Our first experience of the new Women’s County Cup takes place on a blustery, bright day in Northampton and concludes with something of an upset, as hosts Northamptonshire beat Worcestershire by 5 wickets.
We have an inauspicious start to the day when we arrive at the Northamptonshire County Ground 2 hours before play, to find the gates locked and the fixture board outside the ground merrily suggesting that this match was merely a figment of our imagination.
It turns out that we’re at the wrong gate. Once we find the right entrance, things improve: we are able to easily park at the ground, find the press box open, listen to the PA warming-up, and go to watch Chloe Hill batting ferociously in the nets. The only other person inside Wantage Road at this point is a particularly loyal Northants member in a tartan cap, tucked away at the top of the Turner Stand eating his sandwiches.
This is cricket’s first all-inclusive, all-levels knockout competition, involving 37 teams from across all 3 of the new “tiers” – a brave new world for player, spectator and journalist alike. Syd and I have perhaps got a bit complacent of late, having got used to watching players who we know well, with a live scorecard which always has the correct information, and a stream which at the very least allows you to watch all the wickets back.
But this? This is right back to the Golden Days of the Women’s County Championship, of scrambling for binoculars to see who just fielded the ball, of turning to each other to ask: “I missed that – did you see it?”
I also do something I haven’t done in years: count the number of spectators. I reckon 130-odd – presumably, that’s what happens if no one knows that a match is actually happening.
Worcestershire certainly win the “most confusing team for scorers” award, with 2 Davies’s (Gwen and Poppy) and 1 Davis (Ruby), as well as a Beech (Sophie) and a Beach (Jess). We enjoy a delightful, unofficial running commentary from two of the Northants old-handers (“Clare Boycott?” “No relation”, etc, etc), as Worcestershire unhelpfully collapse to 11 for 3 within the opening 3 overs. This is the team who made the early running in Tier 2 by beating Yorkshire on the opening weekend of the season, so it’s something of a surprise to see them struggling.
Seamer Bethan Robinson is zippy and accurate, clean bowling Bryony Gillgrass second ball before returning at the death to do the same thing to Phoebe Brett with a perfect yorker. There’s a smart piece of fielding from Abby Butcher on the deep backward square leg boundary, which not only saves four but results in the run-out of Poppy Davies, before off-spinner Lenny Sims tempts a leading edge from Hill up to mid-off and the Worcestershire batting effort gradually fizzles out.
Northants are left chasing just 97; and the county’s proactive approach to recruitment over the winter ultimately pays off, as former Hertfordshire duo Gemma Marriott (24) and Amelia Kemp (23) lay the foundations with some well-placed boundaries for an easy win.
Afterwards, I go pitch side and manage to speak to the winning skipper, Marriott, who is delighted with both the result and the entire concept of the County Cup.
“It’s a great idea,” Marriott says. “It gives exposure to so many more teams to play against different levels. We know next week we’ve got Shropshire, so it’ll be interesting to see what a Tier 3 team is like now, and then if we win that, we know we’re going to get a Tier 1 team to play against which, if we get there, is going to be a great experience.”
She admits, though, that it is a little strange to not actually know where they will be playing in just 5 days time. “The Steelbacks will play Shropshire in the next round. Please check the website for details of the fixture,” says the ground announcer, helpfully, as we depart.
Welcome to the era of the Women’s County Cup, where uncertainty and opportunity sit hand in hand.
After all the kerfuffle of last year’s domestic restructure, we’re about to find out what it is all going to look like in practice. There has been a reasonable amount of player movement in the off-season (Durham, after all, had to build an entire team from scratch!) so for some teams, it will also be a chance to see how these new squads are hanging together… or not, as the case may be.
Our Big Plan here at CRICKETher Towers is to try to attend at least one home game of each of the eight Tier 1 counties this season, partly to try to get a genuine sense of how well teams are being supported behind the scenes. So watch out for a more even geographical spread of match reports than usual!
In the meantime, here are some predictions for the season (full squads at the bottom of the page):
Who’s going to win the One-Day Cup?
Raf: Counties were told by the ECB that they had to offer contracts to a minimum of 15 players. The deep pockets at Surrey decided that wasn’t good enough and have offered out 17 full contracts – that’s in addition to the 4 contracted England players in their squad, who as we now know will be available for the first 6 rounds of the One-Day Cup. There could be a lot of thumb-twiddling going on, but it’s also hard to look past such a well-stocked team (which is almost identical to last year’s Stars squad) for silverware.
Syd: Don’t ask me… ask the data! I carved-up the impact stats (full data here and here) from the regional era and added up the scores for the best 11 players in each squad.
That brought a clear winner to the surface: The Blaze. With their England players likely to be available for the key fixtures at the start of the season, I’m backing them to build up a sufficient head of steam to power them through the group stages. There will still be the knockouts to come in September of course, but assuming the Bryces are not off to the World Cup (which unfortunately looks unlikely at the time of writing) I think they can still do it.
Who’s going to win the T20 Blast?
Syd: The data above shows the squads with their England players included, but of course they aren’t going to be available for a chunk of the season, which particularly affects the Blast. So I took the England players out and re-ran the numbers:
This paints a very different picture, with Surrey and serial-underperformers Lancashire at the front; so I’m backing Surrey’s power-batting lineup, led by Bryony Smith, to knock the Blast out of the park.
Raf: The Blaze are the reigning champions [Ed: are you still reigning champions when the competition changes its name?] and I can see them pulling it off again this year. Similarly to Surrey, they have the same core squad as 2024 – and this time they will have both Bryces available for the whole season. The only question is whether the trophy will be emblazoned (gettit??!) with the name “Blaze”, or whether Notts might put their foot down at that point!
Who will get the wooden spoon?
Raf: Rumour has it that negotiations were a bit tricky behind the scenes at Central Sparks / Warwickshire last year, with the upshot that the squad they’ve ended up with isn’t necessarily the one they thought they would get. That’s always a difficult dynamic to negotiate – players may feel aggrieved or anxious to prove themselves – so while they’ve got some brilliantly talented young players (I’m excited to see what Dav Perrin does this season), I think they might struggle overall.
Syd: The numbers don’t look good for Warwickshire, but they look a lot worse for Somerset especially without their England players. A lot depends though on what Charlotte Edwards decides to do with a certain Heather Knight – I think she’s likely to continue playing ODIs, but if she gets dropped from the T20 format she’ll play a lot more domestic cricket and could single-handedly haul Somerset to something like respectability.
Who’s our one to watch?
Raf: I’m intrigued to see how Rhianna Southby gets on for Hampshire. We got a sneaky peek at her in their warm-up against Surrey at the Utilita Bowl last week (she hit a run-a-ball 42) and her batting looks to have come on leaps and bounds over the winter. Her keeping has always been top-notch; it’s been her batting which has kept her out of contention as a possible Amy Jones successor – could this be the season where she defies those expectations?
Syd: The wicket-keeping succession battle is certainly an interesting one, and I’ll be keeping a close watch on two of the other contenders – Seren Smale and Bess Heath. Heath’s move to Durham is a sensible one, ensuring she is their first-choice with the gloves for the first time in her professional career, having played second-fiddle (second-glove?) to Lauren Winfield-Hill at Diamonds previously. Smale, though, still has that problem with Ellie Threlkeld playing first-glove at Lancashire, so will really need to kick on with the bat to nudge the eyes of England’s soon-to-be-appointed new selector.
Who’s our golden oldie?
Raf: Hilariously, Sophie Luff was already considered a “golden oldie” by Syd last time we wrote one of these previews in 2021. To be fair, she does seem to have been a mainstay of women’s domestic cricket for eons (despite only being 31), and has been the face of most of the “revolutions” we’ve seen in the past decade (the KSL, regionals, The Hundred… phew!) Even after the ECB tried to abolish county cricket via the back door in 2019, Luff continued to spearhead Somerset, so it seems only fitting that she now leads them into the professional era.
Syd: Let’s go back all the way to 2010 – Berkshire are playing in the final of the T20 Cup against mighty Yorkshire. The top scorer for Yorkshire is one Dani Hazell (you might have heard of her) but Yorkshire can’t overhaul Berkshire’s 1st innings total of 173, of which 61 (off 46 balls) were scored by an exciting young player called “Alice” Macleod. Arguably, Lissy (she’s a mononym these days, like Elvis with a cricket bat!) didn’t quite fulfill her potential. She never played for England, but she went on to win the KSL with two different teams, and when Sunrisers won the RHF Trophy last season, she was a big part of that too. Now in her 30s, she’ll be wearing an Essex shirt this season, and playing a valuable role there as the “senior pro” as well as skippering the side if / when Grace Scrivens gets her England call-up.
Who’ll be the overall MVP?
Syd: Possibly my most left-field cricket take (yes… even more left-field than that Grace Scrivens one!) is that Katie George could still end up with 50 England caps… but as a batter rather than a bowler! I agree with Raf that Warwickshire are likely to struggle this season, but if they don’t then George will have been a big part of why they didn’t. She has been much more in control of her bowling in the last couple of years, both in terms of consistency and looking less like a lower-back injury waiting to happen; and her batting is starting to develop from “late-middle-order” to “proper middle-order”. If she can fulfil that promise, it will make her a very valuable asset indeed as she enters her peak years between 26 and 30.
Raf: From a marketing perspective, you’d have to say Ellyse Perry! As the most high-profile signing ever in the history of women’s county cricket, she’s certainly going to get the punters flocking to the Utilita during July, which is why Hampshire are (we assume) paying her the big bucks…
And what about Tier 2?
Raf: Well, it’s going to be quite embarrassing for Yorkshire if they don’t manage to finish on top, given that they are meant to be joining Tier 1 in a year’s time! They are also the only Tier 2 county who are actually handing out paid contracts to their players this year (thanks to the, ahem, largesse of Colin Graves).
Syd: Tier 2 is going to be… interesting. Which, as the apocryphal proverb about “interesting times” implies, isn’t always a good thing. Yorkshire aside, the standards are not going to be anywhere near professional, because these aren’t professional cricket teams. That doesn’t mean it can’t be competitive and exciting, and huge for the players involved; but I worry that fans that come to watch Tier 2 expecting the kind of women’s cricket they’ve seen on TV at the WPL or the World Cup are going to experience a reality-check that could leave them with a bitter aftertaste on the way home.
Raf: One thing which is still very much TBC is how the dynamic will work between Tier 1 and Tier 2 counties. Will “benched” Tier 1 players be permitted by their counties to go out on loan? Even if they are, will Tier 2 counties get parochial and promote their own players ahead of loaned-pros? Hopefully the counties can find a way to work together to present the best face of the women’s game to “new” spectators lending their support from men’s teams.
CRICKETher 