Back in 2020 I wrote a draft piece suggesting that winning the World Cup in 2017 was the worst thing that could have happened to women's cricket in England. I didn't publish it, because I was at that game at Lord's and it was a truly momentous occasion, and for the girls that played in that final, many of whom I knew quite well, it was magnificent. I did not want to sully that day.
But now, nearly eight years on, the chickens have come home to roost. England have just been demolished by Australia in the Ashes. They did not win a game, and despite what many within the team environment suggested, they never looked like winning a game.
Since that 2017 final, which India should really have won - the returning Anya Shrubsole had just been hit for 9 off the first four balls of the 43rd over, and India only needed 28 more runs to win from the remaining 45 balls with seven wickets in hand - since then, England have won absolutely nothing on the world stage.
There have been five more world tournaments and four more Ashes' series, not to mention a calamitous Commonwealth Games on home soil in 2022, when England failed to pick up a medal of any colour.
In 2017 Mark Robinson was in charge. He was sacked in 2019 after losing the Ashes series 4-12. He was replaced by Lisa Keightley, who left in 2022, after the Commonwealth Games debacle. Jon Lewis took charge in late 2022. His team exited the World Cup at the Group Stage in October and have just been demolished 0-16 in the Ashes. He too has now bitten the dust, and captain Heather Knight has been also been removed from office after 9 years in charge. The Titanic and rearranging the deckchairs springs to mind.
In 2019 the blame was placed firmly on the county-based domestic cricket system, which was apparently "not fit for purpose". The answer Clare Connor, the Head of Women's Cricket, and her team came up with was to create a completely new domestic structure based around eight regional teams. County cricket was cast into the wilderness and left to fend for itself.
Three years previously a six team T20 Kia Super League had been introduced as a way of playing "the best against the best", with each team entitled to play three overseas players. Somewhat controversially, one of those franchises was awarded to Loughborough University, where the ECB had their Performance Centre and the England girls trained, but which had a ground with no real facilities for spectators or the media. The initial concept had been the expansion of this franchise system from just a 20 over competition to include a 50 over version too, but the plans were quickly shelved when it became apparent that the teams would struggle to entice overseas players to play in the extended competition.
The 2020 eight team regional structure swallowed up the KSL teams (Loughborough Lightning, Northern Diamonds, Northwest Thunder, Southern Vipers, Surrey Stars, and Western Storm) and added two more - Birmingham-based Central Sparks, and Middlesex-based Sunrisers. £20M was going to be spent by the ECB over two years, with 40 full-time county pros, in addition to the 21 centrally-contracted England players.
In addition the ECB also announced another new competition that would start in 2020 for both the men and the women. It was the Hundred. A new 100 ball, eight team, fully professional, franchise competition. The eight teams did not quite match the new regional teams - Western Storm moved from Somerset to Cardiff - but all the girls would be getting paid between £3,600 - £15,000, although three of the higher pay brackets would be used to entice overseas players into the competition, so "domestic" players would not see the benefit. Fortuitously, due to covid, Hundred games became men's and women's double-headers.
But after just four years of the regional structure, in January 2024 the ECB announced "the next stage in the evolution of women’s cricket with the creation of a three-tiered domestic competition structure and a shift in the ownership model underpinning the women’s professional game". From 2025 the eight regional teams would apparently "evolve to become eight women's professional "Tier 1 Clubs" - each owned, governed and operated by an individual First Class County". In other words the regional structure was being canned and women's domestic cricket would return to the county-based structure it had had back in 2019.
Not that evolutionary, but then why let facts stand in the way of the narrative? Back in 2019 the Div 1 50 over County Championship teams were - Hampshire, Kent, Lancashire, Notts, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
In 2025 the Tier 1 teams will again be - Hampshire, Lancashire, Notts (The Blaze), Surrey, and Warwickshire, plus Durham, Essex and Somerset. In addition Yorkshire will be added in 2026 and Glamorgan in 2027, with a stated aim to expand Tier 1 to 12 teams by 2029.
Each team in Tier 1 (plus Yorkshire and Glamorgan) will have 15 professional players, making a total of 150 professionally contracted women in England from this season. There are currently also 17 fully contracted England players and three players on Development contracts. Each team will also receive £1.5M worth of funding every year.
Five years of regional cricket has produced almost no new players to the England set-up. Of the squad that went to Australia only really Lauren Filer, Bess Heath and Ryanna McDonald-Gay are relatively new to the set-up, and have had little or no influence. More worrying is that there are no youngsters knocking at the door demanding a place even in the squad, let alone in the starting XI. Five years and many millions of pounds have effectively been wasted. For that "England management" must surely take some responsibility? Are they therefore the right people to once again be reviewing yet another England failure? Who reviews the reviewers?
So where does England Women's cricket go from here? The first thing to say is that expanding the Tier 1 structure to 10 teams in two years time is massively flawed. It will further dilute the strength of the competition. If the eight regional teams have produced very little by way of quality, then surely a reduction, rather than an expansion, in the number of top tier teams would have made the standard better. In addition the England contracted players have to be encouraged to play substantially more domestic cricket to improve the quality of the games and to test young players against England's so-called "best".
Sitting on an England contract should not be an excuse for players and their management choosing not to play domestic cricket. As England players they should be under pressure to perform in county games. That is a pressure that they need. If they fail to perform at that level then they are likely to fail to perform in top international games.
Given that the ECB are currently funding all the women's professional contracts I would further suggest that the central contracts structure is dismantled. It is not required and has produced a self-serving cabal. All players should be on county contracts. England players would be additionally rewarded handsomely through substantial match fees and win bonuses, plus lucrative franchise deals for the elite few. England has taken a top-down approach to the funding of women's cricketers. It is time to take a bottom-up approach. Substantially more needs to be invested in club cricket, age-group representative cricket and county/regional academies.
There is little doubt that England are in a mess and it is going to take at least 3-5 years to get things back on an even keel, no matter who takes over as England Head Coach or captain.
Martin Davies
24/III/25
