By Andy Frombolton

How often have you gone back to a restaurant where you had a bad meal? Or watched the second episode of a TV series if you didn’t enjoy the first one? The brutal fact is that you only get one chance to make a first impression and the key to attracting (and thereafter retaining) new customers is to prioritise quality control over everything else.

Hence the biggest threat to the growth of women’s cricket is if the initial experiences of potential fans are underwhelming. 

This is not to ignore nor belittle the huge positives of the past 5 years: significant investment; greatly improved media coverage; and rapidly-rising standards. All helped by a tailwind of goodwill and a collective desire to address historic and systemic inequities.

But at some point, all products must be able to stand on their own two feet. No sport has an innate right to exist, or to be supported, or for its participants to be remunerated. Reward ultimately must be linked to popularity and the willingness of followers and advertisers to pay for access. 

However, shielded from the commercial realities of having to ensure earned revenue exceeds costs, this simple truth is ignored by those running English women’s cricket whose preference is for catchy headlines and good optics. In the short term, it’s easy to proclaim every new initiative as Success or Progress. But that’s not the same as developing a sustainable, high-quality product.

1. Let’s start at the top – the national team. They’re a good team – but not nearly as good as they should be for all the money and resource spent in the last few years.

Looking first at the batting, the only new talent to have emerged in the past 5 years who has consistently delivered is Bouchier. Dunkley is reminiscent of Hick in the men’s game – too good for county cricket but possessed of a flawed technique and whose fielding and (abandoned) bowling aren’t good enough at international level. Capsey appears to have been similarly exposed. In the keeping department, next-off-the-rank Heath has been given virtually no chances to demonstrate that she could step up to the role and hence we remain one broken finger away from having to deploy a ‘stopper’ who can bat or a keeper who can’t bat. With respect to bowling talent England have good first-choice reserves but there’s still something wrong with the set-up when the selectors deem four 18-year-olds (Kemp, Gaur, Baker and MacDonald-Gay) to be better than anyone produced by the regional system in the past 6 years.    

There is however a much bigger problem than how good the England team is – and that’s how bad most of the international opposition is. With the exception of Australia and India, the rest are no better than a typical regional/Tier 1 team and consequently many international games are terrible mismatches. That England additionally so often choose to bowl first against weak opponents (thereby denying fans the chance of at least seeing a good batting display before our bowling attack invariably works its way through the opposition) shows a complete disregard for the spectator experience. Which brings us back to ‘quality control’. 

If we want better opposition (and hence a better showpiece product), it’s clear that England (and Australia) need to think far more holistically. The ECB should run (and pay for) a scheme under which 10-15 players from each of the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka play a full season of cricket in England. The top talent should be assigned to Tier 1 counties with the rest spread across Tier 2 and 3 counties and also matched with a local club which is suitably incentivised to provide them with regular mid-week and weekend matches in (“men’s”) leagues and ideally women’s premier league games too. 

The cost? With vision and creativity, this shouldn’t cost more than £20,000 per player – or £1.5m (or, put another way, roughly the ECB’s payment for one Tier 1 team). Ideally, the benefitting countries would be required to provide a reciprocal scheme for the best English players (providing a far better skills and life experience than a cosy few months in New Zealand which seems to be the preferred route for so many).

2. England squad size. (N.B. I’d be the first to agree that there’s an excess of England men central contracts – but (i) that doesn’t make it right, and (ii) they might argue that they generate the funds thus wasted.) 

Central contracts are partly designed to ensure that players don’t play too much cricket. And in the men’s game, they are also essential to bind top players to England which is integral to maintaining the value of tv broadcasting rights and high ticket prices. 

But female contracted players play far fewer days of international cricket* and also far fewer non-international matches. Nor is an alternative career playing in various T20 and T10 leagues around the world viable.

[*Between Nov 1 2023 and Oct 31 2024 (the period covering the last women’s central contracts), the England men’s and women’s team played roughly the same number of T20s (17 men, 20 women) and ODIs (10, 9), but the men played 14 Tests compared to 1 for the women.]

Consider the total number of games played by 3 representative non-Test players from each squad during this period:

	ODI	T20i	FC/List A	T20/100
Bouchier	9	17	3	22
Capsey	7	16	0	29
Glenn	3	16	2	14
Salt	9	17	0	35
Livingstone	10	17	0	31
Ali	3	14	0	50

(As another comparator, James Vince played 13 county matches and 52 T20 matches in this period.)

So, neither the argument that you need to protect (most) female players from playing too much cricket nor that it’s essential that they are contractually bound to England holds for the women’s game.

This is not – before anyone gets too agitated – an argument for a smaller total pay pot for the women. My proposal is that there should be very few central contracts and that the money saved should be re-allocated to pay higher match fees.

3. Women cricketers need to play far more games.

This may sound curmudgeonly, but we shouldn’t be celebrating when an 18-year-old gets an international cap. The fact that someone who’s probably played less than 100 games in her life can seamlessly segue onto the international stage is ridiculous (genuine teenage sensations excepted). Not only does it reiterate the argument at point (1), but it’s a terrible indictment on the domestic set-up that after 5 years of professionalism there’s such a dearth of competition from players in their mid-20s. 

There seems to be a belief that natural talent + youthful exuberance is enough. But even a brief study of the stats tables (particularly the batting tables) shows the domination of older players. Why? Because skill and training can only take you so far. To dominate you also need match experience i.e. exposure to, and dealing with, numerous game situations. 

Adam Gilchrist, the Australian men’s keeper, came to England as a teenager and played 90 games in a season, returning home having vastly accelerated his development. Instead of every appearance being controlled by coaches and their game time limited (caps on overs for fast bowlers excepted), all female players, especially young players, need to play far more cricket.

And if you really want to get better you need to play against tough opponents. Most of the greats (Bates, Devine, Edwards, Greenway, Lanning) learnt their cricket playing “men’s” cricket. Fast bowlers bowl quicker, batters hit the ball harder, fielders stop more balls and throw faster. Modern Pathway players have far too little exposure to “men’s” cricket compared to their predecessors. This trend needs to be urgently reversed and participation encouraged.

4. Number of Tier 1 counties. As posited in a previous article most regional teams comprised too many ‘journeymen’ (the pool of pre-professional-era cricketers who were ‘known entities’) and academy graduates whose principal role was to make up the numbers. (Addressing one comment on that article – this is not to say those young players lack talent but TFCs are the inevitable consequence of playing in a team where paid professionals will expect to get the best opportunities.) 

And if there wasn’t enough talent to justify 80 professional contracts, then expanding the number of contracted players to 120 (or 130+ given Yorkshire’s advance recruitment) was obviously going to exasperate the gap between the teams with the best recruiting strategies and those with the worst. The trickle-feed squad announcements from the Tier 1 counties has confirmed this fear – from what we know (and, equally importantly, from the lack of announcements from some counties) it’s fairly clear that at least 3 of the Tier 1 teams are going to struggle to win many games. Quality control, anyone?

An honest assessment of the talent pool should have seen the ECB launch this new era with just 6 Tier 1 counties to ensure a more even spread of available talent which could still have been sold as a ‘positive’ (90 full-time professionals). 

But it’s obviously too late to reverse this decision, so the main lesson should be to not expand until it’s proven there’s enough talent to sustain more Tier 1 teams. “You can’t do that!” Why not? The ECB has repeatedly demonstrated that it doesn’t consider itself bound by the original Darwin tender document and hence should therefore be bold enough to reverse the pre-determined accession of Yorkshire and Glamorgan.

The ECB should then specify the conditions which would need to exist to warrant expanding the number of Tier 1 teams (in terms of spectator and tv numbers, sponsorship, advertising revenue, etc.) without predetermining the timescale. The number of Tier 1 teams should be dictated by demand, not by diktat. 

Will real-life match the enthusiastic projections about the growth of women’s sport? Will the women’s game nurture its own fans? Will most of the audience (as now) comprise fans of the men’s game (and, if so, what will happen when there are far more women’s games which thus compete for the limited time of these fans?) Can fans be converted to switch their primary allegiance to the woman’s game by different marketing, scheduling or pricing strategies?

It is surely far more sensible to expand in line with growing demand than grow too fast and risk having to cut the number of teams in the future if the predicted support doesn’t materialise?

And, regarding any future expansion of Tier 1, access must be on the basis of performance on the field, not a desire for geographic spread. If e.g. the south-east produces the next 2 teams to be elevated, the issue should be to understand how this success was achieved and seek to replicate it elsewhere, not to penalise best practice.

All Tier 1 teams should also run A teams comprising any professionals not playing Tier 1 cricket plus the best academy players. These teams should play against each other during the week but – see point 3 – also play in a “men’s” league at weekends. If they did, I’d predict most of the A team players would usurp the 1^st XI incumbents within 2 years.

5. Sub-Tier 1. Credit where it’s due. Here the ECB has basically got it right. There obviously has to be a pathway providing a smooth journey (both ‘up’ and ‘down’) from teenage county talent to professional. And the structure, together with the money going into – and the commensurate expectations of – the Tier 2 and Tier 3 counties appears well thought out.

Having only 6 Tier 1 counties would have permitted more money to go into this level where every pound spent benefits more players (Which is more likely to grow the talent pool and unearth the next England star? Betting on one full time professional or several semi-professionals?). Tier 1 expansion should not involve any decrease in Tier 2 or Tier 3 funding.

6. Finally, it’s not enough to create a pathway to professionalism. As more talent fights for a finite number of contracts there will be a commensurate increase in the number of players who either seek, but don’t reach, Tier 1 or whose tenure is short. Currently most of that talent, enthusiasm and investment is squandered (Challenge: Could any of the former Regional teams say what happened to all the players who passed through their academy but who didn’t win a regional contract in the past 5 years?)

Alongside a professional contract, all players should be encouraged to gain coaching or umpiring qualifications or offered further education opportunities which could take them into management, administration or data analysis. Better representation in these roles means that decisions about women’s cricket would increasingly be made by people who best understand it.