During the men’s draft for The Hundred last night, quite a few people were questioning when the women’s draft was happening, and were subsequently surprised to learn that there wasn’t going to be one, asking if this was another case of “All cricketers are equal… but the men are more equal than the women”?

Sources at the ECB have told us that they did consider holding a women’s draft, but decided against it; and we think that this was actually the correct decision.

The main stated reason for this is that the average age of the women is much lower than the men – there were going to be a lot of teenagers involved, and you simply can’t just pack a seventeen year old girl off to the other end of the country, to live and play for six weeks with people she doesn’t really know, and expect that to not end up with problems somewhere along the line – at best homesickness; at worst, a life-changing mental health crisis.

Of course, the ECB could have excluded teenagers from the competition, or found a way for them to “dodge” the draft, but excluding them completely would defeat the entire object, and allowing them to dodge the draft would have made the process ridiculously complicated and/ or unfair.

There were also no doubt a couple of other considerations at the back of peoples’ minds at the ECB.

One was the issue of players who come as a “package” – you get both, or you get neither. Arguably, you could say “That’s their problem!” but then don’t be surprised if several of the world’s best players decide to say “Thanks… but no thanks!”

There are also… inevitably… a few instances of players who absolutely will NOT play together any more, for similar reasons, and again this would be very complicated to handle in a draft. You could have given players an “Objection” but then someone would inevitably ask “Why?” and then… well… as the kids say… awks!

It was also the case that the England players didn’t want a draft. After their experience of being shifted around in the KSL – a much more contentious (and occasionally fraught) process behind the scenes than people ever let on – they wanted to be in control of their own careers and destinies, which was especially important given that The Hundred isn’t really just six weeks for the women, because the franchises are likely to be strongly tied to the Centres of Excellence. So the ECB listened to what the players had to say, and acted on it.

Therefore they opted instead to have an “open market” system, where players could accept or reject offers – so if people wanted to play with (or not play with) a particular coach or other player, or in a particular city a long way from home, they could ensure that.

It might not have had the excitement and media impact of a draft, but it by-passed a lot of potential problems – the ECB don’t get everything right, and we’ve been very critical of The Hundred at times; but in this case they made the right call for the right reasons.