We were at the Gate Picture House in Notting Hill last night to see Death of a Gentleman and hear a passionate Q&A by writer-director Sam Collins.

Although it focuses exclusively on men’s cricket, Death of a Gentleman offers a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of food-for-thought on the state of the game and its governance.

Perhaps somewhat incongruously, women’s Test cricket is actually in a slightly better state right now than it has been for some years. There were 3 Tests played in 2014, involving four different countries – England, Australia, South Africa and (amazingly, given the general attitude of their governing board to both the women’s game and Test cricket in general) India.

2015 will probably see just one Test – the much derided recent encounter in England – but at least the multi-format Women’s Ashes seems to have secured some sort of future for women’s Test cricket in the medium term, as the points system appears to have already acquired for itself the aura of a tradition which will hopefully insulate it against the base commercial pressures it is nonetheless certain to face.

Nevertheless, it is clear that if men’s Test cricket is a ship awash upon an ocean of troubles, the women’s equivalent is more of an open lifeboat in a gale-force storm, the ship having long-since sunk. The Women’s Ashes alone can’t sustain the format as anything more than a quaint anachronism.

To be fair, the ECB, the BCCI and CA have shown that they don’t want the format to die completely, having all played Tests in the past year. The challenge now is to begin to rebuild – for Australia and India to schedule a Test when they meet next Easter; for England to invite Pakistan to play a 4-dayer when they are here in 2016; and for the ICC to set up the redistributive mechanisms which can bring the game back to the smaller nations.

Because if men’s Test cricket is worth saving, so is women’s – we need to change our cricket too!

Less Swagger More Dagger

This wasn’t a swaggering victory of the kind we saw in the 1st ODI, but it was in a way more convincing. There at Taunton England won with 9% of their balls remaining, which is a good margin to-be-sure, but they were 6 wickets down at the end and it they’d lost another one it would have been touch and go. Here at Chelmsford, they cruised over the line with a whopping 13% of their innings to spare, loosing just 3 wickets along the way, with Knight, Greenway and Wyatt all still in the traps.

Won & Lost In The Field

England bowled well to restrict the Aussies to what was by their own (very high) standards a below-par score; and they batted well too of course. But it was the fielding that was the real difference between the teams. Danni Wyatt set the tone early on with an excellent stop on the edge of the circle, and from there England were at the top of their game, as testified by 4 catches, 3 run-outs and the concession of just 9 boundaries against the biggest-hitting unit in the business.

In contrast, Australia were poor between the wickets. Grace Harris appeared to make the rookie error of assuming the ball was dead; while Erin Osborne got into such a mess with Jess Cameron that Sarah Taylor had time to stop and tease her before she removed the bails.

Then in the field the Southern Stars made fumble after fumble. Elyse Villani missed a fairly straightforward chance to run out Charlotte Edwards early on; and then when presented with a golden opportunity for redemption, dropped the England skipper at mid off. Late in the innings, not one but two Aussies got easily to a ball that was almost trickling to the boundary; but each seemed to think the other would actually field it – in the end neither did, and it popped over the rope for 4.

Wyatt Whyatt?

In 3 T20 series since the last Women’s Ashes in Austrlia, Danni Wyatt’s batting record now reads as follows:

DNB, DNB, 0, DNB, DNB, DNB, DNB

That’s 6 “Did Not Bats”, and one sort-of* duck incurred when she was looking to hit out as she came in with just 7 balls remaining against South Africa in Birmingham last September. (* She ran a leg bye of her first ball to retain the strike going into the final over… which I sometimes think on occasions like this should count for something!)

To be fair, she has of course bowled in that time… one over, against New Zealand in the winter.

I’m sure that if you asked her, she’d say she’d rather be playing than not, especially when the team is winning; but England need to be careful how they manage their asset here – it is exactly this kind of treatment that made the highly talented Susie Rowe shrug her shoulders in despair and go back to hockey.

Wyatt doesn’t have that particular option, but she might find herself with an interesting dilemma come next January: star in the final of the WBBL… or come back to England to prepare for a tour to South Africa where her contribution is likely to be equally minimal, if indeed she is picked at all. Under such, it would be difficult to blame her if she then told the England management just exactly where they can stick their not-very-central contract.

During and subsequent to the recent Women’s Ashes Test at Canterbury several people, including the respected BBC commentator Lizzy Ammon, suggested that perhaps women’s cricket should be played on shorter pitches:

Sky Sports News then followed this up with a (ahem…) scientific poll, which suggested quite a lot of people (44%) thought this was a good idea:

It should be noted that the key effect of such a change would be to make the bowling appear faster.

A ball from Katherine Brunt would reach the batsman in [back-of-an-envelope calculations] 0.7 seconds rather than the 0.8 seconds it currently does. And given that it takes the human eye 0.2 seconds to see the ball, that’s actually in reality an almost 20% increase in apparent speed.

A spinner’s ball would obviously be less effected in apparent pace, but the shorter pitch would nevertheless allow them to bowl a more accurate delivery more often.

TLDR: It massively rebalances the game in favour of the bowlers, particularly the quicker ones.

So the key question you have to ask is: Were those who voted to shorten the pitch actually watching the same match as us at Canterbury? Because the game we saw didn’t appear to need rebalancing in favour of the bowlers – if anything it was the other way around! Just one batsman posted a score of more than fifty in the match, and the average run-rates for both teams hovered around 2 for much of the 4 days.

On a more practical level, the idea is a non-starter anyway.

Firstly, it would wreck the game for the current generation of elite batsmen and bowlers, who would never truly adjust after years of playing on the longer pitch.

Secondly, it would destroy the art of swing bowling – a key weapon in the armoury of the women’s game – because those two yards are the critical ones where swing really comes into play.

Lastly, it would require the game to change at all levels of the pyramid – you can’t have girls playing for years on a 22 yard pitch, and then suddenly having to adjust to 20 yards at the elite level. And this is a non-starter – clubs won’t (and to be fair, probably can’t) maintain dedicated women’s pitches, remembering that the pitches couldn’t be shared because the women’s foot and crease marks would be located at a point in the men’s pitch that would be downright dangerous.

So, no – there are a lot of things that you might consider changing about the women’s game… but the size of the pitch ain’t one of them!

In the wake of England’s crushing Test defeat last week, one thing that has been asked and asked again is: “Who else could England bring in for the T20s?”

It is an interesting question… and one to which there aren’t any straightforward answers; because although it is easy to say “Drop X”, unless you have a ready replacement it is also singularly unhelpful.

Did Sarah Taylor have a great Test with the bat? No! Is there a better batsman in the county system waiting to step up? No – Taylor is the second highest run-scorer in the Women’s County Championship this season, despite having played just 4 games; and the only player to have outscored her is Charlotte Edwards.

And while both Amy Jones and Fran Wilson should in retrospect have probably played in the Test, neither are really well-suited to the shortest format, so Lauren Winfield should (and in all likelihood will) keep her spot. (Tammy Beaumont for Winfield is a possibility, but probably not one anyone (least of all Beaumont herself) should get too excited about.)

One player who has made the sort of runs at county that really ought to make the selectors to sit up and listen is Danni Wyatt; but realistically the only person she might replace is Nat Sciver, who has hit England’s highest score so far this summer (66, in the first ODI) so it seems unlikely.

Turning to the bowling, England do have a few more options. They will certainly want to bring back Jenny Gunn, fresh from a five-for (plus a bonus half-century) for Notts at the weekend; whilst Dani Hazell remains (lest we forget) the world’s No. 1 ranked T20 bowler, which surely merits her getting some sort of look-in, though England clearly consider Becky Grundy the player in possession of the spinning ball at the moment. (Personally I’d go with Alex Hartley over either of them… but England won’t in a million years, so we’ll speak no more of it!)

Missing out are likely to be Laura Marsh and Kate Cross, neither of whom performed badly with the ball in the Test, but both of whom are perhaps better-suited to the longer formats. Meanwhile Kent left-armer Tash Farrant may well make the squad, but probably not the starting XI, at least while The Ashes are theoretically alive.

So, here’s the team I think we’ll see take the field at Chelmsford:

1. Edwards
2. Knight
3. Taylor
4. Winfield
5. Greenway
6. Sciver
7. Elwiss
8. Brunt
9. Gunn
10. Shrubsole
11. Grundy

If it looks a lot like the team that just got murdered in the Test, particularly the batting… that’s because it is; but unfortunately there are no easy answers for England at the moment!

Local girl, Slough-born Daisy Gardner has been bowling for Berkshire for 10 years now, having made her début as a 15-year-old in 2005. In that time she has become the mainstay of their pace attack, taking 62 County Championship wickets at an average of 31 – figures which actually understate her importance to the team these days, as the opposition often look to just “see her off” knowing that there are easier overs to come.

With her petite build Gardner isn’t your classic fast bowler, but she uses her stature to her advantage, delivering a piercing ball on a very flat trajectory that comes on surprisingly quickly. Now aged 25, and having never really been anywhere near the England setup, Gardner’s chances of ever playing international cricket are pretty-much zero; but she is definitely still one of the first players anyone should be looking to include in their Super League team.

However, there’s a problem.

As a first step towards a professional domestic setup, Super League intends to impose training requirements upon the players – 3 times a week, week-in-week-out. And it is true that this is needed – English domestic cricketers train a lot less than their Australian counterparts, and this might be starting to show in the results, as Australia sit-pretty at the top of the rankings in all 3 formats… albeit apparently self-appointed in Tests!

But players like Daisy Gardner – the County Pros of the women’s game – have always been amateurs, which means they need day jobs to pay the rent. They can’t just turn up to training “as and when”… and they sure can’t quit their jobs for a few hundred pounds in Super League match fees.

Of course there is an argument that: “If they really wanted to play, they could!” But in the real world, let’s face it they can’t, won’t and (to be honest) shouldn’t have to quit their jobs.

And yes, it creates a moral hazard to excuse them from training requirements. Younger players will ask why X plays when she doesn’t train; and then expect the same freedom not to train as they get older. It happens now in county cricket and it is a culture which we absolutely don’t want to carry over to the Super League.

But if the Super League right now really is going to be (as Clare Connor puts it) “the best verses the best”, then it needs its Daisy Gardners, probably more than its Daisy Gardners need it… and we need to find a way to accommodate that.

The Women’s Cricket Super League is a massive step in the right direction by the ECB and we are really excited by it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential pitfalls and a big one is the player selection process.

There are basically 3 “pools” of players: England; overseas and The Rest.

The ECB have already said that they will allocate the 18 contracted England players around the 6 teams – that’s 3 each, if my maths serves; whilst teams will “bid” for The Rest!

Even leaving aside the overseas stars for a moment, there are already two interesting issues here.

The first is so blindingly obvious that I’m sure it won’t actually be a problem: the England players have to be fully assigned before the bidding process for The Rest gets underway, or you risk a scenario where (for example) a franchise selects England Academy glove-butler Carla Rudd, only to find they also get allocated Sarah Taylor from the contracted pool. Result: Rudd spends a lot of time carrying drinks, which isn’t going to do much good for her development as Taylor’s long-term replacement behind the stumps for England!

The second is that the process really needs to be round-robin, like the “draft” systems in place for US sports like NFL and basketball – essentially the equivalent of the old playground line-up where captains take turns to choose.

Anything else, however well you try to manage it, essentially becomes a free-for-all where the Best of The Rest all head in just one direction, preordaining the champions whilst everyone else is left fighting it out not to come last; which might be fun if you’re part of That Team, but will ruin Super League both as a vigorous competition for the players and as an exciting spectacle for the fans.

(It is worth adding here too that a glammed-up, draft-style “bidding day” would be a huge media event by-and-of itself; and could be a great way to launch the competition perhaps?)

So far, the issues we’ve brought to light are all within the capacity of the ECB to solve; but it is regarding the overseas stars that things start to become a bit tricky.

Firstly, their identities won’t be known until quite late in the day, so we will have the Rudd-Taylor problem described above all over again.

Secondly, however carefully balanced the draft system, a couple of overseas signings could seriously unbalance things again very quickly. A team with Charlotte Edwards and Anya Shrubsole and Lydia Greenway would be one thing… a team with those three plus Ellyse Perry plus Dane van Niekerk? Everyone else might as well just go home now!

But this will be especially tricky to manage because the overseas stars (being “stars”) will have demands which will have to be managed: “I’m not playing with X because she sledged me at the World Cup!” “I’m not moving to Y because it’s too far away from my girlfriend!” etc. etc. (Both of these have happened in the past two years in the Women’s County Championship – and in both cases it resulted in the signing falling-through.)

So it won’t be easy for the ECB’s newly appointed Super League General Manager, Jo Kirk. But she is an experienced sports administrator who knows her cricket, so hopes are high and we wish her luck!

Last night, we were asked on Twitter:

Well…

Super League

The Women’s County Championship has provided sterling service over the past twenty years, despite being played and run on a shoestring by an (amazing) army of volunteers and demi-semi-professionals. However, it has significant problems, the most glaring of which is that the best players are spread far too thinly around the 18 teams that make up Divisions 1 & 2.

The ECB tried to address this via a “loan” system, which attempted to concentrate all the very best players in Division 1, but this has been only partially successful, often because amateur players won’t (or to be fair can’t) just up-and-move at the will of an ECB pen.

This is why we’ve been calling for years for a new* elite tier to be created between county and country – a semi-professional “Super League”, which would have fewer teams and create a more competitive environment  for the very best players.

And… amazingly… this is exactly what the ECB announced earlier this year.

Super League is going to make a huge difference – it is going to shake things up and ruffle some feathers; and I do genuinely feel for those who have strived so hard to make the county system work, and whose efforts are now to be superseded… but it is what we need, and it is what is happening.

Abolish The Academy

Okay… okay – this sounds crazy; but bear with me – I’m not talking about tomorrow, or even next year; but ultimately we want to create a situation where we can abolish the Academy.

(For those who don’t know, the Academy is the “Women’s Lions” – a Loughborough-based tier which sits below the full England team – a young squad of future England stars, who train and tour together.)

The problem with the Academy is that it is monolithic – one program, one set of coaches, one way of playing. Currently, it is the only pathway to the England team, and if you don’t fit in, you’re out!

If the Super League is successful, it will create six localised centres of elite excellence, which all become “Mini-Academies”. There will be competition among coaches and coaching methods, and if a player doesn’t fit in at “A” she can move to “B”, where they might have a different approach. Diamonds will be found in the rough; the most talented stars will shine through; and tomorrow’s England will reap the rewards.

YOU!

Finally… one more thing that can improve the domestic game – YOU – by coming to watch a county match! (There are several on tomorrow – see the calendar here!) Then write a blog post and we’ll retweet it; or write a match report and we’ll publish it.

The additional scrutiny alone will make a genuine difference. Yes, the players (and their parents) will occasionally have to feel the sting of criticism, some of them for the first time; but they will also feel more driven because they’ll know people are rooting for them; they’ll feel the adulation that little bit more intensely when they win; and ultimately they will be better England players for it.

—————

* Technically, we’ve actually had such a competition all along – the “Super 4s” – but nobody paid it much attention, and more recently it has evolved into little more than a private training camp.

Jess Jonassen

Jonassen was named Man of the Match for her knocks of 99 and 54, ahead of Ellyse Perry’s 6-for; and although Perry’s name will be “On The Board” and Jonassen’s won’t, having tantalisingly missed-out on her hundred, it was still the right call because Jonassen really was the difference between the two teams – her innings totalling 153 were 95% of the margin of Australia’s 161-run victory.

Shockers All Round

From an England perspective, there were shockers all round today. In the right conditions earlier in the Test, Brunt and Shrubsole had looked super-human; but this morning with a little bit of sunshine creeping through, they suddenly seemed toothless and England quickly went on the defensive – first moving the field back and then turning full-on negative – calling on the spinners, even though Australia were hardly scoring at a rate faster than at any other point in the match.

When it came to the time to bat and Heather Knight hit the first ball for four, England fans might have allowed themselves a moment of belief; but the overly defensive mindset soon came roaring back in the period before lunch. And actually this could have been fine if (like Alex Blackwell) they had scored at 2/ over and kept their wickets intact; but they didn’t, and ultimately there was probably never going to be a way back after going into lunch 2-down.

Ultimately, no one exactly covered themselves in glory. Knight, Taylor, Edwards and Winfield all failed to deliver. Georgia Elwiss made a very pretty 46 – but unfortunately it was still only 46 – nothing like enough to save the game for England.

England’s Batting Order

You have to ask again about the batting order! Not batting Edwards “up top” means you are more likely to lose an early wicket, which brings in Taylor far too early in the innings, and none-down has become two-down in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea.

I do understand the logic of batting Edwards in a position where she feels more comfortable… but if it just leads to everyone else being more uncomfortable, that probably isn’t a win overall; and so it has proved, twice in the space of 4 days.

Australia Weren’t That Good

Australia will obviously be getting all the plaudits in the mainstream press, but… whisper it… the most depressing thing is that throughout this match, they weren’t actually very good either.

The superstars Lanning and Perry both failed twice with the bat; Perry got 9 wickets in the match, but she wasn’t able to generate much pace with the ball and England largely got themselves out to her. (Overall Schutt bowled better, albeit with less reward.) And ultimately, no Southern Star made more than England’s top scorer (Elwiss, with her 46) except Jonassen, which just emphasises that she really was the difference.

England Aren’t That Bad

If Australia weren’t that good, that can only mean one thing: England were really, really bad, especially with the bat.

And yet they are not a bad team. They can bowl, as we’ve seen; and they can bat, which we haven’t seen here, but we have seen all season, away from the spotlight at county and for the Academy.

Perhaps it is the pressure of that television spotlight that is the key to understanding England’s performance? To mangle a line from Joey in Friends:

England aren’t a bad team… they just seem to play like one on television!

Attack Australia Out

I said yesterday that England needed to bowl Australia out for a lead south of 250, and that’s still doable – they’ve taken 4 wickets for 90 runs, including the big ones of Lanning and Perry – they now need to knock the rest over for another 60. This means: attack, attack, attack. And Laura Marsh needs to have a very quiet morning – throwing the ball to her would be the exact opposite of attacking – “detacking”, if you will. [Note to Ed: There must be a better word for this?]

If England can bowl Australia out for 150-or-so, they’ll be looking at a target of 250. The weather forecast is okay, so they’ll have a lot of overs in-hand; and 250 in (say) 60 overs sounds eminently chasable.

All they need to do then is…

Defy History

In the whole timeline of women’s Tests, going back to 1934, no one has ever successfully chased more than 198 in the last innings. So history is against England; but Charlotte Edwards has broken a lot of records in her career – if anyone can break one more today, it is her – but it is going to be A Big Ask™.

Defy The Odds

The bookies have priced England at 13/1 on average, with Australia odds-on as favourites. Can the bookies be proved wrong? Maybe… but I wouldn’t bet on it!!

Defy Themselves

England haven’t scored more than 250 in an innings (all formats) since January 2014; although obviously they’ve won several matches with smaller totals than that. Inauspiciously however, that match in 2014 was the 3rd ODI of the 2013/14 Women’s Ashes in Hobart. England lost by 4 wickets.

Alex Blackwell

The Australian vice-captain took some stick on Twitter for her slow scoring rate, which at 18.5 was well below England’s much criticised rates from yesterday. (England’s lowest was Lauren Winfield’s 25.0.)

But I think Blackwell was playing the game Australia needed her to play – digging in, and giving everyone else the opportunity to express themselves around her; and as long as they were scoring runs at a lively rate (as Jonassen, scorring at 72.5 was) that’s okay.

Laura Marsh v Katherine Brunt

With England needing to force the pace of the game, bowling Laura Marsh for a quarter of the day’s overs was perhaps an “interesting” strategy. She had great economy as you’d expect, but she was never going to take wickets unless they really went after her, and it became quite clear quite quickly that Australia simply weren’t going to do so.

Of course, the question is… who else? Perhaps what England needed to do was rotate a little more between their quicks to keep them all going? It was interesting that Nicole Bolton commented afterwards that Katherine Brunt’s spells were the most hostile bowling she’d ever faced in a competitive match… and yet Brunt only bowled 9 overs. To me, that feels like a missed opportunity.

The Editor’s View

Finally today, I leave with a Random Thought from The CRICKETher Editor:

Seriously… I couldn’t have put it better myself!