Prior to this Test match there was a lot of discussion on social media about whether BBC’s Test Match Special would broadcast live coverage of the game, and subsequent disappointment when it transpired that they would not, after TalkSport won the rights for the men’s Tests next year, with which the rights to the women’s Test were bundled.

The universal assumption, given that the match was hours from starting, was that it would pass without full radio coverage in the UK – the first England Test to do so for a decade. So massive credit to TalkSport for upending that assumption, and pulling together a team to commentate remotely on the final two days [insert hindsight here] of the match from their headquarters beneath The Shard on London’s South Bank.

Raf got a message from the producer whilst she was teaching her Sports Journalism students at Bournemouth University and got on a train; Phoebe Graham got a call when she was training with Thunder in Manchester and got into her car. Less than 24 hours later we found ourselves walking together at 3:30am (coffees and Google Maps in hand) with revellers still spilling out of clubs and pubs from the night before, trekking 10 minutes from our hotel at London Bridge over to TalkSport to… talk sport – and of course one sport in particular!

The setup is not really too different to watching from home – you are sat in a small conference room, in front of a huge screen, showing the “raw” TV feed from the ground – so you are seeing the same pictures that everyone watching on TNT is seeing in their living rooms, but without the comms or any ads. You can hear the effects mic, so you get a sense of the atmosphere, but you are at the mercy of the TV producer as to what you actually see.

It is virtually impossible to follow who is fielding where, and you won’t know a sub fielder has entered the fray until suddenly Harleen Deol or Richa Gosh pop up; but you obviously get a prime view of every delivery – much more so than if you were at the ground, where the most you’ll have is a small screen to catch a replay on.

With it being an early start, we’d brought a round of croissants with us to have for breakfast during the “lunch” break. Not just any croissants either – M&S croissants! And they did get eaten, but not during the lunch break, because there was, dear reader, no lunch break, as England were bowled out for 130-something for the second time in two days.

Of course, this isn’t the first time England have lost a Test match this year; but against Australia in the Women’s Ashes, it felt like they were competing. They fought. They took it to a fifth day. They came within 100 runs of victory. None of those caveats were applicable here. The cavernous DY Patil stadium in Navi Mumbai is 4,500 miles from Trent Bridge; but it might as well have been 4,500 light years.

Having opted not to enforce the follow-on yesterday, everyone expected India to continue batting this morning, at least whilst Harmanpreet was still at the crease; but the Indians surprised everyone by declaring on their overnight lead of 478.

Given that no one has ever chased even 200 to win a women’s Test, let alone nearly 500, the odds were very much stacked against England. But it is the commentator’s job to be optimistic about the state of the game, even at 4am on a chilly winter’s morning in south London, so we gave England the benefit of the doubt – if they could battle their way through today, and take into the final day, they’d have a chance to at least redeem their embarrassment at being bowled out for 136 yesterday.

As the kids say… LOL!

There will be some debate once again about whether England were bad or India were good; and perhaps we won’t really know the answer to that question until the end of next week’s Test between India and Australia, but right now I’m leaning towards “India were good”. They batted positively on Day 1; and they bowled brilliantly on Days 2 and 3. In Renuka and Pooja, they’ve perhaps found themselves a genuine “Shrubsole and Brunt”, with Reunka swinging it in like Anya and Pooja bringing the KSB fight and aggression. Between them they did for England’s top order – Dunkley was again the architect of her own demise, guiding a half-tracker into the hands of point; but Beaumont, Knight and Sciver-Brunt all got more or less unplayable deliveries.

The spinners then took over to run through the tail, with Deepti adding another 4 wickets to the 5fer she took in England’s first dig. It is interesting to consider what Deepti’s role is in this team. Is she a batter who bowls a bit? A bowler who contributes with the bat? She’s not a classic “genuine allrounder”, in the sense of someone who would get into the team on the strength of either role. She once made a big ODI century against Ireland, and took a 6fer against Sri Lanka back in 2016; but (ignoring “The Thing”) she is generally more of a player about whom the phrase “chipped in” might be written.

This then was probably the game of her life. After making a crucial half century in India’s first innings, which took them from “this is a decent score” to “only India can win from here”, she then exploited the red cherry, and a pitch she’ll want to carry round for the rest of her life, to make the ball dance around like a prima ballerina, getting the kind of turn that I’ve only ever seen before from the very best leg-spinners in the women’s game – Amelia Kerr and Sune Luus, before she lost her mojo.

England knew they had problems against spin – hence Jon Lewis’s “Spin Camp” earlier this year. But only one of the players on that camp actually played in this match – the disastrously-out-of-nick-anyway Sophia Dunkley – so much good it did!

To be fair to England though, this was a bit of a one-off – Deepti will probably never bowl like that again, and the batters at the spin camp were being prepped for the Asian World Cups to come in the next 18 months, not this Test match. The great rugby coach Clive Woodward once said: “Judge me on the World Cup”. I’d imagine Jon Lewis will be saying something very similar when he hands his report back to his bosses at the ECB. Clive Woodward went on  to win that World Cup. If Lewis goes on to do the same, all this will be forgotten. If not…

In the break between innings, TNT showcased a couple of the other sports on offer for the princely sum of £29.99 per month. We started with men’s netball (or “basketball” as I believe our American friends call it) before being treated to five minutes of Ultimate Fighting. At least… I think it was Absolute Fighting – it was someone getting the absolute pulp beaten out of them – so come to think of it, it might just have been a repeat of the last 20 overs of England’s first innings.

The day started well enough for England, with Ecclestone wrapping up the Indian tail, taking a catch off Lauren Bell to dismiss Deepti, before bagging the wickets of Renuka and Rajeshwari Gayakwad. The general consensus among the media and commentators seems to be that Ecclestone was poor yesterday, and Lauren Bell appeared to agree with this in the press conference, presumably indicating that Ecclestone herself  wasn’t happy either; and I agree she wasn’t at her best, but still… even if slightly off-song, where would England be without her?

As India had the previous day, England lost two early wickets. The first of these was exactly the one you predicted, but given that India are now a batter down (Satheesh Shubha has a broken finger) I think it evens things up generously that England also have someone in their top 3 who is unable to bat. Heather Knight joined She-Who-It-Is-Genuniely-Starting-To-Feel-Unfair-To-Name back in the dugout, but then Nat Sciver-Brunt and Tammy Beaumont looked to be digging in and things started to feel like they were getting back on track. Not “comfortable” entirely, but not dreadful.

I’m in two minds about the Beaumont run out. The editor of this site spoke for many:

And I sort-of get that, but… England needed to be positive, and there was a single there – TB is one of the sharpest runners in the game, and even though there was a critical moment of hesitation, she would still have made it if it wasn’t for an absolutely exceptional pick-up and throw from Pooja, swooping like an osprey on a juicy pike. It was the fielding equivalent of getting an unplayable delivery, and sometimes you just have to take that on the chin and say well played.

It did mean though the England were just one wicket away from turning a drama into a crisis, and inevitably with Wyatt’s wicket the game was probably up. Amy Jones lasted about as long as you’d expect. (Don’t believe me? Believe Alyssa Healy, who was caught on the stump mic at Trent Bridge saying something to the tune of: “Why does she always do this?”)

And then England’s long, long tail came home to roost, with Sophie Ecclestone coming in at 7. Ecclestone won’t thank me for saying it, but she is a tail-ender. A very handy tail-ender, but a tail-ender nonetheless, and once the ball started spinning, neither she nor anyone else had any answers. It was carnage, with more turns than the Monaco Grand Prix, as England collapsed so hard I had to make on-the-fly changes to my charting code!!

With England on the floor, and a second back-to-back Test match for India to play next week, surely they would enforce the follow-on and finish the job asap? But no! They seem to have decided ahead of time that they weren’t going to use the follow-on, so… they didn’t. Even in these exceptional circumstances, when they could have had the game done and dusted in two days.

Because, as subsequent events suggest, they almost certainly would have had England at least 6 or 7 down, which is where they themselves got to, as England’s spinners turned the tables in the afternoon. The 3 specialist seamers between them bowled just 8 overs, taking no wickets, whilst Ecclestone and Dean did the hard yards – 34 overs for 6 wickets, 4 of them to Dean, whose ability to be able to turn the ball (something (for all her brilliance) Ecclestone doesn’t usually do too much) meant that England could claim to have decisively won that afternoon.

There is, of course, absolutely no chance whatsoever of them winning the game.

But at least they won the afternoon on Day 2.

And Lauren Bell remains undismissed in Test cricket.

I think they call that: taking the positives.

India took control of the Test against England in Navi Mumbai, with 4 batters making scores in the sixties on Day 1 taking them to 410-7 at the close.

England went into the game with a seam-heavy attack, selecting 3 specialist pacers in Kate Cross, Lauren Bell and Lauren Filer, plus Nat Sciver-Brunt; and just 2 spinners in Sophie Ecclestone and Charlie Dean, with Alice Capsey left on the bench, and no other serious spin options. (Knight isn’t going to bowl herself for more than a handful of overs, and Sophia Dunkley isn’t a serious option, though she might send down a couple of overs if England get desperate.)

To justify these selections the seamers needed to take wickets, and they did get two early breakthroughs with the new ball inside the first ten overs, but it was mostly hard labour for them thereafter, though a magic ball from Lauren Bell – probably the best ball she has bowled for England – added the wicket of Jemimah; and a tired shot from Sneh Rana saw her bowled by Nat Sciver. On the other side of the balance-sheet, the 3 specialist seamers conceded 212 runs between them, at a rate of 4.8, as the Indians cashed-in.

To be fair to the Seamers Union, Nat Sciver-Brunt was the exception, finishing the day as England’s most economical bowler, going for just 25 from 11 overs. She didn’t look particularly threatening, but whatever she was doing differently, it was obviously working!

Overall though… and stop me if you’ve heard this before… we seem to have put quite a lot of eggs in the basket marked “Seam” and then discovered that the spinners were far more effective. I guess it is difficult to disentangle the spinners from who the spinners actually are – Sophie Ecclestone is Sophie Ecclestone, and she’s Sophie Ecclestone for a reason; while Charlie Dean was almost as good, extracting genuine bounce and turn. Would Alice Capsey have done the  same? Possibly not, but it feels unlikely she would have done any worse than Filer, who didn’t take any wickets and was a run an over more expensive than anyone else, and she would also have significantly strengthened the batting.

UPDATE: The consensus seems to be (including from Ecclestone herself, if what Lauren Bell said in the press conference is to be believed) that she had an off-day. I agree that it wasn’t her best day, but she wasn’t terrible by any stretch. I guess it is all relative – an Ecclestone off-day is still a better day than 99% of anyone else!!

Anyways… let’s just hope India haven’t picked any spinners and we don’t have to bat last, eh?

To give them their due, the Indians played very, very well – positively, without being reckless – this wasn’t Jonball. Satheesh (69), Jemimah (68) and Yastika (66) were all selections you could argue with, but all justified themselves here. I guess all 3 will be kicking themselves that they didn’t push on past the 60s… there’s more to life than The Beatles and The Stones you know guys! Meanwhile Deepti also made it into the 60s, and remains not out overnight with the chance to push on tomorrow towards the 90s (Boyzone! Steps!) and beyond (Taylor awaits!).

The game really ought to be beyond England already – 400 is a lot of runs, and needless to say no one has ever lost a women’s Test having scored 400 (or for that matter, 300) runs in the 1st innings. But records are there to be broken, and India aren’t Australia, who England weren’t a million miles from overhauling after they scored 473 in their 1st dig at Trent Bridge last summer, so there is something to play for nonetheless. With no multi-format series to worry about, there are no excuses for playing for a draw – England’s batters need to go out there tomorrow, assuming the bowlers can wrap things up, and make hay the way India did today, and we’ll have a game on our hands.

By Andy Frombolton

Last week Will Macpherson broke the news in The Daily Telegraph about Project Darwin (the ECB’s plan for the women’s domestic game in 2025-29); the one-line summary being that counties will be invited to take over the running (and the partial funding) of the 8 regions from the ECB and rebrand them.

Project Darwin thus builds on the ECB’s 2019 Action Plan for Transforming Women’s and Girls’ Cricket which sought to develop an integrated pathway from club to country; core to which were 2 components: (i) raising standards in the girls’ County Age Group and (ii) the creation of eight senior regional teams along with their associated academies (Regional Development Centres, RDCs.)

Regarding that first goal, in reality, the elite tiers of the game have received virtually all the focus in the intervening years whilst County cricket has been starved of funds, competition and attention; surviving primarily through the determination, creativity and passion of some very committed individuals. Given this track record, the ECB’s vagueness about what will happen below Tier 1 and that, whatever form this takes, won’t be rolled out until a year later should sound alarm bells. ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’

Regarding the proposals for the 8 Tier 1 teams, reaction so far has been largely positive. And the proposals are backed by serious amounts of money. But some obvious questions arise:

1. What are the benefits vs the cost implications of being a Tier 1 county? And what will happen if no suitable bids are received for some of the regions?
2. What happens to the RDC Academies?
3. The new structure risks reducing ‘depth’ of player participation within the host counties as well as ‘breadth’ of representation from across the country. Does the ECB deem this a price worth paying?
4. A truly-integrated. holistic strategy would be rolled-out simultaneously. Why roll out Tier 1 and Tier 2 strategies in different years?

Surrey and Lancashire have already expressed an interest in hosting one of the regions and probable bidders for several others have been mooted.

But, what’s in it for any bidder? For the foreseeable future International cricket and The Hundred will constitute the main stage for women’s cricket – and the hosting of England women’s and Hundred games is independent of, and totally regardless of, whether a county is one of the eight Tier 1 women’s counties.

What then are the other reasons to bid? To demonstrate a commitment to equality? Of course – although the corollary position would be that any county which doesn’t bid isn’t committed to equality (which would be both simplistic and a grossly unfair characterisation).

In Will Macpherson’s scoop he stated that host counties will be required to assume responsibility for a significant share of the running costs – initially around 400k but rising to 1.1m by 2029 as salaries and associated costs rise. These are significant sums in themselves, but need to be considered in the context of the women’s county game’s ability to generate additional revenue in this timeframe.

Consider for instance the 3 obvious candidates for the ‘Western Storm’ franchise: Gloucester, Somerset and Glamorgan. Both Gloucestershire and Somerset have proved themselves to be superb advocates of the women’s game over many years. Yet, Gloucestershire lost 570k last year, Glamorgan lost 39k and Somerset made a surplus of just 399k. None look well placed to take on a further 400k of costs in 2025.

Similar challenges face a bidder for the ‘Sunrisers’ franchise. MCC might be keen, but they’re not a county and have no infrastructure so would need Middlesex to partner any bid and provide all the resources. Middlesex’s finances are similarly precarious and would therefore require MCC to underwrite all costs.

Just as importantly, at a practical level, Middlesex currently produce the fewest ‘home grown’ players of any RDC, meaning that the issues cited at point 2 would be particularly germane for them.

Objectively, Essex might be a more logical host than Middlesex given its really strong support for girls and women’s cricket and also in terms of broadening the geographical spread of the Tier 1 counties, but it lost 32k last year which renders a bid unlikely.

What then happens if no county bids for e.g. the ‘Western Storm’ franchise? No one could expect a club to take on costs it can’t cover. And no one is going to think less of any club which is ‘only’ a Tier 2 county – provided they do everything for women’s cricket that’s expected of a Tier 2 club.

Or what happens e.g., if the Welsh Government partnered with Glamorgan to produce a winning bid? The players of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Gloucester and Wiltshire would be excluded in any realistic sense from harbouring professional ambitions.

Based on the information in the public domain, what Project Darwin means for the RDC Academies is unclear. However, if the new Tier 1 counties are to assume responsibility for everything the regions currently do, then this must comprise not just the senior women’s teams but also the associated talent pathways which feed into the senior squads (i.e., the 8 RDCs and the 23 Emerging Player Programmes, EPPs).

A review of the 2023/24 intake for each of the RDCs shows how well represented the non-host partner counties are (a dramatic change from a few years ago).

• Blaze: Derby (2); Essex (1); Leicester (4); Lincs (1); Notts (5); Staffordshire (1)
• Central Sparks: Staffordshire (5); Shropshire (2); Worcester (2); Wales (1)
• Northern Diamonds: Yorkshire (8); Northumbria (4); Durham (3)
• South East Stars: Kent (5); Surrey (9)
• Southern Vipers: Berkshire (3); Hants (5); Kent (1); Oxford (1); Sussex (2)
• Sunrisers: Cambridge (1); Essex (5); Hertfordshire (2); Kent (1); Middlesex (4); Norfolk (2)
• Thunder: Cheshire (3); Cumbria (1): Lancashire (11).
• Western Storm: Devon (2): Exeter (1); Gloucester (5); Somerset (3); Wales (1); Wilts (3)

So, what is proposed to replace the RDCs under Project Darwin? County Under 19 teams? County U21 teams? This won’t work since, as these figures clearly show, no county has enough indigenous talent to organically underpin its senior women’s team.

Hence Tier 1 counties will still need to draw upon talent from adjoining counties – meaning they would need to: (1) continue to fund and support EPPs in contingent counties to identify and nurture the best regional talent; and (2) create replacements for the inter-RDC matches and tournaments to allow each Tier 1 county’s best non-contracted players plus affiliated EPP players play against similar squads from other Tier 1 counties.

For the majority of players across the country playing for their County is the pinnacle of their ambitions (whether capped by ability or other factors) and such a goal should be attainable wherever a player lives.

Currently, this is the case even when your county is also a regional host i.e., a player can play for Hampshire without being in the Southern Vipers squad or for Middlesex without being a Sunriser. (Although the distinction between regional squads and county teams is somewhat blurred at some counties.).

However, with the abolition of the regions if a county becomes a Tier 1 county this bifurcation will end. Suddenly there’ll be no place for the non-professional – however talented – at Tier 1 counties meaning players who don’t seek or don’t have the skills to be professional player will have only 2 choices: play for an adjacent Tier 2 county (if that’s viable) or accept that the highest standard they can play at will be premier league cricket.

This is unfair and discriminates against a Tier 1 county’s entire non-professional pool. In addition, it means that there’d be no structure to nurture a Tier 1 county’s late developing talent – after CAG U17, any player not in the county squad would have no support and hence no chance to improve.

I’ve written several times before about the folly of effectively closing the women’s talent pool at such a young age when evidence from the men’s game suggests there is barely no correlation between performance at age 19 and long-term success. (No one has yet countered with any argument why the women’s game would be different if similar support existed for late developers.)

This proposal risks significantly reducing the breadth of the talent pool by (i) the abandonment of the RDC level and (ii) the proposal that all other counties play Tier 2 cricket. A primary argument for the creation of the regions was that the standard of county cricket was too low. What chance has a talented cricketer in e.g., Cornwall or Cumbria of a professional career if the nearest host county is 2 hours’ drive away, their local coaching is limited to whatever a Tier 2 county can provide, who plays in matches against other Tier 2 sides (meaning no coach or scout from Tier 1 will ever see them play and any reports of good performances will invariably be dismissed as having ‘only’ been made at Tier 2)?

And even this pessimistic scenario requires that the ECB shows considerably more interest (and puts money) in the game beneath the professional level than they’ve done since the creation of the regional structure.

Finally, a staggered roll-out of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 structures suggests that the ECB hasn’t solidified its plans re the future structure of the Tier 2 game (other than issuing some ‘holding’ language that it will act as a level between the recreational game and Tier 1). What, like the counties were expected to do under the current regional set up? Can we expect another begrudgingly-endorsed regional county T20 tournament running the whole month of May? This would not be good enough.

I don’t propose to have all the answers, but here are a few suggestions to start the ball rolling.

1. All Tier 1 counties should be obliged to fund, support and deliver EPPs in a designated number of contingent partner Tier 2 counties. This will ensure that talent isn’t squandered simply because a promising player happens to live in a non-host county.
2. Tier 1 host counties should be required to fund and support a separate, entirely non-professional ‘A’ team (playing under the same county name) which would compete in Tier 2 competitions. This would ensure that all amateur players have the same opportunity to play for their county if their county is a Tier 1 county. Players on EPPs who haven’t secured regional contracts could play in the A team – which would be the next highest level of competition beneath Tier 1 in the absence of RDC games. This would help raise the standard of Tier 2 games and provide a stage on which Tier 2 players could showcase their skills – with the realistic expectation that good performances would be noted by Tier 1 coaches and talent scouts.
3. The ECB needs to launch properly-funded T20 and 50 over competitions for Tier 2 counties (and Tier 1 ‘A’ teams) which run the whole season and culminate in proper quarter-, semis and national finals.
4. Implementation of the new Tier 1 and Tier 2 structure should be on the same year.

Let’s be honest, this hasn’t been a T20 series either team will look back on with fondness. Following what Syd described in this week’s The CRICKETher Weekly as “the least entertaining T20 ever where 350 runs were scored”, England then almost stuffed up what should have been an easy chase in the second match on Saturday – after India were, embarrassingly, scuttled for 80.

Finally, on Sunday, England were bowled out for 126, in an innings which featured no less than four golden ducks (Maia Bouchier, Dani Gibson, Freya Kemp and Mahika Gaur).

Poor old Bouchier. Her chances to open the batting haven’t exactly come thick and fast for England. Then, when she finally DOES get to do the job, she has to face an on-fire Renuka Singh, who sent down a beauty of a ball which moved off the pitch and snuck through the gate. It shouldn’t count against Bouchier – you can’t do much about a ball like that – but you just sense that a good little innings here would have at least put her in contention as a possible Test opener (now that Emma Lamb is, sadly, back on the plane).

By contrast, it was another dismal effort from Sophia Dunkley, who looked like she was trying to rehearse getting out to Renuka with a huge swing-and-a-miss outside off stump which then turned into a swing-and-a-hit – straight to point. Jon Lewis might want to rethink that second career as an inspirational speaker; because whatever he said to her at his Emergency Bootcamp, it doesn’t seem to have done the trick.

England did eventually post a respectable total of 126, thanks to a 50 partnership off 34 balls between Heather Knight and Charlie Dean for the 9th wicket: the death-phase was by far the most productive of the innings.

There are two schools of thought about Knight’s innings (52 off 42). One is that she showed her younger teammates the “sensible” way to play on this pitch, taking the time to play herself in, before slamming two sixes down the ground in the final over to eventually finish on a healthy strike rate of 124.

The other is that by batting at well below a 100 SR between overs 6 and 18, Knight actually created a situation whereby the younger batters coming in below her felt backed into a corner: they needed to go at a million miles an hour from ball one, partly to complement and partly to counteract Knight’s slower style of play. That’s why you get Gibson exposing her stumps first ball, Bess Heath whipping out the reverse sweep, and Kemp cutting a ball which wasn’t there to be cut.

Sorry, Trev, but I’m afraid I tend towards the latter position.

Either way, it’s hard not to hold Knight partly responsible for being happy to encourage a philosophy (Jon-ball) in which reckless batting is, seemingly, valued above sensible batting. Four golden ducks don’t happen by accident.

After their win in the first T20, a lot of journalists wrote that England had overcome the batting woes which had plagued them against Sri Lanka in September. I wasn’t convinced then; I’m even less convinced now.

And so, with a mere three days to switch mindset, it’s onto the Test match – not the best timing for England. There’s been a lot of talk about it only being four days, instead of the five we enjoyed in the Ashes in June. But if England (and India) carry on batting like they have done over the last few days, it could easily be over in three.

This week:

• English domestic restructure: is it joy to the world?
• England contracts for Bouchier & Gibson, but disappointment for Davies
• England beat India in the 1st T20, but how convinced were we?