The men's Hundred should be scrapped - but making it T20 would be better than nothing

According to a report in the Daily Mail, “conversations are at an early stage and sensitivities are high because of the money invested by Sky Sports, the English game’s main broadcasting partner”, but it seems that the penny is starting to drop.

Sky’s overall contract with the England and Wales Cricket Board is worth some £220m annually and was recently extended until 2028, albeit with the expectation that the 100-ball format would still be played.

However, the ECB is concerned that 100-ball cricket is still only played in the UK – the concept has not so much caught fire as been suffocated in water – as the countdown continues to the third season of the tournament starting in August.

It comes amid a backdrop of increasing numbers of T20 franchise competitions around the world and the attendant realisation that the ECB’s 100-ball outlier is precisely that – the one person in the room that nobody wants to dance with.

Even the Americans, God bless ’em, are not so daft that they thought that they needed to dream up a whole new format of the game when they set up Major League Cricket, the latest T20 fad that kicks off soon.

And with Saudi Arabia looking to enter the lucrative fray, the direction of travel is clear enough, amid talk of Indian Premier League franchise owners (their fingers already in the pies of other T20 tournaments around the world, including the new one in America) offering multi-million, full-time contracts to players that would see the franchises as the players’ main employers as opposed to countries or counties.

As the picture globally spins out of control, with the schedule a complete mess, it seems obvious, too, that international cricket needs some type of window in the world of T20 to flourish and survive.

The game cannot continue along this path and allow itself to be cannibalised completely and it is down to the powers-that-be to work out how everything can best co-exist.

While that is a conversation for the sport as a whole, at least there now seems some sort of recognition that The Hundred’s place in the grand scheme of things is effectively untenable.

Even leaving aside one’s opposition to the concept and its effect on the rest of the county schedule, the simple tweak of making the competition 20 overs a side, as opposed to 16.4, would be a positive move, along with making it more of an English Premier League, perhaps, which could attract the desired-for private investment.

Far from simplifying cricket, which is one of the things that The Hundred was supposed to do, it complicates further an already complicated sport.

The scoring system – balls instead of overs – can be difficult to come to terms with, like driving on the right hand side of the road.

If watching games from afar, the on-screen graphics, be they on Sky or the BBC, do not help either. They are a confusing hotchpotch of figures.

T20, on the other hand, is an established format which, whether one likes it or not, has been an undoubted success and is easy to follow.

It may never be proper cricket to some, but at least it more closely resembles proper cricket than the Hundred ever will.

Not only does the Hundred lack the financial heft of its T20 competitors, the ability to attract and retain the world’s best players, it also lacks relevance on the world stage.

One wonders, indeed, whether other countries are laughing at it (they have to be, surely); it is essentially a second-rate version of something that works.

The Hundred not only lacks the ability to pay players the biggest bucks, but it is also making a sizeable loss, according to a recent report by Fanos Hira, the Worcestershire chairman.

Hira, a chartered accountant who knows his onions, put the deficit at around £9m a year, one that could rise to £34m a year if the allocations to each county (some would say bribes in return for support) are factored into the overall expenditure.

The ECB, however, has claimed that the tournament has made a profit of £11.8m.

Something, somewhere, does not add up, a bit like matters at Yorkshire CCC when Lord Kamlesh Patel was the chairman.

There is no suggestion that any of the informal discussions taking place would lead to a change in the women’s Hundred, which has been a success.

The women have gained more exposure and profile and there is plenty to build on in the years ahead.

The men’s Hundred, however, has not only failed in a cricketing and commercial sense but it has proven – as if proof were needed – that two short-form tournaments in a busy English season is a short-form tournament too many.

Ultimately, the T20 Blast works and the men’s Hundred doesn’t; that is the dilemma that the ECB must face.