Long before the Hundred, Gloucestershire’s captain recognised the need to enliven a ‘dying’ game, through quirky declarations
“There has never been a more exciting time for cricket,” said Joe Root last October, when some of the stars and all of the franchise names for the England and Wales Cricket Board’s new, most-exciting-ever format, The Hundred, were announced, promising that “you are pretty much guaranteed exciting cricket”.
It turned out that we were not guaranteed any cricket at all, and the search for cast-iron excitement in the sport goes on. The Hundred is just the latest in a long line of initiatives intended to make it more likely, and it could be that sometime in the distant, murky future, the sport’s historians will write about it glowingly as a genuine attempt not just to make the game more popular and lucrative, but also in some way better. For now, though, they will just have to find something or someone else to praise, and in all of cricket’s rich history there have not been many people more committed to making the game more interesting than Bev/Beverley/BH (take your pick) Lyon, the former Gloucestershire captain and pioneer of freak declarations.
Written by Simon Burnton
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/jun/02/little-to-declare-how-bh-lyon-tried-to-pep-up-county-cricket under the title “The Spin | Little to declare: how BH Lyon tried to pep up county cricket”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
