[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

From the men's point a view I don't get what it brings to the game that Twenty20 doesn't already bring.
I can however see this being a good thing for the Ladies, it will increase the profile of that side of the sport and project the better players into the spotlight

Yeah, I said somewhere further up the thread that I think it'll be a net positive for women's cricket, not least in increasing the number of players who are able to turn full-time professional. And the existing women's T20 tournament definitely wasn't fit for purpose. That said, I've seen crowds of a similar size at women's T20 in the past, and considering this was the curtain-raiser to a new tournament and new format in the week when the Covid shackles have just been taken off, 7000 is... not what it could (and arguably should) be. [EDITED TO ADD: I've just seen that 7000 is actually a record number for a domestic women's match, so I stand corrected on that. But I stick by the position that as a tournament and format opener in hot weather during Freedom Week, it should have been a bigger crowd, not least because a sizeable percentage of those 7000 were apparently NHS workers given free tickets.]

I'd expect the men's opener to be a sell-out, but there are reports that Glamorgan have been giving tickets away to local clubs for Welsh Fire games, because they're just not shifting them. The pop acts being touted as half-time entertainment are B-list at best; I had to look up last night's, who turned out to be a reality star who had one #1 back in 2014 and a handful of forgettable non-top-10 hits since. Was this all they could afford? Or did the decent acts all say no?

And the guidelines to commentators appear to state that they're in no circumstances allowed to use the word "overs", because apparently that would confuse all the poor jellybrains who are put off cricket by big words. Just a thought: if you're expecting that newbies will get to grips with the LBW law without alteration, then maybe they have the intellectual capacity to deal with the concept of balls delivered in batches, too? If they were making a simplified form of football for non-fans, would the FA say "we're going to leave the offside rule exactly as it is, but under no circumstances is anyone allowed to use the words "free-kick", "penalty" or "goal", because we don't want to confuse people."?