‘The Hundred’ is about to enter its sixth season and the novelty has worn off but the arguments certainly have not.
What began as the ECB’s great leap into a condensed, broadcast friendly format of cricket now sits in an exclusive mid summer window, a 25-day sprint in which eight rebranded city franchises jostle for a place in the final at Lord’s on August 16, just two days before the first of three tests against Pakistan.
The basic proposition remains simple enough: 100 balls per side, games wrapped up in a little over two and a half hours, and every men’s match twinned with a women’s fixture to create day-long double headers that have become a fixed feature of the English school holidays.
Yet, as several British papers have pointed out, the Hundred has also become a kind of laboratory – a place where coaches and captains experiment with rhythms and roles that do not quite map onto T20.
HOW THE HUNDRED DIFFERS FROM T20
On paper the differences sound cosmetic: 100 balls rather than 120, “sets” of five balls instead of orthodox six ball overs, and a change of ends only every 10 deliveries.
In practice, those tweaks alter the entire pulse of an innings. Bowlers can deliver 10 consecutive balls from one end, up to a maximum of 20 per game, allowing captains to ride a hot ‘streak’ or stretch a match up between two players well beyond what they could risk in a standard T20 over.
The powerplay is confined to the first 25 balls, with only two fielders permitted outside the ring, encouraging top order batters to attack harder, earlier, while leaving far less room to repair a slow start.
Fielding sides face over rate sanctions in the form of restricted boundary riders meaning wides and no balls carry a heavier cost. It’s all designed to force the tempo in a way that, say, the IPL has failed to do.
STRUCTURE, WINDOW AND STAKES
This year’s tournament runs from July 21 to August 16, an “exclusive window” in which England’s international sides step aside and centrally contracted players are, in theory, available throughout.
Each franchise plays eight group games – six different opponents once and their designated local rival twice – before the top three feed into a familiar ‘eliminator’ and final.
MI London – the rebranded Oval Invincibles - again open proceedings at The Oval, a nod to the competition’s inaugural night and to London’s status as the Hundred’s commercial heartbeat.
Manchester’s franchise has been recast as the Super Giants, Northern Superchargers have morphed into Sunrisers Leeds, the new badges reflecting the equity stakes sold to external investors which has generated around £500 million for the English game.
TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH
MI London’s men, already multiple champions, will begin as bookmakers’ favourites, their Oval stronghold now firmly established as the format’s flagship stage.
Their retention of a core group of domestic match winners and white ball hardened overseas recruits was reinforced in the spring auction, where Hundred contracts climbed into territory more familiar to the IPL than England’s domestic past.
England white-ball captain, Harry Brook, became the game’s highest paid player with an eye-watering price tag of £465k as Sunrisers captain.
Elsewhere, Southern Brave remain the competition’s believers in white ball orthodoxy: stacked pace, a power heavy top order and a confidence in defending totals that owes much to their home conditions at the Ageas Bowl.
Trent Rockets and Welsh Fire are portrayed as the “all out attack” franchises with seven frontline batters and wicket-taking but potentially expensive bowlers. They back themselves to win more shootouts than they lose.
The format is just about old enough to have developed its own terminology; “set closers” are bowlers trusted to finish both a 10-ball burst and, effectively, a phase of the innings – while ‘chokers’ are the spinners used in the middle overs to stifle momentum.
Off the field, the Hundred’s place in the English calendar remains hotly argued on opinion pages but on it, the 2026 edition arrives feeling less like an experiment and more like a mature, if still polarising, pillar of the domestic game.
WOMEN’S HUNDRED
If the men’s competition has gradually found its groove, the women’s Hundred has hurried there in half the time.
The 2026 season follows the first full scale women’s auction, held in London in March, a watershed moment for the professionalisation of the English women’s game.
Each of the eight women’s franchises built squads of 14-16 players under a significantly increased salary cap, with up to four retentions allowed but heavily weighted against the cap, a structure designed to prevent any single side hoarding star power indefinitely.
The net effect has been a more evenly distributed spread of England internationals and overseas signings, and a tournament in which pre season predictions feel riskier than ever, a strong indicator that the competition will be more keen and evenly contested than ever.
The women’s competition mirrors the men’s in schedule: same window, same fixtures, same double header model, with the women on first and the men following under lights.
For players, that means regular exposure to full houses at grounds like The Oval, Lord’s, Headingley and Old Trafford which former and current England captains, Heather Knight and Nat Sciver Brunt, described as ‘transformative’ for both performance standards and public perception.
SOUTH AFRICANS IN THE HUNDRED.
Aiden Markram – Manchester Super Giants
Marco Jansen – Welsh Fire
David Miller – Southern Brave
Tristan Stubbs – Southern Brave
Heinrich Klaasen – Birmingham Phoenix
Donovan Ferreira – Birmingham Phoenix
Lhuan-dre Pretorius – Birmingham Phoenix
Ryan Rickelton – Sunrisers Leeds
Marizanne Kapp – London Spirit
Nadine de Klerk – London Spirit
Laura Wolvaardt – Southern Brave
Annerie Dercksen – Birmingham Phoenix