The good news about next summer’s international schedule is that England’s men will be playing two Test matches in August.

The bad news is that the series against Pakistan is likely to clash with the start of the 2026-27 Premier League season, meaning it will be fighting for attention and column inches with the biggest beast in English sport.

Even worse is that the Test series against New Zealand at the start of the summer, well the second and third matches, will be played at the same time as an event that is likely to draw even more eyes away from cricket – the men’s football World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Have a guess what cricket won’t be clashing with either? Yep, The Hundred. Not that the schedule has been announced yet. But the month-long gap from mid-July to mid-August that contains absolutely no international cricket looks a good bet.

This window falls between the end of the World Cup and the start of the Premier League. A perfect time to promote the sport. But not Test cricket, obviously.

Next summer promises to be a big one for The Hundred, with the investors who have bought stakes in the eight teams finally allowed to get their hands on the tournament from 1 October. Expect new team names, kits, sponsorship deals and, if reports this week are to be believed, a switch from the 100-ball format to Twenty20.

It makes this year’s Hundred a strange placeholder tournament. The jarring juxtaposition with the end of the thrilling Test series between England and India had already made the start of this year’s Hundred feel weirdly anti-climactic. It is like going from reading one of the great literary works to the Mr Men series.

It says much that the three biggest takeaways from the start of this year’s tournament have been a fox invading Lord’s on the opening night, James Anderson making his Hundred debut at 43 and Tymal Mills joining OnlyFans.

In terms of the cricket, the general consensus is that, in the men’s tournament at least, there is zero buzz, a lack of quality and little drama. It is the antithesis of what was witnessed at The Oval on Monday, when two teams who had gone toe to toe over six captivating weeks gave us a dramatic and nerve-shredding end to a brilliant Test summer.

Now, most of those same England players, exhausted and spent, will play in The Hundred because the money – with match fees for the top players now £25,000 – is too good to turn down. Brydon Carse will not play for Northern Superchargers after advice from medics. But the rest of England’s Test squad will turn out. Liam Dawson, a sub fielder for much of the Oval Test after Chris Woakes’s shoulder dislocation, even played for London Spirit on the opening night on Tuesday.

The optics of all this are not good, but why change now?

The Hundred has been a PR train wreck from the very start, initially alienating existing fans thanks to clumsy comments from the likes of former England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief executive Tom Harrison. Forcing the international calendar to be squeezed into ever-smaller windows has not helped, neither has turning the domestic 50-over competition into a second-team tournament.

Now in its fifth summer, the best thing The Hundred has done is secure the financial futures of the 18-county domestic structure thanks to the ECB’s big sell-off. Even then, though, it feels like that the governing body have now lost control of the domestic summer.

In the background to all this is the domestic review, with the threat of a reduction in the number of County Championship games from 14 to 12 very real. So far seven counties have indicated they will resist that change. With 12 of the 18 counties needed to pass any motion, that would be enough to see that particular threat off. Yet there is time for those in opposition to yet be turned.

To paint The Hundred as all bad, though, is too simplistic. Having cricket on free-to-air TV cannot be a bad thing. Neither can a 26,000 crowd at Lord’s on opening night.

The tournament has been transformational for the women’s game, thanks largely to the inception of double headers with the men, initially brought about in 2021 because of the necessity of Covid restrictions.

With tickets priced at £5 for kids and adults from £16, it has attracted a new audience to the sport. A report published last October found 31 per cent of tickets were bought by women, 23 per cent for kids and 41 per cent for family groups.

Yet there is zero evidence that this new audience has actually migrated across to watch other forms of cricket. That is because the ECB, as chair Richard Thompson admitted last week, has done little research into that particular area. This seems inexplicable given the ECB’s mission goal at the start of all this was for The Hundred to be a gateway to the wider sport.

Maybe the truth is that it was only about cold, hard cash all along?