ECB postpone The Hundred until 2021

Last week, the ECB had announced that there will be no professional cricket in England and Wales until at least July 1 while adding that international cricket and the Vitality T20 Blast would be prioritised. That left a little for The Hundred to have a space in the Calendar as the ECB took the decision of postponing the new eight-team men's and women's tournaments for a year.

"Of course today's decision is tinged with disappointment with the amount that has been achieved over the last two years but we do recognise the country is going through something unprecedented. We will be back next year that is the exciting thing. We have learnt an awful lot from the process of getting a competition-ready but it is not possible for us to deliver it," ECB chief executive Tom Harrison told the BBC. 

"We are envisaging it to be as we planned it. We have a commitment to deliver The Hundred in the way we set out to deliver it this year. We will be having discussions with players who have been selected through the draft. It is a good thing to have more time where we can build out some of the areas where we wanted more time to think about things. We have more time to test the format and there are lots of other areas we can now concentrate that we wouldn't have had the opportunity of doing," he added.

While reports stated that ECB Board would consider both tournaments should be scrapped entirely for the inherent risk involved in launching a new tournament in a completely new format of the game, but Harrison rubbished the idea by saying the case for The Hundred is now stronger than ever.

"The Hundred is a profit-making venture for English cricket. Its importance is accentuated through the loss of a large part of our summer. In no way, in the opinion of the ECB Board or most people around the game, does it dilute the impact of this or the importance of it. This is a competition that is designed not only to become a commercial powerhouse but grow the audience of cricket around the country for young people, for diverse communities and build on what have with cricket in this country.

"That job has suddenly become even more important. It was already critically important and is now more important than that. We will compete with a lot more coming out of the impacts of coronavirus. There will be a lot of sports competing for people's free time. We need to be in their thoughts and making sure we are as appealing a game as we are as and we need to be going into this very competitive future."