The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket has blasted the ECB in a landmark report which brands cricket institutionally racist, sexist and classist.

Commission Chair Cindy Butts told the media, in a damning inversion of the ECB’s own promotional slogan:

“The stark reality is cricket is not a game for everyone.”

Specifically on women’s cricket, the report concludes:

“Women are marginalised and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. The women’s game is treated as subordinate to the men’s game, and women have little or no power, voice or influence within cricket’s decision-making structures.”

The ICEC’s report makes 44 recommendations which it believes can transform cricket within the next 5-7 years.

Amongst these recommendations are calls for salary and governance equity which (if implemented) would completely remodel the landscape of cricket in England and Wales.

This includes a call for the ECB to move towards fully equal pay at domestic level by 2029 and at international level by 2030, with England women being paid (on average) the same renumeration, including match fees, central retainers and commercial payments, to the men’s white-ball team.

It also recommends that women’s salaries in the Hundred should be equalised with the men by 2025; whilst for domestic players in regional cricket, average pay and prize money should be equal by 2029.

The detail of the report allows the ECB little-to-no wriggle-room in terms of how “equality” should be calculated, and makes it very clear that just equalising match fees (for example) will be far from sufficient to meet their criteria.

The ECB are under no obligation to implement any of these recommendations, and doing so will be a huge challenge. Pay in domestic men’s cricket is largely dictated by the market, and funding the regions sufficiently such that Stars skipper Bryony Smith is paid the same as Surrey men’s captain Chris Jordan will cost the ECB an extraordinary amount of money. Equalising salaries in The Hundred alone would cost the ECB almost £6m per season. Equity will not come cheap.

On governance, the report recommends that the women’s game should have equal representation to the men’s game, including direct representation “in the same way as FCCs [the men’s First Class Counties]”.

It should be emphasised that this recommendation is explicitly for the men’s and women’s games to be represented equally, and is separate from the call for men and women to be equally present on the game’s boards and committees. To achieve this, the ECB will need to give governance representation to the women’s regions, giving them a vote in key decisions, such as the future of The Hundred – so the men’s First Class Counties will be unable to just abolish The Hundred without considering the impact on the women’s game.

Again, this won’t be straightforward. The men’s counties are big independent businesses, and there are 18 of them; whilst the women’s regions are essentially owned by the ECB, dependent on their “mother” counties for resources, and are only 8 in number. So does each region get 2¼ votes? And how do we ensure the men’s counties don’t put pressure on “their” region’s representatives to vote a particular way? (Especially given that many of the individuals working in women’s regional cricket will be hoping one day to apply for (much better paid) jobs in the men’s game?)

The ECB have promised to reflect carefully on the Commissions recommendations over the next few months. But reflecting is free and easy, and won’t change anything. The hard part is very much to come.

More on this story:

• Cultural change across a sport founded on misogyny is far from straightforward – by Raf Nicholson for the Guardian

Ash Gardner spun Australia to victory on the final morning at Trent Bridge, eclipsing the performances of 10-wicket Sophie Ecclestone and double-centurion Tammy Beaumont, taking a sensational 8-fer in the second innings to finish with match figures of 12-165 – the second-best match figures ever recorded in a Women’s Test.

England were clearly the underdogs going into the final day, needing another 150-odd runs with just 5 wickets in hand. And it was the latter number that was the more important – with 90 overs to bat, if they stayed-put, they were almost certainly going to win the game. But it is a fine balance for players who have been selected and groomed for aggressive white-ball cricket. Amy Jones blocked out 13 balls without scoring before dancing down the track and playing a lovely lofted drive, straight out of the one-day playbook. Two balls later, she tried to do the same again, missed it, and Healy took the bails off with Jones about a millimetre short – such are the fine margins of elite sport.

It was the second time in the match Jones had given her wicket away, and whilst there is no doubt whatsoever that she remains the best wicket-keeper in the world, you can’t carry a keeper who is struggling with the bat in international cricket these days, and feels more and more like the only thing keeping her in the team [sorry…!] is the lack of an alternative – if Bess Heath could keep like Ellie Threlkeld (or Threkeld could bat like Heath) I suspect Jones’s days would be numbered.

Sophie Ecclestone was able to hang around for half an hour, and does look like a potential replacement for Katherine Brunt’s role in the batting line-up – coming in somewhere between the bottom of the middle order and the top of the tail. But like Brunt, she is someone who is going to give you the odd 30 and the very occasional 50 – not a regular contribution. And that’s not a criticism of her – her role is to carry the team’s bowling, as she did throughout this match. Any contribution with the bat is a bonus not an expectation. To be honest, we shouldn’t even have had to see her bat today – if England’s top order had done their job last night, she’d still be in the pavilion right now, preparing to celebrate a famous win, not commiserating over a demoralising defeat.

And this defeat will be demoralising for England. They now need to win 5 of the 6 white ball games against a team who have lost just one white-ball match in the past two years, and whom England haven’t beaten in any format since a dead-rubber win at Bristol in 2019. That’s a psychological hurdle the size of a double-decker bus, and England are trying to jump it Evel Knievel-style… on a moped.

From an Australian perspective, they’ve taken a bit of stick from the press back home, particularly the bowlers; but they’ve got the job done. It was like they somehow understood the 5 day format better than England. So they didn’t rush to play shots; they didn’t panic over batting out a maiden to Sophie Ecclestone; they gave their bowlers time to work their spells. In the end they “used” the extra day, where England ended up just trying to survive it.

Could England have made some different selections? Given Gardner’s dominance in the final innings it does look like Jon Lewis, for all his red ball experience (250 First Class matches – the vast majority of them in England, including at this very ground) disastrously misread the pitch and conditions. My guess is that his lack of experience in women’s cricket didn’t help: he applied some logic from the men’s game – “the quickest bowlers can blow a team away” – without understanding that the quickest bowlers in the women’s game just aren’t that quick. They can hurry a batter into a mistake, as Lauren Filer did on more than one occasion in this match, but they mostly aren’t going to blast anyone away in the way that a Mitchell Starc or a Jofra Archer can.

Playing Dean instead of Filer would also have given England a slightly more Test-friendly tail. It’s easy to look back in hindsight though, and as Mark Robinson once told me in a press conference, “cricket isn’t played in hindsight”. The team England put on the pitch was a team that could have won this match – they got reasonably close, which is perhaps the key reason why the defeat will be so demoralising – it’s the hope that kills you, and all that! This was their one chance to win back the Ashes, and they didn’t quite have enough batting or enough bowling to do it. Oh well… there’s always next time.

Test cricket… like time, in the words of the celebrated mathematician Eric Temple Bell… makes fools of us all.

Everyone, that is, except Sophie Ecclestone; but her extraordinary efforts in this match will all have been for nothing, unless England’s late middle order can pull of the heist of the century tomorrow and snatch victory from what currently looks like the jaws of certain defeat, with 5 wickets down and 152 still required.

Test cricket certainly made a fool out of me, predicting yesterday that Australia would pile on the runs today and declare with the game out of sight of England. Instead England’s bowlers fought back, led by Ecclestone whose 10 wickets in the match bought her entry to a club almost as exclusive as the one Tammy Beaumont joined yesterday – just 11 other women have taken 10 or more wickets in a match; whilst 8 (including TB) have scored double-hundreds.

Ecclestone bowled 463 deliveries in this match – the most bowled by a woman in a Test match in the 21st century – taking 10 wickets for 192. And there was barely a dud ball in there either, until she threw down a full toss to Alyssa Healy 15 minutes into the final session. Healy was well set, having just brought up a half-century to silence the critics who were looking for her to make headlines with a record 4th straight duck in Test cricket, and she pounced, chipping it over the head of Emma Lamb, who somehow hauled it back and held on to the catch. Four balls later, Ecclestone trapped Darcie Brown LBW, and England had completed a cracking fight-back, leaving themselves chasing 268 for the win.

Of course, Ecclestone didn’t do it all by herself. Lauren Filer was billed as an “impact” bowler, and she certainly earned her match fee by bowling both Ellyse Perry and Tahlia McGrath in quick succession – both were decent deliveries, putting pressure on the batter to play and forcing the mistake – that’s certainly “impact”! And there were 2 wickets too for Kate Cross, who was clearly struggling yesterday with fatigue, but bravely sent down another 13 overs today; and the ball that got Phoebe Litchfield was a bit of a Jaffa, though perhaps also a tad fortunate? (I’d lay money she couldn’t repeat it if she’d bowled another 100 overs.)

England’s chase of 268 was never going to be easy – it would be by some margin the highest run chase ever made in women’s Tests. But England have scored that many in ODIs on plenty of occasions of late, and it was only 25 more than they made when they almost chased the target Australia set them in the last Ashes Test at Manuka. With well in excess of 100 overs to get them, it definitely felt doable. If they could just make it through to the close unscathed, as Australia had done last night, that would be perfect and we’d be set for a cracking finish tomorrow.

But… well… Test cricket makes fools of us all, doesn’t it? And it absolutely did of England in the final session, as they proceeded to crack under the pressure. I really didn’t want to be writing anything negative this evening – I was determined that I’d be able to be positive after the bowlers had brought them back into it. But I can’t – they bojangled it up good and proper!

Ash Gardner said in the press conference yesterday that spin would be crucial in the final innings, and she called it right, ripping the heart out of England’s batting order with the wickets of Tammy Beaumont, Heather Knight and Nat Sciver-Brunt. If you’d asked Australia what 3 wickets they really wanted in that evening session, those would have been the three. Getting Lamb and Dunkley as well was just a bonus; and it is really just Amy Jones to come now before Australia are into the tail. (Yes – Ecclestone can give it a whack in white ball cricket, but she’s a tailender here.)

England fans might feel hard done by, having seen DRS go to “Umpire’s Call” on the Knight and Lamb LBWs; but at the end of the day, Sue Redfern and Anna Harris made the right decisions – Lamb’s was (just) hitting; and Knight’s did strike her (just) in line. I’m not a big fan of “Umpire’s Call” – I think if it is hitting, it is hitting – but the important point here is that it was hitting, and you can’t really argue with that.

Is there any hope for England tomorrow? With BBC’s weather forecast saying 0% chance of rain, and 90 overs available, it ain’t gonna be a draw. So England need a miracle, and it could happen… but it feels like a very, very, very long shot.

On February 16 1935, Betty Snowball (or “Batty” Snowball, as I’d no doubt have called her if I’d been writing a blog back in 1935!) broke a record that had been in the books for 43 days – the highest ever score by an English woman cricketer. Snowball made 189 in England’s first innings of the only Test against New Zealand in Christchurch, overtaking the 119 made by Myrtle Maclagan against Australia in Sydney a few weeks previously.

It would be a record that would stand for over 88 years – though she lived into her eighties, Snowball herself, who died in 1988, never saw it beaten.

But today at Trent Bridge… 32,270 days later… Tammy Beaumont finally eclipsed Snowball’s innings, making 208 off 331 balls as England posted 463 all out in reply to Australia’s 473.

And you can’t argue Beaumont didn’t do it the hard way either. Snowball’s 189 was made against a novice New Zealand side playing their first ever Test, who had been bowled out for 44 (yes – four-four!) in just under 30 overs that morning.

Beaumont’s was made against the mighty Australia – arguably the most dominant team cricket has ever seen – in front of a crowd that likely surpassed another pretty old record. We don’t have exact figures yet, but the attendance at Trent Bridge today almost certainly took this match past the 72-year-old mark of 15,000 for the highest ever aggregate attendance at a women’s Test in England, set in 1951.

England began the day on 218-2, with plenty of wickets in hand, but still 255 runs behind – an Everest to climb. Realistically, their best-case scenario was to match Australia’s run rate and try to draw somewhere close to their 1st innings total of 473 some time in the evening session. And that they did – bowled out 10 runs behind. Another 11 runs would have been nice, just to be able to say the words “first innings lead”, but in the context of the game it is probably irrelevant.

TB will rightly get the headlines (Raf will be kicking herself she didn’t get to do the Sky Sports ‘Back Pages’ slot tonight rather than last night, when it was mostly (men’s) football transfer gossip and Frankie Dettori) and within half an hour Kent had issued a press release about “Kent Women Captain Tammy Beaumont”, even though she hasn’t actually played for them for quite some years!

But she couldn’t have done it without the support of a few others in the lineup. It was a bit of a case of: good, bad, good, bad, by turns. Nat Sciver looked nailed-on for a hundred of her own before nicking one to Healy whilst Sophia Dunkley really struggled – almost as if the coaches had given her mixed messages about how to play – and basically just clung on for 50 balls.

Danni Wyatt had said before the game that her instructions were to play the way she always does, and so she did, making a swift (by Test standards) 44. Amy Jones played a couple of nice shots, and then got out in such an Amy Jones way that if it had been anyone else, Amy Jones would have sued her for breach of copyright.

Sophie Ecclestone chipped in; Kate Cross didn’t (no shade – she isn’t really expected to); Lauren Filer had a bit of fun – the only player in the match so far to finish with a strike rate over 100, for her 11 off 10; before Lauren Bell came to the crease at No. 11, whereupon Tammy decided she might as well have a swish at that point, and… as they say… the rest is history – literally!

This left England with 19 overs to have a pop at Australia, with their batters tired after a long, hot day in the field, and England’s quick bowlers well-rested and hopefully chomping at the bit to get stuck in.

But… they kinda didn’t.

A year on from their travails against South Africa’s left-handers (remembering Tumi Sekhukhune’s 130-ball marathon in the second innings at Taunton) they still don’t seem to have a plan for Beth Mooney – at least, not one that is in any way effective – two slips and two gullies might be funky, but it wasn’t functional. If only someone could have predicted that Australia would open the batting with a left-hander… or even two!

There was apparently a suggestion on comms that England were deliberately engaging in a bit of 80s-style declaration bowling to allow Australia to pile on enough runs to feel able to give England a crack, but I don’t buy it: it might have made sense if this was a 4-day game, but with two days left? Surely not!

Occam’s razor suggests a simpler explanation – England just weren’t very good, and let Australia off the hook, such as it was, extending their lead to 92 with 10 wickets in hand. Their only hope now looks to be that either the pitch starts to misbehave… and even then, they still have to bat last on it, with Alana King already starting to find some significant turn with the odd ball today.

More likely, Australia will bat England out of the match tomorrow, and then try to bowl them out on Day 5 to take the win, and almost certainly the Ashes too. England are now playing for a draw. And I wouldn’t put my money on them getting it.

TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains statistics that some England fans may find disturbing – reader discretion is advised.

List of teams to have scored more than 450 runs in the first innings of a Women’s Test:

1. Australia – 473 at Trent Bridge, 2023

List of teams to have scored more than 300 runs in the first innings of a Women’s Test and lost the match:

Basically… history wasn’t on England’s side when we closed last night with Australia on 328-7; but there were some prospects that they could defy it, with this being the first 5-day Test of the professional era, and the weather forecast not looking too bad for the rest of the match. (There are currently some thundery showers forecast for late Sunday, but otherwise we are looking good for a full complement of overs.)

But those prospects began to recede this morning as England took the morning session and then some to clean up the Aussie tail, with Annabel Sutherland making her way to 137* supported by Alana King and Kim Garth – the latter of whom blocked her way to a Laura Marsh-esque 76 ball 22 as Sutherland pushed on past the 100 mark.

Sophie Ecclestone bowled another 15 overs – not quite as economically as yesterday, but still impressive, while the seamers toiled in rotation at the other end.

By the time Ecclestone took the final wicket – her fifth – a few overs into the afternoon session, the numbers read:

                   Overs Wks Runs
Sophie Ecclestone  46.2  5   129
Everyone Else      78    5   331

Ecclestone’s teammates from her home club up in Cheshire had made their way down to Nottingham for the first two days of this match to support her, and they can’t say they didn’t get their money’s worth!

But whist she left the field holding aloft the match ball, the seamers went back to the dressing room battered and bruised: England’s one-spinner selection policy, and their ambitions to win this Test by bowling first, both being called into sharp question.

It’s is true that Sutherland batted beautifully. With technique the echoed Ellyse Perry in her prime, I’ve never seen her play better. But she was only batting at one end, and England really should have been able to clean up the tail for less than the 145 Australia put on today.

It is difficult to escape the feeling that whilst bowlers like Lauren Filer (and to be fair, Darcie Brown for Australia later in the day) might be fast by the standards of the women’s game, they just aren’t fast enough to really trouble the top batters, who have faced plenty of 70-75mph bowling, both from the colleagues in the nets and from bowling machines.

You need something more than raw pace to take wickets, as Australia discovered too, with Tammy Beaumont becoming the second player of the day to join The Hundred Club this evening. Beaumont was coming off the back of an undefeated double-hundred in the warm-up against Australia “A” and goes to bed tonight with another 100 to her name – avoiding the angst of having to sleep on 90-something, reaching the milestone with an over to spare before stumps.

TB might have lost her place in the T20 reckoning, but she is still giving the fight everything in the longer formats. There was a brief period early on where she looked slightly wobbly, mistiming a defensive drive which on another day could easily have carried to cover, and then almost playing-on shortly after. But having got through that, she sailed on with increasing confidence, and you wouldn’t bet against her adding another 100 tomorrow.

But it probably still won’t be enough for England to put themselves in a position to control the game. Although Nat Sciver-Brunt, going at pretty-much a run-a-ball, did push them briefly over a rate of 7 runs per over, maintaining that kind of rate isn’t realistic, so the likelihood is that even if they make the Aussies toil in the field, they won’t reach parity until very late in the day tomorrow.

They’ll then be relying on Australian skipper Alyssa Healy to decide whether or not to make a game of it – set England a target and let them chase it? Or shut up shop and play for the draw?

The one factor in England’s favour: in the drawn Test at Taunton in 2019, Meg Lanning asked the team whether they thought she should make a similar move and offer England a sniff of victory to try to win the match themselves. The team voted 10-1 to make the game safe, and a draw was the inevitable result. But the one player who dissented? Alyssa Healy!

Batting first in the Women’s Ashes Test, Australia reached 327-7 at the close of day 1.

And no, that’s not a typo – it’s the previous Ashes Test, played at Manuka Oval in Canberra in January 2022.

Here at Trent Bridge, a year-and-a-half later, Australia went exactly one run better – 328-7. They did it at a considerably faster run-rate however: at Manuka they scored at 3.4 runs per over; but with rain having taken 5 overs out of the day, and the required number of overs reduced from 100 (for a 4-day Test) to 90 (for a 5-day game), there were just 85 overs bowled today, with Australia scoring at 3.9 runs per over – half a run per over quicker.

Indeed during one phase after lunch, Ellyse Perry and Tahlia McGrath reached the positively Bazballish heights of 6 runs per over, between overs 35 and 40.

Perry and McGrath looked odds-on for at least one century between them, if not two, and had just taken Australia past the 200 mark when a little bit of Ecclestone magic did for McGrath on 61 – the ball fired-in in the direction of leg stump, pitching on middle and then straightening to take out middle as McGrath covered leg with her defence.

Ecclestone bowled on and on, in a mammoth spell of 28 overs across the rain break. It was perhaps a slightly risky move in the context of what’s to come, with Ecclestone having priors for breaking down later in the season after having been over-bowled in a Test, but this match is probably the key to England’s summer. With Australia only needing to draw the series to retain the Ashes, England’s only real hope of winning back the trophy is to win this Test, and they’d probably be quite happy if Ecclestone having to sit out the Sri Lanka series in September was the price to be paid for that.

And of course, the rewards came today, as Ecclestone maintained her control for a total of 31 overs, at an economy rate of 2.3. England’s next best was Kate Cross’s 4.3 – not bad, by any means, but a whopping 2 runs-an-over more expensive than Ecclestone. Even more importantly, Ecclestone added two more crucial wickets. Jess Jonassen was a tad unlucky to glove an attempted sweep to Tammy Beaumont at short leg who took the catch.

Alyssa Healy – the really big wicket – then followed two balls later – a quite similar dismissal to McGrath’s, playing for a ball heading towards leg but seeing it turn back past the outside of her bat and clatter into the stumps. Healy will look back and wince. Her choice to drop down the order made a lot of sense on paper, but she isn’t used to sitting in the pavilion for hours waiting her turn to come to the middle, and the concentration when she did was just a little bit lacking.

She wasn’t the only one who will be kicking herself – Perry also perished, on the dreaded 99, due to a lapse in concentration, flashing at one she could have left alone.

Australia bat deep though – Ash Gardner coming in at 7, and Annabel Sutherland at 8 meant England weren’t into the tail yet, and another big partnership of 77 took Australia past the 300 mark, which you feel means they have the right to claim they “won the day”, before Lauren Bell , preferred to Filer with the new ball, delivered the goods with a bit of inswing and an edge to Amy Jones.

England would have liked one more from the new ball, but Sutherland and Alana King survived to the close, brining to an end what turned out to be an entertaining day.

Trent Bridge seems like a really good venue to have chosen for this Test match – it is the most intimate of the “Big” grounds, with the front few rows of seats feeling much closer to the action than they do elsewhere, and there was a real buzz through the day, with a decent crowd enjoying all the hospitality on offer. Whether your tipple was Pimm’s, gin cocktails, or the more traditional pint of lager, all the concessions were open for service, which hasn’t always been the case for women’s matches. It wasn’t a “sell out” by any means, but it was definitely a much better crowd and atmosphere than any recent Test I can remember, and fully justified the decision to show faith in the bigger venues.

Will it be a venue where England get a result in a Test for the first time in nearly 10 years? It won’t be easy – the pitch is already breaking up a bit, with the ground staff called on to repair Ecclestone’s footmarks at one point, and batting on the final day will be a… well… a test, I guess! But if they can play positively tomorrow and look to bat into day 3 towards a lead of 100-150, they have a chance.

Uncapped Western Storm duo Lauren Filer and Dani Gibson have been included in England’s squad for the Ashes Test at Trent Bridge later this month.

Gibson’s call-up is not massively unexpected – she was an official reserve for the T20 World Cup and as a genuine allrounder offers quality seam bowling and aggressive batting options. If she plays, it would suggest England are planning to continue the aggressive approach which saw them almost win the last Ashes Test on the final day in Canberra last year.

Filer’s selection however is somewhat left-field – much more so than the inclusion of Emily Arlott was for the Test versus India two years ago. Filer has taken just a handful of wickets in regionals this season, and bats in the tail. Arlott of course didn’t end up playing against India, and missed out again a year later after withdrawing due to the effects of long COVID; and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if Filer too spends the week in Nottingham carrying drinks.

Issy Wong also makes the squad, despite a run of very poor form in domestic cricket, with England clearly gambling that she will rise to the occasion for England in a way which she hasn’t done for Sparks this season.

Alice Capsey meanwhile is included, giving her the opportunity to complete the set of Test, ODI and T20 caps before the age of 19, which she’ll reach in August.

England Women’s Ashes Test Squad
Heather Knight (Western Storm)
Tammy Beaumont (The Blaze)
Lauren Bell (Southern Vipers)
Alice Capsey (South East Stars)
Kate Cross (Thunder)
Alice Davidson-Richards (South East Stars)
Sophia Dunkley (South East Stars)
Sophie Ecclestone (Thunder)
Lauren Filer (Western Storm)
Danielle Gibson (Western Storm)
Amy Jones (Central Sparks)
Emma Lamb (Thunder)
Nat Sciver-Brunt (The Blaze)
Issy Wong (Central Sparks)
Danielle Wyatt (Southern Brave)

This week:

• Thunder at Finals Day – literally!
• Farewell to Anya Shrubsole
• Weird goings on at Sunrisers
• Ashes squad announcement – who should be included based on Lottie Cup performances?