The 2025 Women’s Caribbean Premier League got underway on Saturday without Lauren Winfield-Hill – who was instead playing a key role captaining Yorkshire to victory against Middlesex in Sunday’s One-Day Cup semi-final.

Winfield-Hill had been named in the squad for the Guyana Amazon Warriors, but there was some confusion earlier this week when it was confirmed that she had been replaced by Ireland’s Amy Hunter.

Fans were unsure if Yorkshire had asked Winfield-Hill to miss the tournament or – given that they are her main employer – pulled rank once they reached the One-Day Cup semi-final.

However, in an interview with CRICKETher, Yorkshire coach Richard Pyrah clarified the situation, confirming that Winfield-Hill’s inclusion in the tournament had always been provisional.

“If we’d not got the result in the last game of the group stages, our season would be done, so that would have allowed her to go and play in the CPL,” he said.

“She put her name down just in case we didn’t get through – then she’d go out there. But she was always going to be available for us, however long we carried on for, which is now the final.”

He added that the decision to remain with the Yorkshire team for the semi-final and final was entirely Winfield-Hill’s call.

A century partnership between Grace Harris and Cordelia Griffith secured a win for London Spirit in the opening match of the 2025 Women’s Hundred at Lord’s.

This was the 10th partnership of 100+ in five years of the women’s competition (full list here) – and the first ever for London Spirit.

Despite a slightly quieter final 10 balls (2 wickets lost for 12 runs), the pair took Spirit to 175, which is well above a typical score in the Women’s Hundred, as shown by Syd’s “ghost”. To put it in context, last year’s highest total across the whole comp was 158.

Spirit’s total today was particularly impressive given that Georgia Redmayne – their Player of the Match in the 2024 final – departed for a duck, trapped leg-before after missing a straight one from Marizanne Kapp.

Grace Harris was her usual self, rollicking along to an unbeaten 89 from 42 balls. A week ago, she hit 63 not out as Surrey romped home in the final of the inaugural T20 Blast: this was if anything an even more imposing knock, which included back-to-back sixes against Sophia Smale.

Harris missed last year’s Hundred for Spirit as she was rehabbing from a calf injury, but had a particular reason for wanting to head back to England this time around. Her recent dominance on English pitches this season, across both the Blast and The Hundred, may prove to be strategically important as Australia ponder their squad selection for the 2026 World Cup (including a final on this very ground).

“I did think that I might not make the 2025 ODI World Cup team for Australia,” Harris told me recently. “So I thought in planning ahead it would be great to be able to play in England a little bit more and maybe better. To come over here and play in English conditions against a fair few England players and with England players is very much a good challenge and I’ll get better insights.

“I’m taking my international career one game at a time, but I’m looking to the future and thinking how I can get the best out of myself.”

Meanwhile Griffith, whose 50 from 29 balls is her highest ever score in The Hundred, matched Harris ball-for-ball until she was caught at long-off with 20 balls to go of the Spirit innings. “I felt in a groove there,” Cords said afterwards, describing batting with Grace Harris as “a nice laugh”. That’s an unusual compliment, but maybe having someone out in the middle who can bring a bit of light-heartedness to proceedings during a pressure game at Lord’s is no bad thing.

Someone who doesn’t do much laughing is Marizanne Kapp, whose 77-run partnership with Meg Lanning from 48 balls gave Invincibles hope in a mammoth run-chase. As Syd’s graph shows, the highest-grossing phase of the match for either side was actually Invincibles’ late-middle phase:

This was the point at which Lanning and Kapp were really taking off, as they strategically targeted the shorter boundaries on the Grand Stand side of the ground. “We didn’t talk numbers at all. It was literally about where our boundaries were, and what pockets we were going to target. It was pretty difficult with the slope and the wind and the bigger boundaries, you had to only hit to one side of the ground,” Lanning said afterwards.

But Invincibles had been too slow to get going – Lanning started with 12* off 17 – and it was that slow start which cost them this opening match of the 2025 Women’s Hundred. A lesson, perhaps, as they look to their next match on Saturday at The Oval.

In the end, the first ever Vitality Blast Finals Day weekend was the story of the haves and the have-nots of women’s cricket.

Let’s start with Saturday. The disaster of Tier 2 Finals Day at Northampton has been well documented by Polly Starkie: a chaotic affair where there was no indoor seating for written press, one coffee truck which closed as the final was just getting underway, players apparently being randomly ejected from dressing rooms, and a lack of effort made to properly cover the square when rain fell during the first semi-final.

This was Finals Day done on the cheap, with no thought given to the player or the spectator experience. Here’s Polly and I talking about in on this week’s CRICKETher Weekly:

Contrast that with Sunday at The Oval, where the Tier 1 event was a roaring success. 5,761 fans showed up (a record for a women’s domestic T20 game), many sporting pink Vitality bucket hats, on a day of fireworks, face-painting and a twist on the traditional Mascots Race: a Mascots Hungry Hippo competition.

Kirstie Gordon, whose Blaze side lost the semi-final against Bears after winning the last Lottie Cup at Derby a year ago, was well-placed to contrast 2025 with 2024:

“[Derby] was a bit of a shambles wasn’t it? There was no food van. Fair play to everyone at The Oval and the ECB for today’s event. We’ve had a really good crowd in, it looks like there’s loads of activations going on round the venue for the kids and all sorts. That’s awesome. You look at the success that The Hundred’s had and it does all these things – that’s how we can start pushing that into days like this.”

In typical Kirstie fashion, she also found the time to express support for her Tier 2 counterparts, who hadn’t been quite so lucky:

“It’s a bit sad to hear that the Tier 2 final yesterday had a bit of a non-event with similar things [to Derby] – we need to start filtering that [The Oval event] down and make it a showcase event.”

Issy Wong was Player of the Match in that first semi-final, but hot on her heels was Sterre Kalis, who struck 45 from 33 balls after becoming perhaps the first player ever to feature in back-to-back Finals Days for two different sides.

Kalis explained after the semi-final that she had hot-footed it down from Northampton to London in an Uber on Saturday night: “I’m still Yorkshire’s player, but at the same time I want to try and win this with the Bears as well.”

There has been much debate about whether Kalis’s back-and-forth this season between Bears (where she is on loan) and Yorkshire (where she is a contracted player) is exploiting an unfortunate loophole in the loans system, which was actually designed to allow fringe Tier 1 players the chance to get some cricket instead of sitting on the sidelines.

But one thing you can’t dispute is Kalis’s commitment – to Yorkshire, to Warwickshire, and to women’s cricket. The Dutch-born Kalis doesn’t have the chance to make big bucks by representing her home nation in World Cups, so she takes her chances where she can get them, even when that means paying an exorbitant amount to take a taxi 70 miles down the road in order to play four matches in two days.

It’s difficult not to contrast that with the notable absence of England players Nat Sciver-Brunt and Amy Jones from what was designed to be a showpiece event in the new women’s calendar.

I’ll quote Kirstie Gordon again here: “That was their choice not to play today.” And when pressed on exactly whose choice (the ECB’s or Amy and Nat’s), she clarified: “The players’ choice.”

The ECB’s hastily-issued statement 10 minutes later explaining that both players had been “rested… to manage schedules and workload” was too little, too late: Kirstie’s responses, in a tone which conveyed her disdain about the decision, told the real story.

Surrey, of course, were the real winners this weekend, romping home in the final against Bears by 5 wickets with 20 balls to spare, in front of a raucous home crowd. If you want to talk about haves and have-nots, it’s worth a look at a recent report into the financial health of domestic cricket in England & Wales, which puts Surrey right at the top of a new Financial Performance Index. This season, they funded three bonus contracts for their women’s team, in addition to the funding provided by the ECB.

So where are we with women’s cricket, after the first big test of the ECB’s decision to rejig the domestic system in order to align with the men’s counties? Yet again, it seems that taking a big leap forward for one group of players hasn’t yet permeated downwards throughout the rest of the game.

It’s up to all of us, even as we celebrate the big, glorious steps forward, to continue to hold power to account on behalf of the ones who are still being left behind.