INSIDE CRICKET: I was one of the Hundred's fiercest critics - but here is why I have finally come round to supporting the competition which has helped save county cricket, writes LAWRENCE BOOTH

The merchandise shop at the Utilita Bowl was dominated yesterday by the green of Southern Brave, with the yellow apparel of Hampshire squeezed into a corner.

Perhaps the county’s replica shirts should have been grateful for any kind of presence. These days, August means the Hundred. Lesser competitions know their place.

Out in the middle, the Brave’s women were moving towards a decent total against Oval Invincibles, watched by a crowd that grew as afternoon turned into evening, and the men’s teams took their turn. The fans seemed into the cricket: not plastic, and certainly not prawn-sandwich; engaged but never enraged.

In one sense, the ECB have tapped into the tribalism that is the heartbeat of all British sport: the Brave’s replica green sprouts up wherever you look. Then again, you sensed the result of the game wouldn’t persuade anyone to go home and kick the cat.

The stands oozed benevolence of a kind sporting diehards might disdain. The Brave faithful generously applauded a good stop by their opponents, and at one point a lone cry – it sounded like a teenage girl – went up for the ‘Green Army’. (Do Plymouth Argyle know this is happening?) When the Invincibles were bowled out for 72, there were no chants of ‘sacked in the morning’.

The bar serving booze beneath the Rod Bransgrove Pavilion had not a single customer at 3.30pm – a time of day when visitors to Edgbaston’s Hollies Stand or Headingley’s Western Terrace are usually unable to stand up.

The demographics, then, were everything the ECB hoped for, full of the ‘mums and kids’ that Andrew Strauss – then the board’s director of cricket – suggested in 2018 were the Hundred’s target audience.

‘We want to make the game as simple as possible for them to understand,’ he said, to widespread derision. Yet here they were, politely cheering for teams that are in only their fifth year of existence, and fully comprehending of the cricket.

When this year’s tournament began the day after the epic Test series between England and India, the traditionalists could not disguise their disgust. Would Chris Woakes have walked out with his arm in a sling for Welsh Fire? And hadn’t county cricket’s 50-over Metro Bank One-Day Cup been rendered irrelevant by clashing with the Hundred?

As if to prove this point, the men of Surrey and Hampshire – effectively the parent companies of the Invincibles and the Brave – were doing battle up the M3 at The Oval, except that Surrey have lost 15 players to the Hundred and fielded seven born in the 21st century. To no great surprise, they were demolished by nine wickets, with almost 35 overs to spare.

But it is almost futile to make this point now. And you may as well be howling at the moon to argue that the ECB’s obsession with their creation is what shoehorned the India Test series into a 46-day window, giving Ben Stokes little chance of emerging with all his limbs in working order. Instead, he is helping out at Northern Superchargers while his shoulder recovers from the tear suffered at Old Trafford. Really, you could weep.

This, though, is the shape of the summer now, and we had better get used to it, with ‘POM-BEAR’ emblazoned on the sightscreen behind the wicketkeeper and ‘EVERY. BALL. COUNTS’ dominating the pavilion livery, as if this wisdom doesn’t apply to any other form of the game. You can see why the Hundred gets up people’s noses.

And yet. Earlier this year, even the critics who call it the ‘16.4’ (the traditional six-ball-over equivalent of 100 deliveries) had pause for thought, when the sale of the eight franchises raised £520million for English cricket almost overnight. As a whole, their valuation approached the promised land of £1billion.

‘When the facts change, I change my mind,’ said the economist John Maynard Keynes. ‘What do you do, sir?’ I don’t know about you, but that windfall certainly changed my mind.

By the end of the 2023 financial year, county cricket’s collective debt had reached £338.6m, according to a recent report by the financial and business experts Leonard Curtis.

And if the new income is spent wisely, as the ECB insist it will be, the domestic game can become not only debt-free, but self-supporting, at least in the medium term. What happens after that depend on the counties’ financial acuity.

Had the auction proved underwhelming, critics of the Hundred would rightly have nailed the ECB for messing up the summer schedule, for downgrading the domestic 50-over tournament to the extent that England – world champions as recently as 2019 – now lie eighth in the ODI rankings, and for alienating vast swathes of the cricket-loving public.

That did not happen. Instead, perhaps the strongest criticism the ECB deserve is over their failure to convert Hundred fans to longer forms of the game – the gateway argument they used at the tournament’s inception.

Yet even that may prove a red herring. Because if both the Hundred and Test matches are packing out stadiums, we may have alighted on an unexpected truth: give or take a bit of overlap, there are two cricketing tribes in this country, and they can co-exist in harmony.

And why be sniffy? The attendance for the women’s game at the Utilita Bowl came in at 9,674. Last season, in 27 days of hosting four-day championship matches for its men’s team, Hampshire’s total gate was 23,510 – fewer than 1,000 a day. At The Oval, fewer than 5,000 watched Surrey v Hampshire.

It is a bitter pill for some to swallow, but the future of red-ball domestic cricket in this country is now inextricably linked with the success of the competition it despises.

The theft of August, the summer-holidays month, was brazen. No one can say for sure how private investors will rub along with old-fashioned counties. But as the Utilita Bowl all but filled up for the men’s match last night, a thought occurred: when so many are enjoying themselves, mockery misses the point.

What hope for the future of a competitive, equitable Test-match environment when Todd Greenberg, the chief executive of Cricket Australia, is making the case for precisely the opposite.

Last week, Greenberg said: ‘I don’t think everyone in world cricket needs to aspire to play Test cricket, and that might be OK. We’re trying to send countries bankrupt if we force them.’

This, of course, is the logical – and grim – conclusion of cricket’s capitalists, who see Test cricket’s value only in the Ashes and in India v England or Australia. And when you have a series as compelling as the recent Anderson–Tendulkar Trophy, you inevitably want more of the same.

But there is another way. It involves less self-interest in the short term, and a healthier game in the long-term.

If the ‘Big Three’, especially India, give up a chunk of their ICC handout, the so-called lesser nations can invest in Tests. Instead, Greenberg diagnoses a problem partly of Australia’s own making, and proposes more of the same.

Was there a whiff of an apology about the decision to make Jacob Bethell captain for England’s three-match T20 series in Ireland next month?

His Test summer never got going because of the ECB’s decision to keep him at the IPL in late May, ruling him out of the one-off game against Zimbabwe and allowing Ollie Pope to cement his place with a facile 171.

When Bethell finally got a chance against India at The Oval, he was all over the place, and lucky to score as many as six and five.

The captaincy confirms how highly England rate him. It's just a shame their admiration wasn’t underlined earlier in the summer.

Bob Simpson, the former Australian opener and coach who died last week at the age of 89, came close to one of cricket’s most esoteric records.

By scoring 311 at Old Trafford in a bore draw in 1964, he registered the second-highest maiden century in Test history, behind only Garry Sobers’s 365 not out for West Indies against Pakistan in Jamaica in 1957-58.