Anya Shrubsole has been ruled-out of the first two ODIs in England’s 5-match series versus West Indies. The fast bowler sustained a side-strain during yesterday’s warm-up match against Jamaica.

The news presents something of a problem for England because their back-up quick, Beth Langston, is also out of the first couple of matches, as she completes recovery from a broken finger; so it seems likely England will be taking an extra spinner onto the park tomorrow, though of course they do have all-rounders Nat Sciver and Georgia Elwiss to offer some additional seam options for captain Heather Knight.

The 1st ODI starts tomorrow (Saturday) at 3:30pm UK time.

The ECB have announced that a 50-over Kia Super League, which was expected to take place next summer alongside the T20 competition, will NOT now go ahead in 2017.

The ECB statement we have received states that:

“As we start to map out the 2017 schedule ahead of the ICC Women’s World Cup, we also firmly believe that we must factor in sufficient time for the women’s county 50-over competition and for club cricket.”

The decision has been reached as part of the ongoing review of the inaugural T20 competition, in which the ECB is talking to the six hosts as well as players and partners.

CRICKETher understands that there had been some significant disquiet amongst the counties, who feared that a 50-over Super League would leave the Women’s County Championship unviable due to limited player availability and scheduling constraints.

The 2017 season already looks to be congested, with the World Cup due to take place in July, and it was unclear how a 50-over KSL competition could be fitted in around existing domestic commitments. One proposal, to hold a 50-over KSL in May, would have led to severe shortage of players, given that many have work / educational commitments during that period.

It is as yet unclear whether a 50-over KSL will go ahead in 2018.

England arrive in the Caribbean this weekend for a 5-match ODI series against the West Indies, beginning on October 8th at Trelawny Stadium in Jamaica.

The last 3 games are the “Championship” matches – the ones which count towards qualification for next summer’s World Cup – and if England win all 3, they will seal qualification for 2017*, regardless of how things go in their final matches versus Sri Lanka, who look like a walking 6 points right now, having just been ground to mincemeat by Australia.

England have a squad of 15, and looking at a possible starting XI, most of the options would appear to be amongst the bowlers:

1. Winfield
2. Beaumont
3. Elwiss/ Wyatt
4. Sciver
5. Knight
6. Jones
7. Brunt
8. Shrubsole
9. Marsh/ Hazell
10. Gunn/ Langston
11. Hartley/ Ecclestone

At the top of the order, Winfield and Beaumont are the first on the team-sheet after their golden summer; but both still have something to prove – making runs against Pakistan at home is one thing, but they still need to show they can do it against the top teams in less friendly conditions; and if they fail, the same old questions will be back again, make no mistake.

Elwiss came in at first-drop in all the Pakistan ODIs this summer, so you’d imagine she will do the same in the first ODI here; but coach Mark Robinson might then use the 2nd ODI to give Wyatt an opportunity higher up the order, especially after having seen her make a patient century on the last day of the County Championship season for Sussex against Surrey.

With Knight having decided that she feels more comfortable generally coming in a bit further down, Nat Sciver will be up next – she was obviously explosive against Pakistan, and she had a good Super League too; but having treated even the ODIs this summer as T20-style “boshes”, she needs to show she can change her game up a bit when required in the ODI format against tougher opponents.

Moving into the bowling, barring injury, both Brunt and Shrubsole are of course automatic selections; and England will be really hoping that injuries don’t rear-up early on, because Beth Langston won’t be available until the “second half” of the tour, as she completes her rehabilitation from a broken finger.

Finally turning to the spinners, under Mark Robinson it looks like England want to try to take the field with a left-right-arm combination available, so the lefties – Alex Hartley and Sophie Ecclestone – will probably interchange throughout the series, unless one of them does something spectacular (either spectacularly good or to be fair, spectacularly bad) to change that.

The right-armers present more of a dilemma perhaps – Robinson has clearly become an effusive fan of Laura Marsh, since her surprise recall flying into the World T20 after Dani Hazell got injured; and Marsh played all the ODIs against Pakistan at Hazell’s expense, with Hazell only coming back for the T20s. But there are no T20s here, and Robinson will be reluctant to leave Hazell totally out in the cold, not least because he’ll need her if injury-prone Marsh has any recurrence of her on-going shoulder problems.

One thing is certain – the West Indies won’t roll-over like Pakistan did. These will be tough, hard-fought matches against the World T20 Champions, who currently sit in 2nd place in the Women’s International Championship – just above England in 3rd. England could play really well and still lose the series and a final 2-3 scoreline would be no surprise.

The only scenario England have to be very careful of is losing all 3 Championship matches, which would mean they really couldn’t afford to slip-up against Sri Lanka – the pressure would be on then; but that is a bridge they’d have to cross if and when they came to it.

In the meantime, our job as fans is to sit back and hopefully enjoy some fantastic cricket, and with live-streams promised by the West Indies Cricket Board of all 5 games, we are looking forward to doing just that!

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* The table isn’t as close as it looks because West Indies and India, and South Africa and New Zealand, have yet to play each other, so one of each have to drop points and won’t therefore be able to catch England.

Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate * Wickets / Economy – Min 100 Runs + 5 Wickets

This year’s Division 1 50-Over County Championship all-rounder rankings are dominated by the big international stars.

At No.1, England captain Heather Knight was once again a rock for Berkshire, with her two best performances both coming in losing causes – 92 with the bat against Warwickshire and 3-16 with the ball versus Kent.

Meanwhile, at No. 2, Knight’s New Zealand counterpart, Suzie Bates, stepped onto the English summer scene with a crash, a bang and (dare we say?) a wallop – her 206 runs and 9 wickets were a big part of why Kent won the County Championship; and she has certainly set down a marker for next year’s World Cup, as she flies home with all 3 domestic trophies in her kit bag!

Georgia Elwiss, stepping up to the Sussex captaincy in Sarah Taylor’s absence, makes the list at No. 3 after a very consistent season – she’ll remember the game against Somerset at Bath in particular, where she took 6 wickets as the hosts were knocked-over for just 126, and then hit 45 opening the batting as Sussex chased them down in under 30 overs.

Only one non-international player met the all-rounder qualifying criteria of 100 runs plus 5 wickets – Yorkshire’s opening batsman Hollie Armitage. Armitage is only really a part-time all-rounder at best – she bowled less than 20 overs across the season – but the numbers say what the numbers say (!) and so Armitage makes the list, with a best batting performance of 70 against Staffs, and a best bowling of 4-17 in just 4 overs, cleaning up the tail against Berkshire.

Ranking = Wickets / Economy

The star of this year’s Division 1 50-Over County Championship bowling rankings is Kent’s 18-year-old off-spinner Megan Belt, with 16 wickets at a fantastic economy rate of just 2.63. If you were following the Kia Super League you might remember Belt from… oh… no… hang on… amazingly she wasn’t selected for Super League – so if there aren’t six KSL coaches out there right now, kicking themselves sharply in the shins… then they jolly well should be!

There is actually a serious point here – the KSL teams undeniably gravitated towards “local” players – you were more likely to get picked for Surrey Stars if you were a Surrey player, more likely to get picked for Lancashire Thunder if you were a Lancashire player, etc. etc.; and whilst this is understandable, it did means some very good players like Belt missed-out when on pure merit they probably really deserved to get a game.

Anyway… Belt’s response has certainly been the right one – she has made the best case she can for inclusion next season, and if someone doesn’t snap her up, they won’t be kicking themselves… we’ll be doing it for them!

Meanwhile at No. 6, Middlesex’s overseas pace-bowler, New Zealander Holly Huddleston, is another who has her eye on next season… but in her case it is the 2017 World Cup that is the prize. Huddleston, who from the boundary looked like the quickest bowler we saw in the County Championship this year, played a handful of internationals in 2014/15 but was unable to establish herself in the side, and wasn’t selected for the World T20s; but her performances at 50-over in England seem to have been instrumental in earning her a recall to the White Fens squad just in time for the run-up to 2017.

Finally at No. 16, someone we sadly won’t be seeing next year is Amanda “Steamer” Potgieter, who is off to start a new life in New Zealand. In 14 years which brought her to Berkshire via Hampshire and Surrey, she has been a stalwart with both bat and ball, all whilst juggling a full time career in the armed forces; and she’ll be much-missed not just on the field, but as part of the wider women’s cricket community – we wish her well!

Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate

This year’s Division 1 50-Over County Championship batting rankings are headed-up by Danni Wyatt, in her first season at Sussex after signing from Notts. Wyatt helped her cause considerably with a near-run-a-ball hundred against Surrey on the last day of the season – one of only two centuries scored in Division 1 this term – the other being Eve Jones’ 110, also against Surrey.

Surrey’s Kirstie White ended the season as the County Championship’s highest run-scorer with 337 runs, including 3 fifties at an average of 48; but a relatively sedate Strike Rate of 54 pushed her down the rankings to No. 6.

A couple of younger players on the way up are Surrey’s Bryony Smith at No. 9, who also had a good Kia Super League, and Berkshire glove-butler Carla Rudd in at No. 11 – finally starting to fulfil the promise that she showed as a junior with the bat.

But this doesn’t mean the old-timers are done yet, with Kent’s ex-England duo of Charlotte Edwards and Lydia Greenway at Nos. 10 and 13 respectively; and Middlesex veteran Beth Morgan also making the top 20.

The West Indies Cricket Board has become the latest to offer significantly improved central contracts to its women’s team, which like the New Zealand contracts announced earlier this year, will lift many of the squad into the realms of full professionalism for the first time.

The number of contracted players increases from 11 to 15; and although the WICB have not released details of the salaries to be paid, CRICKETher understands that the average remuneration including match fees etc. is likely to be in the realms of $30-40,000 (USD). Adjusted for cost-of-living, this represents something like £35,000 – not a king’s ransom, but a good living wage nonetheless.

Interestingly, the president of the Players Association which negotiated these contracts with the board, Wavell Hinds, cited not the recent WWT20 win, but consistency over a number of years, saying:

“Our women senior team has been a solid elite performing group over the last decade. As such, the improvement and security in their compensation package is well deserved.”

This is an important point – as Raf Nicholson argued in her CricInfo Cordon column last year, tying the contracts to particular successes merely creates a hostage to fortune when those successes inevitably pass into history.

The ECB have announced the squad for England’s 5-match ODI series in the West Indies, which begins in Jamaica on October 8th. The final 3 ODIs count towards the Women’s International Championship, in which England currently stand 3rd on 19 points, right behind the West Indies in 2nd with 20 points.

There is disappointment for Western Storm’s Fran Wilson, who has been ruled out of the tour with a broken finger; but one player’s misfortune is another’s lucky break and the beneficiary on this occasion would appear to be Danni Wyatt, who didn’t have a great KSL, but finished the County Championship strongly with a century in front of the England coach at Hove last weekend.

Meanwhile there is good news for Loughborough Lightning’s Beth Langston, who was expected to miss the tour also with a broken finger, but who has nevertheless been in full training with the ball (the break was on her “wrong” (left) hand) and is selected in the hope that she will now be fully fit for the later matches.

Also include are both the “new” left-arm spinners who made their international debuts this summer – Alex Hartley and Sophie Ecclestone.

Full Squad:

• Heather Knight
• Anya Shrubsole
• Tammy Beaumont
• Katherine Brunt
• Sophie Ecclestone
• Georgia Elwiss
• Jenny Gunn
• Alex Hartley
• Dani Hazell
• Amy Jones
• Beth Langston
• Laura Marsh
• Nat Sciver
• Lauren Winfield
• Danni Wyatt

In any team sport (and even in some nominally individual sports, like athletics) the concept of the team as a bonded unit is very important. You play for the team; you work for the team; you win for the team. Ask any player and they will tell you: it is the team – and being part of the team – that really matters!

And yet in the modern era of multiple teams, this presents a dilemma – on Super League Finals Day, Charlotte Edwards was team-mates with Carla Rudd… two weeks later they were facing off against each other in the County Championship, respectively for Kent and Berkshire. In the next few months, she will likely find herself playing against other Vipers team-mates in Australia’s WNCL and WBBL… but then next summer they will be Vipers together once more!

So what do you do with those little pieces of knowledge – the flaw in technique you know the player has been working on in the nets… the slower delivery you’ve overheard the coach discussing? Do you exploit that knowledge against someone who might be your team-mate again in six months time… or do you keep the secret?

It is a dilemma which India’s Smriti Mandhana alluded to in a recent interview with Cricbuzz, discussing the possibility of playing against national team-mate Harmanpreet Kaur in the WBBL, making it pretty clear where she stands:

“I don’t think we’re giving each other’s secrets away!”

Contrast this with the attitude of New Zealand’s Sophie Devine, who spoke to us in the run-up to KSL:

“I don’t care that Georgia [Elwiss] plays for England and I play for New Zealand – for me that goes out the window and it’s just about playing cricket. And if we can help each other get better and if we can help the county players get better, then surely that’s going to be better for the women’s game in general.”

Maybe Devine’s perspective is simply reflective of the reality that, in an age of video analysis, there can’t really be secrets any more… at least not ones that last for more than 5 minutes out in the middle?

But it is also interesting to consider that this more open mindset comes from a New Zealander – the country that, more than any other, seems to be encouraging its stars to embrace the world of the modern, globetrotting, supranational cricketer.

And then you ask yourself: which team are on the up right now, increasingly at the top of many people’s lists of favourites for the World Cup in England next year?

New Zealand, of course!

Coincidence? Perhaps!

Or perhaps not!