The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said that “Hope is a waking dream” and so it proved for England, as their Ashes hopes were raised by a brilliant bowling performance, before being dashed once again with the realisation that when it comes to batting, England Gonna England.
The Junction Oval, in Melbourne’s beautiful bohemian beach-side suburb of St Kilda, has been a bit of a first innings graveyard of late. Since New Zealand struck 231-8 here in March 2019, no side has made it to 50 overs in the 4 subsequent completed ODIs; yet Australia looked well set to tally-up a decent total at 131-2 nearing the half-way mark.
Then Sophie Ecclestone removed Beth Mooney in the 23rd over; and that seemed to prompt Heather Knight to make a game-changing decision – bringing Alice Capsey on to bowl for the first time in the series, in the 24th over.
Capsey has been in pretty woeful nick with the bat, but she had a decent WBBL with the ball, taking 13 wickets in the 8 games she played before jetting off to South Africa with England – could she bring something here? The answer soon looked clear, as she dropped new batter Sutherland off her first delivery. Sutherland then added insult to injury by smashing Capsey back over her head for six off the final ball of the over.
It must have been touch and go whether Capsey would get another over, but Knight tossed her the ball once more, and this time Capsey got her revenge. Sutherland came down the pitch; Capsey adjusted and pushed it wide, looking for the stumping. Knowing she was gone if the ball went past her, Sutherland stretched for the shot and mistimed it straight to Knight at cover.
Another Capsey over followed, and another wicket – that of Ellyse Perry, given out LBW on review after the umpire initially shook her head. Perry had been looking in dangerous form – she was on 60, with a hundred beckoning – but Capsey had a ball with her name on it, and she was back in the pavillion with Australia starting to wobble on 149-5; which became 150-6 as… who else… Alice Capsey bowled Ash Gardner for just 2.
England were up and running in this Ashes as Sophie Ecclestone took another couple to bowl Australia out for just 180 – their lowest 1st innings total in a 50-over game in the professional era. If England couldn’t win this one, you had to ask, when could they win?
It’s not unknown for England to shoot themselves in the foot, but this time they shot themselves full in the face – batting so slowly that they wouldn’t have won the match even if they’d had another 10 wickets in hand.
Australia tried their best to make it an even contest at the end. Annabel Sutherland, bowling the 48th over, dropped Amy Jones, then gifted her two head-height no-balls, meaning she had to be removed from the attack leaving Tahlia McGrath to bowl the final ball of the over. Having declined the opportunity of a run off the first free hit to protect No. 11 Lauren Bell, Jones scooped the second free hit to deep square and yet again declined the run, apparently having forgotten it was the final ball of the over. This left Bell to face Megan Schutt from the other end, who promptly bowled her to finish the game with England 22 runs short of victory.
The blame shouldn’t lie entirely with Amy Jones, but it does feel like she got it into her head that all England needed to do was bat it out, and they’d win the game, and was then totally unable to shift that mindset when it stopped being true. It is all very well declining single after single to protect your two No. 11s (yes… this England side goes up to 11 twice, with Laurens Bell and Filer in the lineup!) but once you get to the point where you need 6 an over, you can’t really afford to do that any more because it is going to leave you short even if you make it to 50 overs.
Some credit must go to Alana King who bowled with brilliant aggression; but even with King, England were the architects of their own downfall. Danni Wyatt presumably thought she’d picked a wrong-un from King, and had to watch in horror as a conventional leg-break spun back onto her off stump; whilst Charlie Dean decided this was the time to try an audacious ramp – brilliantly anticipated by Beth Mooney, who left her position at slip to get herself behind the keeper (as she is entitled to do in response to the stroke that the batter’s movements suggest she intends to play) to make the catch.
And so all that good work done by England’s bowlers was undone by yet another half-cut performance with the bat. An Ashes series which could have been levelled 2-2 is now 4-0 to Australia, with just a couple of days before we go again for the 3rd ODI in Hobart. England could make changes – Sophia Dunkley and Dani Gibson both travelled to Melbourne, so will presumably be available in Tasmania, and Kate Cross apparently isn’t totally ruled out of the last ODI; but it feels like we are very-much in “moving deckchairs on the Titanic” territory here.
Aristotle once also said: “Excellence is never an accident.” It isn’t. And nor is mediocrity.
If there’s a better place in the world to watch live cricket than North Sydney Oval, I’ve not been there. With its compact nature and delightful “Olde Worlde” feel, provided by its green-painted tin-roofed stands which were partly imported from the SCG when that was rebuilt in the 80s, it somehow draws you into the action in a way that the bigger first-class grounds never do. If a cricket ground can have “soul”, then North Sydney Oval has it like Otis Redding, sittin’ on the dock of the Sydney bay.
Over 6,200 Sydneysiders turned out to enjoy it on a beautiful summer Sunday, and were rewarded with a home win in the first match of the 2025 Women’s Ashes, with Alyssa Healy making her first “score” of the Aussie season – 70 off 78 balls – to put the hosts 2-0 up in the series.
It hasn’t been the easiest few months for the Australian skipper, and had she not been captain her place in the XI would almost certainly have been at real risk with the recent form of Georgia Voll, who in just 3 appearances this antipodean summer has scored more international 100s than Alice Capsey has in almost 3 years since her debut.
Prior to today, Healy’s 9 matches this summer in the green and gold had seen her pass 30 several times, but no further. With two different injuries nagging at her knee and foot, we wondered who she needed more – her coach or her doctor? But all those worries evaporated today into the hazy blue New South Wales sky, as Healy turned on the class when it really mattered. Having kept wicket energetically, she then batted with an authority that made a mockery of any suggestion that her 34 years were starting to take their toll.
Coming into this match, England insisted they were in brilliant form after their success in South Africa – that tour wasn’t officially a multi-format points series, but if it had been, England would have won it 14-2. Those of us who raised question marks at the beginning of that tour were beginning to feel like killjoys by the end, but the result here suggests that we may actually have had a point.
Australia were not at their brilliant best; but against them England nonetheless looked very, very mediocre at times – those times being mainly between 10:30am and 4:30pm. Outside of those times, there were some positives – England joined arms to belt out the national anthem prior to play; whilst later on Heather Knight and Lauren Bell performed their post-match media duties with customary aplomb.
But in terms of the actual cricket, it didn’t go quite so well. Lauren Bell sending down 9 overs for 25 runs – an Economy Rate of 2.8, by far her best in ODIs – was probably the best of it; but she couldn’t make it count in the wickets column, which is what England really needed having been bowled out for only just north of 200.
A typical first innings score in meetings between the top 5 sides since 2020 is 264; and on a pitch which looked decent (if slightly sweaty, after a night under the covers) 280 felt more like par going in. Australia’s run rate would have put them at around 260/270, even though they took their foot off the gas at times, which obviously they had the luxury of doing, chasing the target they were chasing.
The bottom line: 204 was not nearly enough. England sold their wickets far too cheaply, with Heather Knight and Nat Sciver-Brunt particularly standing out in the “What Were They Thinking” stakes. My advice? If you want to be out on the pull in Sydney, try Kings Cross on a Saturday night, not North Sydney Oval on a Sunday morning.
Both captains made a lot in the press conferences yesterday of getting those first points on the board; of getting momentum in what is a punishingly quick series – tomorrow, we take the first of 6 internal flights to play 7 games (including a 4-day Test) in 22 days. And it is Australia who now have those first points and that momentum. All is not lost for England by any means – there are still 14 points to play for. But they are going to have to bat a lot, lot better if the final scoreline isn’t going to look much more like that South Africa series than the last, tied Women’s Ashes in England in 2023.
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 1st 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.
CRICKETher 