“The rich get richer; the poor get the picture” sang Pete Garrett on Midnight Oil’s 1982 hit Read About It.

One of the saddest realisations of the past decade has been the way that technology, far from being the democratising force we had all once hoped, has mainly been used to enhance and entrench the riches of the richest. Jeff Bezos buys another private island, while his minimum-waged delivery drivers struggle to pay their rent; Bill Gates pockets another billion, while his software subjects office workers to unprecedented levels of semi-covert surveillance.

The benefits of economic growth over the past 10 years have been disproportionately channelled to those who need it least, as the iron laws of the market have asserted themselves with a ferocity not seen since the early stages of the industrial revolution.

For a long time sport resisted these laws. The greatest footballer of my lifetime – Diego Maradona, who died a couple of weeks ago – grew up in a a third-world slum. In our own sport, England’s greatest allrounder, Enid Bakewell, was born in a mining village in Nottinghamshire. If you could hold a bat, or kick a ball, it didn’t matter where you were from.

Of course, this was only ever true in microcosm, especially in cricket. On an individual level, you were always more likely to succeed if you came from a wealthy family or went to a good school.

Zoom out further, to a national level, and the picture becomes starker still – money talks… loudly and incessantly. No one doubts the talent of players like Ellyse Perry and Meg Lanning; but the unprecedented levels of “investment” (which, after all, is just a polite way of saying “money”) that have been poured in by Cricket Australia have undoubtedly been a factor in their success.

Thus far, however, that investment has mostly been systemic – it’s investment in the clubs; the training facilities; and the coaches – and the human factor has remained the key wildcard. You can have all the “investment” in the world, but 18 year old Hayley Matthews can still walk into a World Cup final and rough you up, with talent that no money can buy… right?

Yes… but also… no.

A recent piece by Brittany Carter – How women’s cricket is being influenced by Major League Baseball – describes the use of a something called a “Blast Motion Sensor”. This is a high-tech gizmo which attaches to the bottom of the bat during training, and syncs up with an app to analyse the player’s bat swing, providing them with feedback which allows them to pinpoint areas of improvement to increase the power of their swing.

Human coaches have always done something like this, but this technology automates and enhances the degree of analysis and feedback possible from a human coach, allowing the player to fine-tune their game beyond the Nth degree.

This tech is being used today in domestic cricket in Australia, to augment the skills of the next generation; and it is undoubtedly amazing.

What it isn’t, however, is cheap; and that’s the grit, because like all tech, this stuff costs money – real money, that the 1% have and the 99% don’t; money that will buy an edge for the next generation… but only for those who can afford it. No girl in Moga, India (where Harmanpreet is from) or Barbados, West Indies (where Hayley Matthews grew up) will have access to these wonders.

And so in cricket, as in life, the 1% will pull away, using technology to fortify and magnify all the advantages they already have, leaving the rest – the 99%, also known as “us” – standing at the side of the road, peering in awe at their increasingly distant tail-lights.

The eight women’s regions have today confirmed the names of the players who have been allocated professional contracts, with five assigned to each region (with the exception of Western Storm, who have six).

In addition to the 20 players who signed regional retainers earlier in the year and the five England “Rookies”, who have all progressed onto full-time regional contracts, a further 16 players have been added to the list of contracted professionals.

CRICKETher understands that the new contracts are worth £18,000 annually (substantially less than the PCA’s mandated minimum wage of £27,500), with the ECB providing the funding for 40 of them.

However, the total number of contracts on offer has been increased to 41 (instead of the originally intended 40) thanks to an additional contract for the South West & Wales region, funded jointly by Western Storm and Glamorgan CCC. Georgia Hennessy, Nat Wraith and Alex Griffiths all shone for Storm in the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy, and with the player allocation process led by the Regional Directors it seems that Lisa Pagett was able to provide a convincing case that all three had done enough to earn a contract.

A number of players offered contracts have established careers outside of cricket (Central Sparks’ Gwenan Davies, for example, is Head of Girls Cricket at Shrewsbury School; while Northern Diamonds’ Phoebe Graham works in marketing for Sky), which strongly suggests that at least some of the new “professionals” will be continuing to do other paid employment outside of cricket.

Perhaps the most surprising inclusion is that of Jenny Gunn for Northern Diamonds. Gunn, who is 34 years old, announced her retirement from international cricket in October 2019, and had made the decision to retire from all cricket in March 2020, only playing in the RHF due to a last-minute phone call from Diamonds head coach Dani Hazell.

The full list of contracted players is now as follows (newly contracted players in italics):

Northern Diamonds:

• Hollie Armitage
• Beth Langston
• Linsey Smith (EW Rookie)
• Phoebe Graham
• Jenny Gunn

North West Thunder:

• Georgie Boyce
• Alex Hartley
• Emma Lamb (EW Rookie)
• Ellie Threlkeld
• Hannah Jones

Central Sparks:

• Eve Jones
• Marie Kelly
• Issy Wong
• Emily Arlott
• Gwenan Davies

Lightning:

• Kathryn Bryce
• Sarah Bryce
• Bethan Ellis
• Lucy Higham
• Abbey Freeborn

Western Storm:

• Dani Gibson
• Sophie Luff
• Fi Morris
• Georgia Hennessy
• Nat Wraith
• Alex Griffiths

Southern Vipers:

• Georgia Adams
• Tara Norris
• Paige Scholfield
• Lauren Bell
• Maia Bouchier

South East Stars:

• Alice Davidson-Richards (EW Rookie)
• Sophia Dunkley (EW Rookie)
• Tash Farrant
• Bryony Smith (EW Rookie)
• Aylish Cranstone

Sunrisers:

• Amara Carr
• Naomi Dattani
• Cordelia Griffith
• Jo Gardner
• Kelly Castle

The ECB have announced that next year’s inaugural Women’s Hundred will be played at the same 8 venues as the men’s competition – side-lining places like Taunton and Hove, in favour of Sofia Gardens in Cardiff, and The Ageas Bowl in Southampton.

Although the ECB haven’t quite said so, it now also looks likely that many more of the matches will be “Double Headers” with the men’s teams.

Head of The Hundred Women’s Competition Beth Barrett-Wild said:

“It’s clear that the wide ranging impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the delivery of elite sporting events and society more generally, necessitates a change to our plans from 2020.”

“The move to an integrated eight-venue model with the Men’s Competition next summer will simultaneously enable us to reduce our operational risk, protect the delivery of the Women’s Competition, and optimise the opportunity to work with our broadcast partners to provide maximum visibility and exposure for the women’s game.”

Although this will be disappointing news for fans in some parts of the country, one up-side is that it does mean we will almost certainly get live-streams (or Sky TV coverage) of every game, with the necessary infrastructure already in place at all the big grounds.

The situation will be reviewed following next year’s competition, with the ECB leaving the door open to a return to the original venues in 2022.

Three bowlers are tied for leading wicket-taker in the league stages of WBBL 20/21 – Sarah Coyte, Nat Sciver and Sammy-Jo Johnson all took 18 wickets – but none of the 3 occupy top spot in our Bowling Rankings. That goes to Amelia Kerr, who took 16 wickets but pulls ahead of the pack thanks to having by far the best Economy Rate in the competition for bowlers bowling 15 or more overs.

Kerr’s ability to genuinely turn the ball both ways remains a potent weapon it seems, despite the scepticism early on in her career from certain parts of the commentary box that her googly is too obviously telegraphed. Even if you can “read” her out of the hand (and there are actually top international players who privately admit they can’t) it is still another thing to worry about, forcing a more defensive mindset on the batter; and at the end of the day, numbers like these don’t lie.

Sarah Glenn’s first season as an overseas star on the T20 rollercoaster has to be deemed a success. Though things probably didn’t go quite as well with the bat as she might have hoped, she excelled with the ball, taking 16 wickets at an Economy Rate of a shade over 6, putting her at No. 3 in the rankings.

From an Aussie point of view, I wonder if Hannah Darlington at No. 8 could actually be the answer to their long, and thus far somewhat ineffectual search for a young seamer who can stay fit for more than 10 minutes. (Don’t bother looking for Tayla Vlaeminck on this list – she’s injured again!) Darlington might not be “quick” quick, but neither is Megan Schutt; and like Schutt, Darlington seems to put the ball in the right place consistently enough to trouble the batters. Having had a breakthrough season last year, this was her Difficult Second Album™ and she’s risen to the challenge with another 15 tidy wickets.

Just behind Darlington, Grace Harris has had a good all-round season – coming in at No. 20 with the bat and No. 9 with the ball, despite only bowling 21 overs (Sarah Glenn by comparison bowled 48.2 overs).

Finally… can we talk briefly about Hayley Matthews? She’s 15th in the Bowling Rankings, but way down at 42nd in the Batting Rankings… again! When are we going to realise that she is actually a bowler (and gun fielder) who can bat a bit, and realign our expectations accordingly? I guess it is all about those first impressions from the 2016 T20 World Cup, but I’m not really sure it is helping her now?

As ever, we welcome your comments below!

Bowling Ranking = Wickets / Economy

The top spots in the 20/21 WBBL Batting Rankings are very much a case of The Usual Suspects – so much so that when I challenged The Editor™ to name the top 5, she got it right off the middle of the bat, without hesitation, deviation or repetition; though it is perhaps worth highlighting that Alyssa Healy takes first place, despite having scored fewer runs than any of the rest of the top 5, due to her outstanding Strike Rate of 161.

Beth Mooney is in pole position to finish as the leading run-scorer, though at the time of writing there are still the semis and final to play, and she could be caught by Meg Lanning, Sophie Devine or even potentially Heather Knight, who has continued her outstanding run of form in Australia, dating back to… well… she has always done well in Australia, but 2020 will certainly be one she’ll particularly remember, having also averaged 64 in the T20 World Cup back in 2020 BC [Before Corona].

Further down the list there are a couple of interesting placings, including Georgia Redmayne who is a new entry in the top 10 at No. 9. After moving from the Hurricanes to the Scorchers last season, she hit the road again to join the Heat, and she’s been a huge part of why they haven’t flopped this year, despite losing the likes of Mooney and Sammy-Jo Johnson, hitting 332 runs at 118 – a big step up from last year, when she scored 137 runs at 95. Also at the Heat, Laura Kimmince (The Artist Formerly Known As Laura Harris) has had a remarkable season – you quite often see a tail-ender with a Strike Rate of over 200, having made 20 or 30 runs in the season, but to score 140 runs at 203 is absolutely outstanding, coming in at 5 or 6 and taking the “closing” role to a new level.

Among the younger prospects, Courtney Webb has had another good season for the Renegades. Still only 20, she pushed on from last year, which is what you really want to see from an up-and-coming player – improving her Strike Rate from 97 to 112 as she contributed 246 runs, including a match-winning half-century off 33 balls against the table-topping Stars.

Batting Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate

On a scale of 1-10, the summer of 2020 will probably not go down in history as a “Perfect 10”. In fact, a Big Fat Zero would probably be pushing it for most of us, to be fair!

So it is all the more impressive that the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy was such a beacon of light in what was otherwise a pretty dark summer. With regionals being a new “thing” it would have been easy for the ECB to quietly postpone them until 2021; but instead they gave them their full support and they blossomed, with an unprecedented level of coverage and a fantastic final at Edgbaston shown live on Sky.

As the men debate the future of the Bob Willis Trophy, parallel conversations are currently ongoing about next year’s RHF, with some big decisions to be made at ECB Towers.

So what should the ECB be looking to do next year?

What’s In A Name?

That answer is… quite a lot! The name Rachael Heyhoe Flint has been synonymous with women’s cricket for 50 years now – and was once even a little too synonymous for the bigwigs at the Women’s Cricket Association back in the day, who resented the fact that RHF “transcended the genre”.

But now she’s more than a person – she’s a trophy, and in the couple of months that the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy has existed, it has achieved an unprecedented level of brand recognition – in the newspapers, on social media, and on the front page of Cricinfo, which the Women’s County Championship (RIP) never was.

When the competition was first announced, the feeling was that, like the Bob Willis Trophy, it would be temporary – something to tide us over until the “proper” tournament was introduced next year.

But unlike the men, we know we aren’t going back to the County Championship; and having built the brand, throwing it away now would be crazy – so whatever we have next year, it has to still be called the “Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy”.

Flying First Class

Playing the tournament on proper, First Class grounds made a huge difference to the quality of the cricket, compared to the club pitches which were mainly used for the old County Championship. As Emily Windsor put it, you can “trust your shots” playing on decent pitches – something we heard from a number of players.

Could Georgia Adams have scored 150 on a club ground? We’ll never know, but she’s been playing for a while, and it is by far the highest score she’s ever made!

Sticking with First Class grounds won’t be cheap – the “budget” solution will be to revert to club grounds next year; but that would be a pity. As James once put it: “If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor!” But I’ve seen them now… and I’d kinda like to keep them!

The North-South Divide

This is a difficult one, and there are arguments on both sides; but I like the North-South Groups format – it creates local rivalries, which are always good for business; and makes it easier for “away” fans to attend all their team’s games.

It works across the board in American sports… it works for the men’s T20 Blast… I think it works for the RHF too.

Additionally, it provides a platform for re-introducing multi-day domestic cricket, via North v South matches, with amalgamated teams featuring the “pros” of the North v the “pros” of the South.

Lie Back And (Don’t) Think Of England

This is another tough call, but for me the lack of England players in the RHF was not a bug – it was a feature!

Imagine if England players had been involved all through – the Vipers would have had Danni Wyatt to send down a few overs of off-spin… Charlotte Taylor would never have got that call from Charlotte Edwards… and an aircraft parts salesperson from Hampshire wouldn’t have ever become the story of the summer by taking a 6fer in the final! And it was a similar tale with Diamonds bowler Phoebe Graham, who would probably otherwise have missed out to Katherine Brunt.

Obviously the other side of this coin is that the England players – particularly those on the fringes, who are required “just in case” but don’t actually see much England action – need to be playing these formats in domestic cricket, especially with The Hundred being… well… The Hundred, not a T20 comp.

But if we want to see new stars shine, and new talent come through, those players have to be given a proper chance – that’s how you find your Charlotte Taylors and your Phoebe Grahams. How to square this circle is probably the biggest challenge those reviewing the RHF have, but I think I’d (just) come down on the side of excluding the England squad for at least one of the formats going forwards.

And Finally…

The RHF Final at Edgbaston was a fantastic day, even played behind closed doors – it gave fans and the media an “event” to focus on; and with a crowd, it would have been even better.

In purely sporting terms, it is true that “the league never lies” – the winner of an All v All league will invariably be the best team; whilst a final (particularly if preceded by semis) will occasionally throw up a “winner” who lost half their group matches!

But still, you can’t beat a “Grand Final” for sheer spectacle, so whether or not we keep the North-South Groups, or go with an All v All league, we definitely need a final to crown the winner, hopefully in front of a few thousand fans!

Yesterday, Syd wrote that the success of the current Australian team is “killing the game for everyone else, and fans – eventually even Australian ones – will start to respond by tuning out and turning off.” Others in the mainstream media have expressed similar concerns: Tim Wigmore suggests that: “For all the wonder of Australia’s achievement, there is a certain sadness too” – a sadness, he argues, stemming from the fact that other nations are falling so far behind due to lack of investment.

But while the run of success experienced by Meg Lanning’s side is undoubtedly a concern, I actually think there’s more cause for optimism than Syd thinks.

Firstly, cricket – unlike many other top sports – is played across multiple formats. Lanning & co’s astonishing run of 21 consecutive victories has come in the 50-over format alone. Their recent record in T20 cricket, as I’ve argued before, is actually not that convincing. They lost the last game of the Women’s Ashes last summer to a thoroughly demoralised England; more to the point, in the T20 World Cup earlier this year, they lost to India, almost lost to New Zealand, came within a hair’s breadth of losing their semi-final to South Africa, and only totally managed to overpower their opponents in the final – something I suspect had more to do with the overwhelming nature of the occasion for the Indians than anything else.

If Australia are so far ahead of the rest of the world, wouldn’t we expect them to also be consistently dominant in T20 cricket? They aren’t.

Perhaps that is due to the unpredictable nature of the 20-over format – but that unpredictability is here to stay. And in women’s cricket, as we all know, 20-over cricket is much more significant than ODIs, both in terms of growing the game and in terms of global TV audiences. So maybe we shouldn’t be quite so worried that fans will simply begin to “tune out”?

Similarly, Australia don’t experience the same dominance in multi-day cricket as they do in 50-over cricket. There’s a simple reason for that: they don’t get to play it very often! And nor does any other team in the world. Multi-day cricket provides a level playing field like no other.

At the moment, that’s somewhat irrelevant, but we are hearing positive noises from England and Australia that more Ashes Tests might just be on the cards – both Tom Harrison and Nick Hockley have come out in favour of the longer format in recent weeks. There’s also been some discussion about the possibility of the new domestic regional sides in England (Southern Vipers et al) playing multi-day cricket, now that they will have a bit more time on their hands to do so.

Back in 2014, the BCCI went through a brief period of supporting women’s Test cricket because – at a time when the Indian team were experienced little success elsewhere – they saw it as a format which they could win at. Lo and behold, India beat England at Wormsley, then annihilated South Africa by an innings three months later. Sadly, for whatever reason, it seems to have been a short-lived period of BCCI interest; however, it’s still significant: it shows that if a cricket board wants to be successful, a focus on the longest format is one way of achieving it.

Maybe Australia’s dominance in 50-over cricket can convince the ECB that the regions really DO need to be playing multi-day cricket, as the best possible preparation for the next Women’s Ashes? After all, what better way to pull ahead of Australia than to become dominant in Tests – widely heralded as the premier format in world cricket?

Cricket can work in mysterious ways!

A second point to counter Syd’s pessimism would be this: yes, Australia reign supreme in 50-over cricket at the moment, thanks to a huge amount of investment in their domestic set-up, but will they keep getting exponentially better, forever? It seems unlikely. The biggest leap in standards comes when you allow players to focus on cricket alone – they improve hugely, but there is a ceiling on how far that takes you.

Domestic professionalism is the biggest difference between Australia and elsewhere as it stands, but it won’t be a point of difference for very much longer. England should (fingers crossed) have 40 domestic professionals in place by the end of October, and Clare Connor has said (pre-Covid) that her aspiration is for a fully professional domestic structure by 2024. It might be a few years away, but England are advancing on Australia, and (in my view), we will catch up eventually – even if it takes longer than we’d like.

That doesn’t solve the problem for other countries. But in the same way that a domestic professional structure was unthinkable in England 5 years ago but is now where we are surely headed, I’d like to think that in 5 years time West Indies, South Africa, India and the rest will have reached the same conclusion as the ECB.

In fact, with the dominance of Australia hitting the headlines just a week after West Indies’ miserable 5-0 capitulation to England, is it just possible that for some boards, the contrast between those two news stories might just be the wake-up call they need, spurring them on to action sooner than might otherwise have been the case?

Maybe Australia’s winning streak might actually change women’s cricket for the better?

Are Australia’s women’s cricket team the best sports team in history? The question comes to mind because lesser questions are rapidly becoming exhausted by their success. They haven’t lost an ODI for getting on for 3 years now; and during that period they’ve won the Women’s Ashes twice and the T20 World Cup twice. There is little doubt that they are the best women’s cricket team in history; and well on their way to becoming the best cricket team, full stop.

Jarrod Kimber has done a brilliant job summing up why, as he asks the question: ‘Will the Australian women ever lose an ODI?‘  The answer of course is yes, for exactly the reasons Kimber states – someone will eventually produce the performance of a lifetime against them, as Harmanpreet did at Derby in 2017 to knock them out of a World Cup they’d probably have won if they’d reached the final. (Let’s face it, they wouldn’t have mentally disintegrated and thrown away a near-certain victory the way India did at Lords that day.)

But that’s what it will take to beat them these days, at least in the less unpredictable ODI format – as Kimber concludes in his penultimate sentence: “Right now [Australia] aren’t just dominating cricket, they’re almost destroying it.”

I’d go a bit further even: this team are figuratively “killing it”.

But I worry there is a problem: they are also literally “killing it”.

Economic historians describe a problem called the “Tragedy of the Commons“, where a shared collective resource is ultimately destroyed by everyone acting in their individual, rational self-interest.

What we have in macrocosm, is perhaps most neatly described in microcosm with reference to the last Women’s Ashes Test at Taunton. Meg Lanning refused the opportunity to go for a win, because Australia only needed a draw, and going for the win would also have given England an opportunity to win. This was a totally rational decision in the context of the series, but it severely damaged the long-term credibility and viability of Women’s Tests, as the match ground itself out into a mindless bore-draw.

Australia’s recent series versus New Zealand was obviously not a draw, but it was a bore, because there was no contest. New Zealand were never even at the races – we all knew what was going to happen before a ball was bowled, and by the 3rd ODI New Zealand were so thoroughly demoralised they couldn’t even reach 3 figures on a pitch where the Aussies had made over 300.

This is obviously because Meg Lanning and her Australia team are just doing their job – exactly as they were in the Women’s Ashes. None of this is their “fault”; nor is it Cricket Australia’s. Putting in place a world-beating infrastructure, and winning cricket matches off the back of it, is what they are paid to do. But the consequence of this – the “tragedy of the commons – is that this is killing the game for everyone else, and fans – eventually even Australian ones – will start to respond by tuning out and turning off.

Is there a solution? I’m not sure there is. Tim Wigmore has floated the idea of a tax-and-redistribute system, where the ICC fund women’s central contracts across the globe; but even if this was a political starter, the problem with it is that it while it might level everyone up to where England currently are, it doesn’t bring anyone any closer to Australia, who will just pull further ahead as a result.

Kim Garth’s recent defection to Australia to play domestic cricket there, rather than international cricket for Ireland, is potentially where we end up here: with the world’s best players going to Australia full-time, while international cricket slips quietly into irrelevance. At some point Australia effectively stand back, maybe by fielding an Under-19s team at World Cups, leaving international cricket in the same sort of place as international baseball – a part-time, recreational pursuit, while the world’s best players ply their trade professionally in the WBBL “World Series”.

Maybe that would be a good thing; maybe it wouldn’t.

But if we don’t ask ourselves the question now, it’s where we are going to end up regardless.