a process completed in 2025.
The structure matters more than the sums. Each host county retained a controlling 51 per cent of its team and sold 49 per cent, while the ECB's own holding was sold and the proceeds distributed across the eighteen first-class counties and MCC, with a portion ring-fenced for the recreational game. Buyers included groups already holding Indian Premier League franchises and investors from American sport, which is the same money that has been buying into every franchise competition on the circuit.
Three things followed, and they are all still working through.
The counties got balance-sheet money. For clubs whose finances had been marginal for years, a one-off capital injection is genuinely transformative, and it defused a good deal of the ownership objection by paying the objectors.
The competition became much harder to abolish. An ECB project can be cancelled by the ECB. A competition with outside shareholders holding minority stakes in eight separate businesses cannot, or at least not cheaply. Every subsequent conversation about reforming or replacing the format now has investors in the room who bought an asset on the basis of what it currently is.
And the incentives tilted towards the global circuit. Owners who also hold IPL and other franchise teams have an obvious interest in aligning windows, moving players between their own clubs, and eventually in a format their other assets already play. That is the quiet argument for the hundred-ball innings not surviving indefinitely, and it has nothing to do with what English supporters think of it. The economics of multi-club ownership across the franchise world are set out in the survey of T20 leagues around the world.
Does a hundred-ball format have a future outside England?
The short answer is that nobody has copied it, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of taste.
T20 is the global standard, and standards have network effects. International tournaments are T20. The franchise circuit is T20. Player contracts, agent negotiations, statistical records and broadcast inventory are all built around a twenty-over match. A board launching a new competition in a new market gains nothing by inventing a format its players have not practised, its broadcasters have not built graphics for, and its statisticians cannot file. It gains a great deal by fitting into the circuit that already exists.
There is also a talent-market problem. The best short-format players are freelancers who move between leagues, and a format played in exactly one country asks them to learn a different rhythm for a few weeks a year. Twenty balls rather than twenty-four is a different workload, the ten-ball spell is a skill nobody rehearses elsewhere, and the shorter powerplay changes an opener's calculation. None of that is hard, but it is friction, and friction is what an emerging league can least afford.
That leaves two plausible futures, and English cricket has been openly weighing both. The competition continues broadly as it is, possibly expanded to more teams so that regions currently excluded get one, with the hundred-ball innings kept because it is the brand and because changing it would irritate the people who just bought in. Or the innings quietly becomes twenty overs at some point, the teams and the broadcast slot and the double-header structure all survive, and the format turns out to have been the least important part of the project.
The second is more likely than most supporters of either side will admit, because almost everything the competition achieved is separable from the hundred-ball innings. The free-to-air window, the city teams, the women's double-header, the shorter evening, the in-match over-rate penalty: none of those needed the over to be abolished. The countdown is the exception, and a countdown is a graphic rather than a rule.
What to watch for in a match, once you know the rules
Four things, and none of them are in the highlights package.
Count the ten-ball blocks and see who bowls them. A captain who never uses a ten-ball spell is leaving the format's one unique weapon in the bag, and a captain who uses two of them on the same bowler in the powerplay has committed his best option before he knows what the game will need.
Watch ball 26. The field spreads in a single delivery and the batting side's guaranteed gaps disappear. Who is bowling at that moment, and whether the batters have a plan for the transition, decides more matches than the last ten balls do.
Watch when the timeout is called and what happens in the six balls after it. A pre-emptive timeout is a captain thinking ahead. A timeout after two sixes is a captain who has already lost the passage, and the batting side usually knows it.
And check the fielders inside the circle in the final block. If there is one more in there than the rules require, the fielding side has been penalised for its over rate, and it is about to pay for the previous ninety minutes at the worst possible moment. The rest of the format guides, the rule explainers and the statistical work behind all of this sit in the cricket section.
Common questions
How many balls does each team get in The Hundred?
Each side bats for 100 balls, delivered in sets of five rather than overs of six. The team with more runs at the end of its 100 balls wins, and an innings can also end early if all ten wickets fall. Because the innings is exactly 100 balls, a side's total is also its run rate per hundred balls, which is the closest cricket has come to a self-explaining scoreboard.
Can a bowler really bowl ten balls in a row in The Hundred?
Yes. The captain chooses whether a bowler delivers five consecutive balls or ten, and the ten-ball option has no equivalent anywhere else in the professional game, where a bowler may never bowl two overs in succession. A bowler may deliver a maximum of twenty balls in the match, so a captain who uses two ten-ball spells has spent that bowler's entire allocation in two visits.
What is the powerplay in The Hundred?
The powerplay is the first 25 balls of each innings, during which only two fielders may stand outside the 30-yard circle. After ball 25 the limit rises to five outside the circle for the remaining 75 balls. Measured as a share of the innings it is slightly smaller than a T20 powerplay, which covers 36 of 120 balls.
Do runs and wickets in The Hundred count towards a player's T20 record?
For statistical classification the competition sits inside Twenty20 records rather than in a category of its own, which is why Hundred runs appear in career T20 aggregates. This is contested, because the two formats set different quantities: 100 balls against 120 for a side, and twenty balls against twenty-four for a bowler. A rate calculated across both is measuring two games at once.
Why did the ECB invent a 100-ball format instead of using T20?
The stated aim was a shorter, simpler product for people who do not already follow cricket, played in a free-to-air broadcast window with city-branded teams in places county cricket does not reach. Dropping the over removed the piece of jargon a newcomer has to learn first, and the round number gives a countdown anyone can read without being taught. Whether that justified a new format in an already crowded calendar is the argument that has followed the competition since it was announced.
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