A tweet last night got me thinking. Well, it got me a little more than just thinking. It got me a little angry. Except that’s the point of the tweet. To make me, and people like me, feel as though we should not get angry.

This is going to be, by my standards, a short post, but one I think I need to write. It does hark back to the days of How Did We Lose In Adelaide, when I had to plough what felt a fairly lonely furrow (even with TFT doing their thing) as I set about the ECB, the media and the acolytes who chose to accept that the people running our game could do what the hell they liked and you, as a fan, as a customer, hell, as a stakeholder, had to STFU and leave it to those in power. A power they had due to money, connections, and hell, they may have liked the sport every bit as much as we do. If we’d followed the line of some, we would never have questioned Sepp Blatter, let the IOC just take bribe after bribe, and let the cricket authorities install a new format of the sport in this country and risk the marginalisation of the existing game. Oh. That’s right. The last one is happening.

To the tweet. I’m not going to put the name of the person who wrote it on here. That individual clearly loves the sport, and the point is not to attack them, but the message. There is a massive difference.

A couple of people I know have written well thought out articles in the last week or so with some arguments for how #TheHundred may be beneficial and I’ve never seen such vitriol from sections of cricket twitter over anything. It’s honestly ridiculous.

Oppose the Hundred crew – you are making it harder and harder for people to have any meaningful discussion on the topic. All I have seen is yelling. If you want to exist in a vacuum where only your opinions matter then go ahead. Stop attacking people for writing an article.

You are perfectly entitled to have a view that supports the Hundred. I cannot be entirely sure of the article the individual has in mind, but I’m thinking it might be the one in the Cricketer in particular that had some interesting, if somewhat odd (in my view) points on how attractive the sport in its current format in the UK is to South Asian background fans in this country. One could have taken it that by supporting the current county structure you were enhancing the current in-grained anti-minority stance evidenced by the lack of non-white cricketers in the first class game. Could being the operative word.

That piece, as it was intended to do, provoked debate. Great. That’s what strongly-held views are going to do. You are also, as I know, going to be very protective of your position and fight it hard. I wouldn’t have made an impact back in the day with HDWLIA (and I did, I know I did) if I’d been backward in coming forward, polite and delicate in my approach and backing down when the first wash came over me. I had a really strong view, some called it obsessive, bilious, boring, that KP’s sacking was bad, that the people who did it were worse, that the people in the media who defended it were possibly even worse, and that the people who wouldn’t see my view were merely misunderstanding what that view was! Yes, I know the last part seems arrogant.

The “Oppose The Hundred” crew, whatever that may be, seemed to be some people absolutely afraid that the county structure, which never gets the praise when things go well, but always gets the blame when it goes badly, which they hold dear, is being jeopardised by an ego trip, with little to no consultation or on-boarding of supporters. These supporters, when confronted with this monstrosity, and the absolutely appalling marketing and leaking of information on the competition, voiced strong disapproval. If you believe in something dearly, I’m afraid strong disapproval is what you get. It comes with the territory. I can point to those who were big fans of Alastair Cook. Because I’m not, I got a ton of attacks back. I can’t say I dealt with them all well, but I had to deal with them. Melbourne was almost the last straw. I almost packed the whole game in. But I know people, lots of people, like Cook. You have to get on with it.

You can’t complain if a provocative article evokes a passionate response. You can’t moan if the view you put forward is controversial that those challenged won’t respond. You also don’t get attention in this modern world if you are dull and boring. A journo said to me when he pointed out that I got too prickly about some commenters “why do you bother with them. No-one knows who they are in the game. People know Being Outside Cricket” to which I said they were cricket fans too, and that their view, even if I thought it was horribly wrong, had to be addressed.

The problem with meaningful discussions is that you don’t get to define what it is. You don’t control it. You can only control your own contribution to it. If you set out to defend something that, on the face of it, is unpopular, then you are going to get responses you don’t like. It’s not easy to take lots of the time, but you have to take it, thick, or as in my case, thin skinned as you may be. It can over-step the mark – I’ve had a death threat, I’ve had someone threaten my dog, I’ve had a couple of people threaten to dox me, other threatening me with a legal action – but those events are rare. They aren’t the norm. For every idiot who accuses me of being a Piers Morgan stooge (when I actively loathe the man) there are people I can have passionate disagreements with while remaining friends, and in some cases, when it comes to politics, spouses.

People see a massive threat to the life they love, the sport they care about, and the future of the game. They have, like me, an in built distrust of the ECB. They are going to get angry. They are going to put up passionate, steadfast defences, and, yes, attack the arguments put up against them. And while we will be ultimately unsuccessful, it doesn’t mean we have to get on board. I didn’t feel anywhere near the same passion for an England team post-2014, because of the events after that Ashes tour. I’m not going to go the Hundred just because it needs me to go to “save the game” because “we can’t afford it to fail”.

This wasn’t that short, really. I just wanted to get things off my chest a little. Cricket engenders passionate support, and we love it dearly. We fight for what we love dearly, maybe even crossing a mythical line. But don’t moan (yeah, rich coming from me) if you get stick back when you are doling it out, or threatening what we hold dear. I would expect the opposite side of the argument to come at me, and I can choose whether to engage or not. I have muted a couple of people on Twitter after a long debate on the Hundred because it wasn’t going anywhere, and they started interjecting in conversations I wasn’t having with them (and not leaving me out of other streams when I asked them to do so, politely). It’s the way you want to conduct your own business that matters. We have been forthright, angry, even downright rude, but I hope most of the time it is those in authority, and that’s where the anger should lie.

“If you want to exist in a vacuum where only your opinions matter then go ahead. Stop attacking people for writing an article.”

I found my critics’anger as an energy. I wanted the anger to fire me up. If I had packed it in for writing an article that got an angry response, I wouldn’t be here. If you are firm enough in your views, believe in something, you should respond. That’s not a vacuum. It’s a discussion. A debate. An argument. And it isn’t always defined by the writer.

Have a great day, and speak soon.

Dmitri (Peter)

UPDATE – Harry Gurney, Bumble and Topley. Oh my lord.

Topley’s tweet is right up there for most idiotic of the year. Me Me Me. I want to be attacked. Please.

I omitted above that one of the chief villains, and one of the reasons that we should be strident are people like Harry Gurney – he of the more Twitter followers than you, I or our humble website. You are to know your place because you are just a mere spectator. How can you be polite to an attitude like that?