The Hundred’s revamped return at the Kia Oval mixed pyrotechnics, entertainment and cricket on the opening day of the women’s and men’s competitions. John Newman performed between matches, while Nicholas Pooran’s batting lit up MI London’s chase as they overhauled SunRisers Leeds’ total in the men’s game.
Newman, whose early career mirrored the hit-heavy promise of the tournament’s entertainment, took to a small temporary stage built on the back few rows of the SSE Energy Solutions Stand at a half-full Oval. He was performing between the women’s and men’s opening games, and his set leaned heavily on his early successes while still delivering a lively show.
In 2012 John Newman’s first hit, as featured vocalist on Rudimental’s Feel the Love, went straight into the charts at No 1. The following year his first solo release, Love Me Again, did it too, also earning him a Brit nomination for single of the year and one for the Ivor Novellos as best song musically and lyrically.
In 2022, as he prepared to relaunch a career that had reached such an extraordinarily early and ludicrously high peak, Newman was interviewed by the NME.
“I’m crazy nervous but really excited,”
he said.
“I could become the biggest artist in the world or it might all go wrong, who knows?”
Four years later Newman was back in front of a crowd, though a far less attentive one, and made his plea in vain.
“I love you so much!”
he shouted as his set built towards a climax. Literally on the first row of seats in front of the stage was a group of six people who didn’t even turn around.
A gentle underarm throw away the SunRisers Leeds men’s squad warmed up while managing to completely ignore not only Newman’s best efforts but the fireworks launching sporadically just a matter of feet from them. Cricket can be a cruel game, and this was it at its most vicious. Thanks for asking, Mr Newman but no, we will not love you again. Or, indeed, at all.
Newman was, to be fair, performing to a niche audience, one for which few singers could possibly be more interesting than, say, Jason Roy. A little later, while being forced to respond to fans’ questions by the BBC and communicating through an earpiece as he was prowling the outfield for MI London, Roy was asked to identify his favourite childhood hobbies and reacted as if a hobby was an entirely foreign concept.
“What did I do? What did I used to love doing?”
he gabbled, flummoxed, as if he had been asked to identify the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia. It is fair to say his mind was elsewhere. Eventually, after a bit of time and some gentle prompting, he identified
“those model aeroplanes, those plastic ones. A bit like Lego but more nerdy.”
Never mind Airfix kits, here it was a struggle to put together a decent partnership. After SunRisers reached an underpowered 143, MI London’s chase started badly: Roy, on his 36th birthday, demonstrated the batting struggles when nudging his second delivery to slip to depart for a duck, his team at that point two for four, and gradually their target started to slip out of reach.
But the game was transformed when Nicholas Pooran joined Sam Curran; both went on to reach half-centuries, the Trinidadian off just 19 balls and Curran off 34, and soon it was a stroll, their partnership yielding 93 runs off 40 balls of carnage.
A little earlier, with unexpected time to fill after SunRisers Leeds cantered to victory in the women’s game – 108 genuinely was a feeble target – competition winners were rewarded with stuffed toys by two people in meerkat costumes representing the Hundred’s main sponsor, a popular market comparison website, while another in a wombat suit, without an obvious role in proceedings, compensated with some surprisingly grooved dance moves.
As they did so ground staff pushed the boundary back to a more male-challenging distance, a somewhat condescending switch given that MI London’s Hayley Matthews and, even more eye-catchingly, SunRisers’ Phoebe Litchfield had just demonstrated their ability to deposit the ball deep into the stands.
Boundaries in the Hundred are permitted to be a maximum of 70 yards from the centre of the pitch in the women’s competition, and 90 yards in the men’s; for it to be a Pooran-challenging distance it would have had to be cradled by the crowd. Given the branded boundary padding that had to be detached, loaded on to carts, moved and reattached, rope relocation was a surprisingly complicated business, which must have been made even more irritating by said padding endlessly repeating the word “SIMPLES” in large capital letters.
Hundred teams are given a budget for their mid-game entertainment, which they can choose to supplement should they wish to big names. MI London chose instead to bust their fireworks budget, and Nita Ambani, the Indian businesswoman whose Reliance Group owns 49% of the team, watched while a tiny fraction of her fortune went up in smoke as the men took to the field. The new-look Hundred may be a game owned by the wealthy, but this one belonged to Pooran.
