Fire and Loathing: the Hundred and its pyrotechnics will strangle cricket

At 6.57pm on Wednesday 3 August, as the final notes of Freed From Desire by Gala (Full vocal club mix) lingered in the eaves of the Rose Bowl, Hampshire, as the lights of the smoke-shrouded player tunnel gleamed like nuggets of high carbon Llanelli anthracite – like fire, Welsh fire – Joe Clarke, top bracket signing, felt a droplet of sweat trickle down the grille of his tomato red helmet.

Slowly he turned to Tom Banton, first draft pick, with whom he would in the next few moments be yoked together on the face of the Hundred Matchday One, out there like mountaineers scaling that sheer sporting peak.

“Bro. Are you out later? It’s foam night at Zeus.” The air seemed to shimmer between them, potent with the tang of raw, uncut sporting entertainment product, as umpire Arthur Cakebread brushed past, sighing, as he strapped the sleek black plastic ball shield to his forearm. Banton looked up from his phone. “You know, if you close your eyes for long enough, I mean for a really, really long time, you can smell colours. It’s, like, whoah.”

Fast forward 17 minutes, through a haze of light, sounds, light, sounds, sounds and sounds, and Banton and Clarke will be back sitting on the same UPVC-mix sport-bench. Clarke was out without scoring. Banton hit one huge six then forgot what he was doing. Welsh would go on to lose by nine wickets, the first in a sequence of eight defeats in eight games. And so a grand scale sporting collapse is set in train.

In the course of this 4,000-word deep dive and 12-part companion podcast the Guardian will provide forensic, unseen insight into the unravelling of the men’s Welsh Fire Hundred franchise season. Fire and Loathing: Two Years of Hurt is an attempt to understand the collapse of a sporting