Who’s your favourite influencer? For me it’s Ashton Hall, an inspiring and cheerful man on YouTube whose fame has been brief, beautiful and as fragile as a butterfly lifespan. But who was for a period earlier this year the greatest influencer on the planet, propelled to that status by a video showing his “extreme morning routine”.
The routine is amazing. It starts at 3.52am. The standard kick-off time for The Grind used to be 5am. Sod that. Ashton Hall gets up at 3.52. Ashton Hall gets up the day before to prepare for his getting up.
In the video, fast-cut and excitingly soundtracked, he showcases a rigidly structured roster of wellness acts. He journals. He press-ups. He sprints. He prays. He moisturises with banana peel. Sombrely, tenderly, he dunks his face in iced mineral water. He leaps into a pool and lurks for ages, being well. We don’t get to see him vaping and having a shit. But if we did it would be slick, snappy, moving, cinematic and soundtracked by clunk, fizz, snap fzzt, pft, shtm.
The effect is visceral. Ashton Hall in his morning routine is like some super substance, like perfect human metal. His body is a clean space, his mind pristine. He looks as though he smells of musk, lemon, honey and breast milk. He looks like the word Readiness and also Love, Hope and Money, packed into a single preternaturally muscular torso, eyes like Roman candles, an avatar of American can-do, a place that is all frontier, where it’s always a sunrise, and where Ashton Hall is always out there at 3.52am like a sandpiper running ahead of the surf line.
The routine ends with the start of his work day at 9.26am, signalled by an unseen hand presenting him with avocado on toast as he settles gravely at his desk. By this stage Ashton Hall has been up for almost six hours, brooding, banana-peeling, communing with his inner energy. And by now some alarm bells have begun to ring.
The thing with Ashton Hall, the great unspoken question is … what does he actually do? What is all this preparation for? There is a vague hint of some kind of business being done. We hear him say: “We’ve got to get at least 10,000”, but he could be talking about playing Minecraft or making a Lego petrol station. Is anyone else on that phone line? Is it plugged in? Is the receiver actually a frankfurter?
The fact is, and we can say this now because it has become a huge self-fulfilling success, the morning routine is the thing. It is the content. Ashton Hall is a man who is always getting ready, whose business is being ready for business, like watching the same glittering marble endlessly shifted about between the cups of a street magician.
This is the real brilliance of Ashton Hall. The routine is like a deeply caustic one-man art installation, a real-time satire on the decline of industry, on the fact all life is simply staging and show now, getting ready to be ready, because looking like a human engaged in human activity is the last remaining pillar of reality.
Once you’ve accepted this it becomes deeply addictive. There is another video where you can watch Ashton Hall running for an hour, not actually going anywhere, just running, with a kind of Palladian symmetry to his lines and angles, arms pumping, all balance and perfect levers, a Leonardo set to the music of the spheres, or at least to the music of a high-energy techno montage.
And this is fine because we are post activity now, post making or doing. Wealth is just numbers moving around. People are shapes and sounds. The world is a stage-set made of pixels. Ashton Hall knows this. He’s up at 4am preparing for it because preparing is content, because we will simply slide down the surface of things, beautifully.
OK. Fine. A trick of the light. The thing that isn’t really a thing. A sales pitch that is, it turns out, the only product. What, you might ask, does this have to do with the Hundred? Well, there you make an interesting point.
Because four years on, at the start of the final season before the new ownership kicks in, we can say this now. What the England and Wales Cricket Board has created is basically Ashton Hall cricket, a stage pretending to be a thing. And as things go, this isn’t even a very good one, to the extent that pound for pound, product versus hype, there is a fair argument the Hundred is the worst cricket thing ever invented.
I’ve tried hard with it. I’ve watched the games and enjoyed the family vibe. There will always be good bits, because cricket is good. I know there are also commentators who like to say that the Hundred is good because it is disruptive and new, it freaks out the squares, and that’s all fine.
Plus there is of course a more managed gush around the product. Everyone here is hyped up. Everyone is Ashton Halling it. More cynically the Hundred has done a good job of selling itself on the back of manipulative waffle about diversity and openness, notably the lie that this is the only way, the only way you hear, that women’s cricket can be properly funded.
Kids like it, we are told. Do they? One key thing having kids tells you is that kids really shouldn’t be allowed to decide the best thing to do. Kids also like drinking four litres of Dr Pepper for dinner. As for that parroted line that young people only like short things and brain-frazzling clips on social media, this has long since been discredited. Try watching a Marvel film. It’s like sitting through six hours of medieval church music.
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The reality is simple enough. The Hundred is just a bad product, bad sport, a force-grown entity that struggles to justify its bizarre state of prominence. The gear change from a brilliant Test series is the obvious point of contrast. But you don’t need to go that far. The Hundred has terrible staging. The cramming of a complex activity into such a small space means the basic nuts and bolts are weird and fiddly, with no room for narrative or for players to properly excel.
The Hundred has generated very few moments. It has developed no male players. It has helped by giving female cricketers more games to play and an income stream, but has the England team got better or worse in its lifespan? Base, low-skill, tediously repetitive acts are met with head-slapping disbelief, booming victory music. This is just colour, noise, content without features. There are 32 Hundred games. Why? Why not screen the same one 32 times and rest the players?
More widely, we know the Hundred has been a loss leader. As of this week we also know there is no evidence the Hundred has actually attracted any new people to the sport. Chuck in the confusion of the summer, an age of talented but pathway-less players, the Jacob Bethell effect.
Does it really matter? This thing is clearly a stepping stone, a sellable warm-up routine, prep for the actual business of the future. In a final monetising of the family furniture the ECB has managed to sell this empty box for a lot of money.
There are two things worth saying about this. For all the backslapping over headline figures, this is basically severance money. It will keep some jobs running. It will also disappear into debt and losses like water down an open drain. Selling off the English summer. Is this really the most logical way of trying to save the English summer?
And from this perspective there is also cause to be hopeful now. Change must be good. Basically, bring on the new owners as quickly as possible. I used to think the problem with English cricket was that it was run by marketing people. In fact the problem is being run by really bad marketing people.
A common refrain is that the new owners won’t have English cricket’s interests at heart. Well, who has down the years? How could they be any worse than the previous administrators, a stream of semi-competent business people called things like Lord Cakebread and Sir Gordon Cardboard-Box?
Making an English IPL, for example, sounds like an excellent idea. The IPL is for people who actually like cricket. It makes players. It works. At the very least it seems highly likely the new owners will move on from the silliest format and make it into a T20, a big step in the right direction.
When that comes, who will remember this interlude, our Ashton Hall phase, noise and energy for the sake of noise and energy? English cricket’s admin arm has long since lost faith in making its best parts work and in the intelligence of its own customers. So bring on the future. Put down the hotdog phone. Remove the banana skin. Silence the generically shrieking voices. Can we just get on to the actual thing now?
