The Hundred goes nowhere earlier than the top of 2028 and has “a protracted and profitable future properly past that”, in response to the ECB’s chair.

A number of retailers reported final month that Richard Gould and Richard Thompson – the ECB’s chief government and chair respectively, who beforehand held the identical roles at Surrey – have been discussing choices to regulate the format of the eight-team, 100-ball competitors, and even to scrap it altogether.

However, in an interview within the June version of the Cricketer journal, Thompson stated that there had been “an terrible lot of misreporting” on the match’s future, emphasising that it’s a part of the ECB’s profitable broadcast take care of Sky Sports activities which runs till the top of 2028.

“We’re signed up with the Hundred till 2028 and there is been an terrible lot of misreporting round that,” Thompson stated. “The fact is that the Hundred exists with Sky till 2028 and I am positive it has a protracted and profitable future properly past that.”

A report by Fanos Hira, the Worcestershire chair, earlier this yr steered that the Hundred had made a £9 million loss to this point, figures which the ECB disputes. Thompson stated: “It is a historic report trying on the earnings and value base of the ECB. And it [the Hundred] will assist us throughout the sport.

“It relies upon the way you attribute these prices,” he added. “Particularly the £1.3m that every county receives a yr [which is directly linked to the Hundred]. The sport has invested a major amount of cash into the Hundred to make sure that it finds a brand new viewers, which it has completed. However the actuality is it is an funding sooner or later.”

The prospect of personal funding within the Hundred has additionally been recurrently mooted over the past two years. “We’re solely in yr three of a really new match,” Thompson stated on the topic. “And the sport has bought to make that call. That is not an ECB choice.”

The Hundred takes place in a standalone window from August 1-27 in 2023, the primary time that it has not clashed with any England males’s or ladies’s worldwide cricket. Consequently, the ultimate Check of the English summer season is because of end on July 31 – a state of affairs that Thompson stated “completely won’t” occur once more.

“It does not really feel proper, does…

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