In an interview on BBC TMS yesterday Clare Connor has stated that the ECB are currently reviewing the women’s domestic structure and that her personal ambition is for a fully professional set-up by 2024.

“I think it’s achievable – we’ll see,” she said.

“We’ve outgrown the current domestic structure underneath the KSL. We’ve been looking for the last 6 or 8 months at what it should look like… We’ve got an internal performance group that is looking at these issues”.

She said that it was important to sustain the success achieved by England in last year’s World Cup, and that a renewed county structure would help to do that.

“Paying players allows them to focus on their training, it allows them to make cricket their priority. And that isn’t paying them 6 or 8 thousand pounds, it’s got to be enough so that they can be a fully fledged cricketer for the majority of the year.”

Asked what the new domestic structure would look like, she said: “We’re not sure what the right number of players looks like yet.”

On The Hundred, she said that the decision to make the women’s game part of the new format was “based on the scale that it can give to the women’s game. It enables us to send a very powerful message that we are putting men and women on the same playing field, in the same teams.”

She praised the KSL and those involved in it, saying that they had “done a phenomenal job in creating a brand new competition from scratch”, but said: “We mustn’t be scared of change. I’ve loved going to all of the [KSL] grounds and seeing people wearing new kit and getting behind their teams in new ways. I would urge those people to trust us.”

She pledged to deliver a new women’s domestic T20 competition that is “equally worthwhile [to the KSL]”.