A competition that arrived a year late
The Hundred was supposed to begin in 2020. The pandemic pushed it back twelve months, which gave its opponents an extra year to sharpen their objections and its organisers an extra year to worry. When the men's competition finally started at The Oval on 22 July 2021, nobody could say with confidence whether it would work.
The cricket settled that faster than the arguments did. Oval Invincibles beat Manchester Originals by nine runs in front of 18,126 people, and the format's oddities - sets of five, a change of ends every ten balls, a bowler allowed to run through two sets on the trot - mattered far less than the compression. Games finished inside two and a half hours. Bowlers who could hold a length under pressure, Tymal Mills and Adam Milne chief among them, became disproportionately valuable, because there is nowhere to hide when a spell runs to twenty balls.
Livingstone, and a group that would not settle
Liam Livingstone was the summer's headline act. He made 348 runs for Birmingham Phoenix, more than anyone else, and his 92 not out from 40 balls at Headingley in mid-August was the innings people replayed. Phoenix topped the table with six wins from eight and looked, for a fortnight, like the strongest side in the competition.
Beneath them nothing resolved. Rain removed two matches entirely and cut a third to 65 balls a side. Southern Brave lost their opening two games, to Trent Rockets and then Welsh Fire, and were widely written off. They won five of the next six. Trent Rockets scraped third. Imran Tahir produced the bowling performance of the group stage, a hat-trick and 5 for 25 as Phoenix dismantled Welsh Fire by 93 runs at Edgbaston.
Lord's, and a final that ended early
Brave dealt with the Rockets in the Eliminator at The Oval without much fuss, bowling them out for 96 and knocking off the runs in 68 balls. The final was closer to a procession. Paul Stirling hit 61 from 36, Brave posted 168 for 5, and Phoenix never got near it. Livingstone made 46 from 19 and departed. Mills and Milne squeezed the middle. Southern Brave won by 32 runs, and a side that had begun with two defeats finished holding the trophy.
What it settled, and what it did not
The ECB's numbers were strong. More than 500,000 tickets were sold, over half of them to people who had never bought a cricket ticket before. The women's competition ran as a genuine double-header rather than a curtain-raiser, and that changed the economics of the women's game in England almost overnight. Charlotte Edwards said it had transformed women's cricket in this country, and few people who saw a full house at Edgbaston argued with her.
The objections did not go away, and they were not frivolous. Counties without a franchise looked at a competition built around eight grounds and worried about what that meant for the other ten. The T20 Blast, which had spent years establishing itself in the high-summer window, was pushed aside to make room, and supporters of the county game argued that a format already working had been displaced by an invented one. Others replied that the Blast had never drawn broadcast money or new audiences on anything like this scale, and that the money now funding a professional women's structure had to come from somewhere.
Both positions were held in good faith. The 2021 season proved the competition could fill grounds. It did not settle whether it should exist.