By Richard Clark

With “real” county cricket in abeyance, we got together with @WomensCricDay, @WomensCricBlog and WomensCricket.net to run the CRICKETish Cup – a virtual women’s cricket competition played in cyberspace!

On a thrilling night at Lord’s, North East Warriors carried off the inaugural Cricketish Cup, defying the odds to defeat favourites Surrey by just two runs!

Division 1 newcomers Warriors had already taken the scalp of Sussex in the semi-final and repeated that underdog victory as Laura Ellison defended 7 off the last over in a nail-biting climax.

Surrey had looked in control as Sophia Dunkley (19) and Aylish Cranstone (18) took them within 25 runs of victory with more than four overs left, building on the foundation laid by Bryony Smith (29) and Nat Sciver (25), but both were dismissed in the space of five balls and the Surrey lower order couldn’t find a way over the line from there.

Skipper Hannah Jones took two off each of Ellison’s first two balls to leave her side needing four from four, but when she fell lbw two balls later it left Rhianna Southby to find a boundary off the final ball. She could only find Lizzie Scott at midwicket and the trophy was off to the North East amid huge celebrations.

Earlier, openers Laura Hockaday (21) and Layla Tipton (22) produced another solid opening partnership of 44, only to be dismissed off consecutive deliveries, and when Warriors subsided to 74 for 5 after the unfortunate run out of Ami Campbell for 13 they looked in danger of falling short of a challenging score.

However, youngster Ciara Boaden (30) more than made up for her part in Campbell’s departure as she marshalled the lower order expertly and helped set a target of 131 for Surrey to win.

Jones took three wickets for the Oval side, but the pick of the bowlers was undoubtedly Beth Kerins with 2 for 13 off four miserly overs.

Warriors backed up an excellent fielding display in the semi-final with similar vigour here as they threw themselves at everything to keep Smith and Sciver from cutting loose. There were two wickets each for skipper Helen Fenby, Bailey Wanless and Lizzie Scott who finished as leading wicket-taker for the competition with eight, whilst Tipton topped the run-scoring charts with 108 across the three games.

The Player of the Match Award, meanwhile, went to Boaden for her excellent innings and two fine catches to oust Sciver and Cranstone at critical moments.

So the Trophy travels up to the North East, and it may stay there permanently if rumoured plans to play real cricket again one day come to fruition…

The ECB’s new retainers, which will be awarded to 24 domestic players and will begin on 1 June, will be worth £1,000 a month; while the 40 new full-time domestic professionals – whose contracts will commence later in the summer – will earn £18,000 a year, CRICKETher has learned.

All of those awarded retainers will subsequently be upgraded to a full-time domestic contract once these kick in later in the summer.

The remaining contracts will be confirmed after the Centre of Excellence fixtures have been played in September, presumably based on player performances during the competition.

All CoE players, meanwhile – assuming at least some fixtures go ahead this season – will be paid a match fee of approximately £200 per game.

From 2021, the £18,000 will be supplemented by payments for The Hundred (Women’s Competition), which for domestic female players will likely range between £3,600 and £9,000.

This would still, however, mean that all domestic players would earn less than the PCA’s mandated minimum wage for full-time professional cricketers in England, which last June was set at £27,500.

As predicted in our weekly vodcast, the ECB have confirmed that domestic retainers will be introduced from June 1st, in order to partially compensate players who were hoping to receive one of 40 new domestic contracts, which were supposed to have started at the beginning of this summer.

The ECB have said that up to 24 women will receive a retainer, which will come with reciprocal obligations on the players to start work on taking their anti-corruption and anti-doping education modules online, as well as following strength and conditioning programmes at home throughout the lockdown.

The ECB have not said how much the retainers are worth or who will receive them, though the implication appears to be that the players will be selected by the Regional Directors of Women’s Cricket at the 8 new Centres of Excellence, which were also confirmed last week.

The ECB have confirmed the hosts for the 8 new Regional Centres of Excellence which will form the backbone of the new domestic structure in England and Wales.

As mooted by CRICKETher last October, the new teams will largely correspond to the previous 6 Kia Super League regions – with Surrey, Hampshire, Loughborough University, Lancashire and Yorkshire all acting as CoE “hosts”; while both Western Storm and Southern Vipers live on in an alternative guise. Both Storm (a partnership of Glamorgan CCC, Gloucestershire CCC and Somerset CCC) and Vipers have also registered as limited companies, reflecting the greater amount of autonomy granted to the CoEs compared to the KSL hosts.

Meanwhile the two “new” regional teams – London & East and West Midlands – will be hosted by Middlesex CCC and a partnership between Warwickshire & Worcestershire CCC respectively.

It is expected that the players selected for the new Centres will train and play at least some of their fixtures at the home grounds of the regional hosts, with the new domestic calendar therefore centring around Headingley, Old Trafford, New Road, Loughborough University, Taunton / Bristol, the Ageas Bowl, the Oval and Lord’s.

All 8 Regional Directors of Women’s Cricket are also now in place, with familiar faces Danni Warren (London & East), Richard Bedbrook (London & South East), Laura MacLeod (West Midlands) and Lisa Pagett (South West & Wales) joined by James Carr (North East), David Thorley (North West), Ian Read (East Midlands), and Adam Carty (South Central).

Carr previously worked at Cricket Scotland, while Carty had headed up Hampshire’s Boys’ Player Pathway; Thorley joins from England Boxing, and Read is the former Performance Programme Manager for Loughborough Sport.

The full list of hosts is as follows:

• North East – Yorkshire CCC
• North West – Lancashire CCC
• West Midlands – Warwickshire & Worcestershire CCC
• East Midlands – Loughborough University
• South West & Wales – Glamorgan CCC, Gloucestershire CCC and Somerset CCC (aka Western Storm Ltd)
• South Central – Hampshire CCC (aka Southern Vipers Ltd)
• London & South East – Surrey CCC
• London & East – Middlesex CCC

The WHAT?

The CRICKETish Cup is a “virtual” women’s county cricket cup, played in cyber-space by the top 9 county teams! It will take place over the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of this month, with a play-off, quarter finals, semi-finals and a final.

The WHY?

With no women’s county cricket happening this month, thanks to You Know What, the CRICKETish Cup is a bit of fun to keep women’s county cricket in the spotlight.

The HOW?

The CRICKETish Cup will simulate matches, using real stats from last year’s County Championship, combined with a big random element to keep things interesting. Syd wrote the software, in a programming language called C# (pronounced “C Sharp” – like the musical note), and we’ve entered all the stats from Play Cricket into a database.

Alongside @WomensCricDay, @WomensCricBlog and womenscricket.net, we will be bringing you all the action “live” on Twitter, with score updates and match reports.

The WHO?

All 9 Division 1 T20 teams have agreed to take part and have submitted their teams: Wales, Hampshire, Kent, Lancashire, North East Warriors, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex and Warwickshire.

The SMALL PRINT

Although the CRICKETish Cup uses real stats, the outcome is very much down to luck, so don’t sweat it if your favourite player gets out for a duck or gets whacked for 30 off an over – it is just a bit of fun!

LIVE DRAW

FIXTURES

PLAY-OFF (Fri 22 May at 6pm) – Wales v Somerset

QUARTER-FINAL 1 (Sat 23 May at 11am) – Durham v Play-Off Winner

QUARTER-FINAL 2 (Sat 23 May at 11am) – Sussex v Lancashire

QUARTER-FINAL 3 (Sat 23 May at 3pm) – Kent v Surrey

QUARTER-FINAL 4 (Sat 23 May at 3pm) – Hampshire v Warwickshire

SEMI-FINAL 1 (Sun 24 May at 11am) – Winner of QF 1 v Winner of QF 2

SEMI-FINAL 2 (Sun 24 May at 3pm) – Winner of QF 3 v Winner of QF 4

GRAND FINAL (Mon 25 May at 6pm) – Winner of SF 1 v Winner of SF 2

The ECB’s Managing Director of Women’s Cricket, Clare Connor, has admitted that following the cancellation of The Hundred there may be no professional women’s cricket at all played in England this summer, but has softened the blow with the announcement that the ECB are looking to introduce interim “retainers” for some players below England level to help them through the COVID-19 crisis.

Speaking to members of the press via a Zoom conference call, Connor said that she remains steadfastly committed to her vision for the women’s game, in the face of the unprecedented possibility of a summer without cricket and a £380 million black hole in the ECB’s accounts.

Whilst admitting that “there is no part of the ECB that has been afforded ring-fenced funding”, Connor said that the £20 million allocated for women’s and girls cricket in 2020-21 was still the budget they were working to; and that the ECB was planning to address the financial worries of those who had been hoping for full-time domestic “Centres of Excellence” [CoE] contracts this season by awarding a number of “financial retainers” to tide them over.

Although these retainers would not quite be a full time salary, they would be part-way to full professionalism, with the players being expected to commit to a full Strength & Conditioning program, overseen by their CoE coaches, as well as undertaking mandatory anti-corruption and anti-doping education programs online.

With the ECB facing an enormous financial deficit, Connor conceded that bringing in revenue by playing men’s Tests, behind closed doors but on TV, may have to take priority over playing women’s internationals:

“We’ve got long-term ambitions for the [women’s] game that extend beyond this summer, and trying to protect as much investment as possible over the next five years is largely going to come down to how much international men’s cricket can be staged this summer.”

However, she said that she remained hopeful that at least some international women’s cricket could be staged this season.

England’s series against India has been postponed but at this stage not officially cancelled, and the later series against South Africa is in theory still on the calendar “as was”. But with only a limited number of bio-secure venues available, Connor admitted that prioritising the men’s games, which would bring in the money the game as a whole desperately needs, could be “a hit we might have to take”.

The Secret Game by Jake Perry (occasionally of this parish) is not the first book to be published on the history of Scottish Cricket. But when David Drummond Bone published his Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of Scottish Cricket back in 1898, little can he have imagined that it would take not just another fifty, nor even one hundred, but more than 120 years for a second volume to join it on what must be one of the shorter bookshelves in cricket’s library.

This is partly because, as the title – The Secret Game – hints, cricket has largely remained outside of the mainstream media discourse in a country where football has long been the alpha and the omega. (It is no coincidence that for all of England’s supposed obsession with football, it was Scotland’s Hampden Park which was for a while the largest football stadium in the world, and for many more years by far the largest ground in Britain, with a capacity between the wars of 150,000 – considerably more than any modern stadium anywhere.)

Although it is a book about history, The Secret Game is not a “history book” as such. Though it is presented in chronological order it is more like a medieval bestiary, with each of its 14 chapters focusing on an individual (or in some cases, a family) who had a particular impact on the development of the sport in their time and place.

It begins with the Lillywhites (yes, those Lillywhites, whose name still remains synonymous with sporting goods) playing a game which was (as Arthur Dent might have put it) almost, but not entirely, unlike cricket at Kelso on the Scottish borders in the 1850s; and ends with brother-and-sister internationals Gordon and Annette Drummond in the 21st Century.

Along the way it takes in Bodyline “Bad Guy” Douglas Jardine (English Captain, Scottish Heart) and his great rival, “The Don” Bradman (From The Ashes), and Scotland’s greatest ever woman player, Kari Carswell (Pushing The Boundaries).

Some may say that Carswell is “Scotland’s Rachael Heyhoe Flint”. But to those who really know, it is more that RHF was merely as close as anyone south of the border has ever come to being “England’s Kari Carswell”. Player, captain, coach, manager and administrator – Carswell was at some stage each of those… and occasionally almost all of them at once!

It is to Carswell’s chapter that those of us who love the women’s game may well turn first, and The Secret Game is definitely a book you can dip in and out of. But if you should do so, you should not omit to return later and cover the rest of the ground Perry rolls out – a voyage in vignettes, from the lochs to the lowlands, taking in the landscape of a game which is not quite so “secret” any more.

Lancashire batting allrounder Emma Lamb has been awarded an England Rookie Contract, following her graduation last year from Edge Hill University.

Lamb was a key member of the Lancashire side which won the county double in 2017, scoring 333 runs and taking 13 wickets. The following season she bettered that, scoring 497 runs at an average of over 40, and taking 11 wickets with her off-spin.

She also made 30 appearances for Lancashire Thunder in the KSL, scoring 329 runs at a Strike Rate of 99, and taking 21 wickets with a best of 4-17.

Lamb, who has been a member of the Academy squad since she was a teenager, attended the Professional Cricketers Association’s 2020 “Rookie Camp” in February alongside Kirstie Gordon, and told the PCA’s in-house magazine Beyond The Boundaries:

“I don’t think you can underestimate how difficult it can be to balance university studies with training. It’s quite hard to focus on just the cricket.”

“After completing my Sports and Exercise Science degree at Edge Hill University, I’ve earned my contract so [cricket’s] now my main focus where it wasn’t before.”

Although women’s Rookie Contracts are by themselves not a full-time living wage, they allow a player who might otherwise have had to go out and look for a regular job to continue within the system; and Lamb will also be able to supplement her England contract with her earnings from playing for the Werther’s Manchester Originals in The Hundred, assuming that goes ahead in August.

Last week Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde’s Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution was deservedly named Wisden’s Book of the Year. The book provides a forensic examination of the multiple ways in which T20 has changed cricket, both for the better and for the worse, and features interviews with more than fifty players and coaches in the men’s game.

I began reading it while out in Australia for the T20 World Cup, and almost immediately happened upon the following, in the Authors’ Note: “This book is solely on men’s T20 cricket. T20 has transformed women’s cricket too – quite possibly even more so – but that story deserves its own full telling, and there are others better qualified than us to do it justice.”

That quickly became the lens through which I consumed the rest of the book. How far can Wigmore and Wilde’s analysis be extended to the women’s game? Is men’s T20 cricket a vision for our future?

I’ve noted some of my musings below. I’d be interested to hear your own views in the comments.

• Increased use of data is at the heart of this book, and is one aspect of what Wilde and Wigmore label a “paradigm shift” in cricket in the past 10 years (see especially ch.2). Here is one area where women’s cricket is lagging behind. Matthew Mott is the first coach I’ve heard who regularly uses the term “match-ups” in press conferences; Australia are the first international side who actually have the resources at their disposal (i.e. analysts) to use data to the extent that it’s been used in men’s cricket. This was much discussed during the recent T20 World Cup, when Australia came under the spotlight for becoming obsessed with a numbers-based approach to questions like whether Ash Gardner or Meg Lanning should bat at 3. Overall, use of data is one area where I’d suggest women’s T20 cricket will begin to look much more “Cricket 2.0” in the next few years, as teams become better resourced around the world.
• Commercial forces have shaped men’s T20 cricket to a much greater extent than in the women’s game. Men’s T20 franchise leagues have created a free market whereby mercenaries like Chris Gayle (ch.3) can make millions of dollars without wearing their national shirt. No one chooses the freelance life in women’s cricket: it’s hard work – see for example Rachel Priest, who snapped up a New Zealand contract as soon as she could, after moonlighting in the KSL and WBBL for a couple of years.
• That means that some of the positives which T20 cricket has brought to the men’s game, like the “democratisation” process amongst players from non-Test playing nations (ch.13), have not yet arrived in women’s cricket. On the other hand, you might argue that the players remain much less motivated by money – they are grateful for the chance to make a living playing cricket, but they don’t turn into the kind of person who gives themselves the nickname “Universe Boss”, which is a plus point as far as I’m concerned.
• Men’s T20 cricket has brought spin bowling to the fore (ch.4) – an interesting contrast with the women’s game, where spinners have generally been more dominant. I might even hesitantly say that, in a reversal of the trend Wilde and Wigmore identify, T20 cricket has made pace bowling more important in women’s cricket. If the best T20 pace bowling is about mastering variations (ch.7), might that gives seamers in women’s cricket an advantage, because variations (not sheer pace) have traditionally been the tools of their trade?
• In chapter 8, Wilde and Wigmore outline the gradual unravelling of the ECB’s initial opposition to the IPL from 2015 onwards, which they attribute to England Men’s poor performance in the 2015 World Cup. I am intrigued by this timeline. It was in June 2015 that Clare Connor first unveiled plans for a new women’s “Super League”, which was to be a franchise T20 tournament – the first of its kind in England. Perhaps the success of the KSL, as it became, helped erode the ECB’s opposition to these kind of leagues?
• Something we have seen a lot less of in women’s T20 cricket is the struggle for peaceful co-existence between domestic T20 leagues and international cricket (ch.9). WBBL and KSL have both been part-funded and fully supported by their national boards. Nonetheless, an integral part of the story of the WBBL’s origins is the rebel-league-that-wasn’t, Shaun Martyn’s Women’s International Cricket League (WICL). This initiative pushed Cricket Australia, who were terrified that they might lose control of their players, into launching WBBL – and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s going to be interesting to see if the launch of a Women’s IPL eventually takes us to another showdown between the boards and the franchises.
• Chapter 12, “Why CSK Win and Why RCB Lose”, could equally well be entitled “Why Western Storm Win and Why Lancashire Thunder Lose”. Western Storm, the only team to feature in all 4 KSL Finals Days, realised early on (as did CSK in the men’s IPL) that a strong core of domestic players was the way to achieve success.
• However, one key difference between women’s and men’s T20 franchise leagues has been the lack of a player draft in the women’s game. There is no “science of a good auction” (ch.2) in women’s T20 cricket – in the KSL, England players were “allocated” centrally by the ECB, while for the overseas players, all the negotiations were done behind the scenes. These negotiations, which have generally been top-secret, would certainly be a fascinating process to research!
• On that note, Wigmore and Wilde’s “Epilogue” is devoted to 32 Predictions For The Future Of T20 Cricket. (Many of these provide a compelling vision for the future of the women’s game, which is one reason why I’d recommend this book to Cher readers.) One prediction is that: “The system of drafts and auctions will evolve”, with at least some of the allocation process moving to direct negotiations with players, in order to create more continuity in teams and eliminate the upheaval currently experienced in the men’s IPL when contracts come up for renewal. I wonder whether women’s cricket might learn from the men’s game and actually bypass the draft system completely, given its many disadvantages?

A final point: Wigmore and Wilde’s “Author’s Note” might well be interpreted as a “call to arms” for some future author to write their own version of this book, but centring on the women’s game. My feeling is that it would be a very different book. The forensic level of statistical analysis which Wilde and Wigmore adopt, based on extensive use of CricVizz’s stats database, would be much harder to achieve – there is no equivalently sized database for the women’s game (as far as I’m aware). As it stands, an author would have to rely far more heavily on anecdotal information provided at a team level.

I’d still read it, though!