It has been a while since I posted anything on here. Not a deliberate or conscious decision not to, more that I simply didn’t have anything to say that I hadn’t said before. So it came as quite a pleasant surprise to be thinking about something this morning and feeling the need to post about it. You lucky people.
And it is this. The Women’s Cricket World Cup is on, and I am really enjoying it. A resounding “so what?” is an entirely fair response to that statement, so I shall qualify it and explain why. Perhaps it says more about me than anything else, and certainly I do not confuse my own response with anything wider, but perhaps I am not alone and others may have the same kind of response. You see, I didn’t say I am enjoying it, I said I am really enjoying it. And this is new.
Of course, the rise of women’s team sports in the last years can be viewed as a wonderful thing in its own right, both in terms of the profile and as a social good, but you cannot force people to truly want to watch, no matter how much they are harangued to do so, or if social acceptability depends on it. It is an emotional response, to move from “oh the cricket is on” to “ooh the cricket is on”, and that this time around seems to be the personal difference. It isn’t format, it isn’t location, it isn’t because England are especially good, meaning there is a supporter stake in it; it is because the sport, for its own sake, is generating a significant appeal and desire to watch it. I can tell myself I am a modern man, who passionately believes in the equality of opportunity for female sport, and my brain will insist that is true, but I cannot help the fact that I find women’s football unappealing (while absolutely enjoying women’s rugby immensely) as a spectacle. Sorry, it just leaves me cold. You can call me names for that if you like, but I don’t care, it just isn’t something I seek out particularly. Cricket on the other hand, I have most definitely watched and enjoyed for years. But this time around it is more. I am going out of my way to watch the games. All of the games. It has made a personal step up in my desire to see it.
Why that might be, well that is the reason for the post, and I am trying to rationalise it and in truth largely failing. Perhaps it is that familiarity has taken me to the point where I do care what happens, but it certainly isn’t that national pride from English success is raising it in my awareness, because for one thing it is not just their games I am seeking out, for another the flaws in the England team are irritating me and for a third England have won World Cups before. To have an emotional stake in what is happening to the point of irritation is the essence in caring about a sport. The reason I have zero interest in the Hundred is not the format, which is just a game of cricket whatever the attractions or otherwise of it, but because I don’t care who wins any particular game, let alone the competition. Same applies to the IPL. I have no emotional stake in it, male or female teams. International tournaments are in any case different, for you can identify with all the nations whichever of them you might support.
It is dangerous and also rather arrogant to assume that this personal response is shared widely, or indeed by anyone, so perhaps it is a me thing solely, and if so that too is fine. TV audience figures would show to some extent if this a growth area (I suspect so, just because it is growing anyway), but even those do not show the degree of engagement, only that the engagement exists. Caring about outcome, checking the table and working out scenarios, being annoyed that the rain is falling, laughing at how damn lucky England were (and feeling bad for Pakistan at the same time) that the rain did fall – all of these are examples of feeling a connection to what is going on that is greater than background passing interest, and it is a new sensation.
Does this even mean anything? Perhaps not. But it was put to me that A list of commentators – particularly the male ones – at the tournament is in itself an illustration of reaching maturity, that this isn’t a secondary women’s World Cup, it is a World Cup. Posting something like that is inherently risky, for it invites comment that this is how it should have always been, and I can accept that criticism, but I would refer again to the point that you cannot force engagement or interest, only hope that it develops. For me, it has done. And I am pleased. If it is the case for others too, I would be even more pleased.
Today is International Women’s Day. Considering that the ECB have yet again posted their usualself-congratulatorysocial media posts patting themselves on the back, it seems worth examining why they consistently pay women a lot less than men.
The main argument that the ECB employs to justify their actions is money. Women’s cricket makes less money than men’s cricket, and therefore women’s cricketers must be paid less money than men’s cricketers as a result. To quote ECB chief executive Richard Gould from his recent appearance in front of a select committee:
“We are investing around £25 million ahead of revenues currently. If you look at the commercial revenue for the women’s game, it is around £10 million or £11 million. We are investing about £35 million or £36 million into the women’s game at the moment. That is something that we want to be able to keep doing.”
From this description, someone would get the impression that the ECB are being incredibly generous with regards to women’s cricket to the point of being practically charitable. As is often the case with figures released by the ECB, they do not tell the whole story.
The first thing which must be acknowledged is that women’s cricket does bring in a relatively small amount of revenue when measured against men’s cricket in this country. However, this is far from being a fair comparison. Test cricket accounts for something in the region of two thirds of the ECB’s total revenue, and the England women’s team barely play any matches in that format. When comparing the financial draw of the men’s and women’s international white ball sides or the men’s and women’s Hundred, it is a lot closer than many people would expect.
When a women’s game is played second in a Hundred doubleheader, which has only happened once in 2022, it attracts a virtually identical TV audience to a men’s game. The women’s opener that year had an average of 510,000 BBC viewers compared to 520,000 for the men’s opener a couple of weeks earlier. This women’s match also had visibly more fans in attendance than the men’s game which preceded it. It is almost certainly the case that if the roles were reversed and every women’s match was played second in a doubleheader, then they would attract more TV viewers and higher attendances than the men with little-to-no reduction in terms of overall revenue.
This post has concentrated on players so far, but they are by no means the only women who are arguably underpaid in English cricket. Female coaches, administrators, umpires and so on are all paid considerably less than their male counterparts. This is broadly for the same reason as the cricketers, that jobs in women’s cricket have lower salaries than the men’s equivalents, but with an added twist. A female player doesn’t have the option to play for a men’s team in order to find a higher paying job, but women in other roles can work in men’s cricket and just don’t get the opportunity to do so.
This can be illustrated by the umpires used in last year’s The Hundred. On-field umpires were paid a match fee of £1,000 for each men’s group game, but only £300 for a women’s match. Thirty-two games in the women’s competition featured a female on-field umpire, but none in the men’s. The ECB might argue that the men umpiring women’s matches were paid the same as the women but this misses the point.
It is almost universally accepted by people ‘Inside Cricket’ that being successful in men’s cricket qualifies someone for a role in women’s cricket, but someone whose only successes are in women’s cricket can’t make the ‘step up’ to the men’s game. This would explain why only one woman (Lisa Keighley from 2019-2022) has held the role of England women’s head coach since 2000, for example. The last two men to hold the position, Mark Robinson and Jon Lewis, appear to have had no experience regarding women’s cricket before taking the job. It is so rare for women to receive similar opportunities that when Alex Hartley was appointed as spin bowling coach for the men’s Multan Sultans team last year it was considered headline news.
The ECB’s justification for paying people less within women’s cricket than men’s relies on the fundamental premise that women’s cricket only generates £11 million per year on its own merits, and so any additional funding must be provided from a finite pot of Test match money. The viewing figures don’t obviously support this viewpoint, with women’s T20Is and the women’s Hundred appearing to attract roughly half as many viewers as the men (or a third of the overall viewing hours, to put it another way). However, it is far from unheard of for people to view something as less valuable purely because it was done by a woman. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the ECB, and it is Sky who have only paid the ECB £3 million or so for the rights to all women’s cricket even if that sum appears to be insultingly low?
This is not the case. The TV rights for English cricket are sold in a block. The ECB offers a tender with the ability for a TV broadcaster to show more or less all professional cricket played in England and Wales, and the TV companies respond with a single bid for everything on the table. Sky Sports has not gone through each competition and said “We will pay £150 million for men’s Test cricket, £20 million for men’s white ball internationals, £35 million for the men’s Hundred, £10 million for the T20 Blast and £5 million for all women’s cricket.” That is not how the process works.
Damian Green: Within the various media deals you do, does that mean that effectively the broadcasters are paying more for men’s Hundred matches than women’s Hundred matches?
Richard Thompson: I think it is packaged.
Richard Gould: Yes, our rights are sold in a collective manner. They are all sold together and that gives us the ability to invest where we think the future markets are going to be. We do think that the future market will be women’s cricket and women’s sport. It is the collectivisation of those rights that gives us the ability to get money where it is most needed.
So it is the ECB which is ascribing a very low value to women’s cricket matches within the £220-million-per-year Sky Sports broadcast deal, it is the ECB who appear to consider a viewer of women’s cricket to have less financial worth than a viewer of men’s cricket, and it is the ECB who grudgingly pay women from money those women earned and then expect to be applauded for it.
So to answer the question in the title: Why are women paid so little in English cricket?
Because the ECB think they can get away with it.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments on this, the Test match or anything else please leave them below.
“The reality is The Hundred has been a huge success both from a ticketing and TV perspective. It is also an extremely important revenue stream for the game of cricket, generating roughly 25% of the ECB’s revenue which funds the broader game of cricket, and helps maintain a viable 18 county ecosystem.” – Surrey CCC chair Oli Slipper
“The Hundred has gone well: the obvious reason is the success [of Southern Brave] on the pitch, but I would also point to the public, families, and new watchers of cricket coming in, which has been very strong.” – Hampshire CCC chair Nick Pike
“The third year of the Hundred brought good attendance figures, better matches in the men’s competition and decent viewing figures. The concentration of talent into eight teams, instead of 18, drives up standards, and from a standing start it was clear on Sunday that the teams have built a fan base in just three years. It is a success story.” – Nick Hoult, Telegraph correspondent
There appears to be a growing consensus, at least by people within the cricket establishment, that The Hundred is a ‘success’. But by which measures, and who for, are questions without clear answers.
Unfortunately for Deloitte (and the counties), they had not reckoned on the calibre of fools available at the ECB.
The original proposal was for the new (and presumed to be T20 format at the time) competition to follow a low cost, high return model. Annual costs were expected to be £13m, with roughly half of that spent on players’ wages and the rest being almost the minimum necessary to coach, host and produce a televised sports event. A lean, simple approach to creating a new sports league.
What almost inevitably followed was an all-encompassing form of mission creep, where the new competition would not only have to make money but also directly address every other issue English cricket faces. The ECB missed out on the chance to trademark and license the T20 format when they introduced it at the professional level, so a new format had to be created. The average attendee at English cricket matches is aging, so lavish in-ground entertainment will be provided in the form of fireworks and live music to attract a younger crowd. Ticket-buyers at cricket matches also tend to be wealthy, so entry to The Hundred was to be heavily discounted. Participation is declining, so The Hundred would be partnered with a youth club cricket scheme to boost the numbers of kids playing the game. Women’s cricket was suffering from a chronic lack of investment over decades, and so the Kia Super League would be partially integrated with the men’s competition. Former marketing executive Tom Harrison wanted more information about cricket fans in order to better tailor their product and advertising, and so a bespoke app was designed to gather as much of their personal data as possible.
Each of these additions came with a cost, in terms of both money and increased complexity. The expenses more than tripled from the original projections, which in turn reduced the potential profits considerably. Even with all of these add-ons, the ECB has declared that The Hundred has made an annual profit in each of its three years so far; £10m in both 2021 and 2022, £15m in 2023. These figures have been widely questioned though.
The most thorough external examination of The Hundred’s claimed profits came from a review conducted by Worcestershire chair and chartered accountant Fanos Hira. After looking at the ECB’s actual account books, he determined that additional costs which were not publicly declared by the ECB (such as core ECB staff members working on The Hundred) meant that the competition actually made a loss of £9m in its first two years. Given that the ECB declared a £20m profit in this period, this would imply The Hundred has £14.5m of added annual expenses which must be considered.
Everything up until now has been purely about running costs, the losses made since The Hundred actually began in 2021. They don’t factor in the tens of millions of pounds spent in the years before 2020 which led to The Hundred taking its current form. Marketing and design consultants creating the team names, the team colours, the on screen graphics, the custom fonts, or the surveys and market research carefully crafted to give the answers which the ECB executives wanted.
Nor do they include the £24.7m ‘dividend’ payments to the counties and the MCC. To be clear, these amounts were not included in the initially projected £31.9m profits either but would at least have been covered by the money earned by the new competition. Instead, most if not all of these ‘dividends’ are being paid from the ECB’s central funds which primarily come from Test cricket’s Sky TV deal.
All of which brings us to the elephant in the room when it comes to The Hundred: It only works if someone else is paying the bills. The ECB might rent the eight largest cricket grounds in the country for a month, but it’s Test cricket that’s still footing the bill for their continuing existence. Owning a 15,000-30,000 capacity stadium isn’t cheap with maintenance, electricity, refurbishment and staff needed to keep it open, and the hosting fees from The Hundred will barely make a dent in that.
The players are also only paid for one month out of the year, with their counties footing the bill for the other eleven. Not to mention the decade or more of training the counties have to pay for, so that those cricketers progress through junior pathways, second XIs and finally the first team to the point where they are worthy of inclusion in a Hundred squad. Test cricket essentially funds all of the costs related to a player (secure long term contracts, training, medical fees, etc) through the central payment counties receive from the ECB.
It is a wonderful business model if you are able to persuade other people pay all of the costs necessary for your investment to grow. The question the ECB needs to answer is whether that is sustainable in the long term.
One possible explanation for the ECB’s profligate spending might be the incentives on offer to those who were in charge of delivering The Hundred. Tom Harrison and several other executives controversially received a £2.1m bonus between them, ostensibly for achieving several targets within the sport. It seems likely that some of these benchmarks related to the new competition which became The Hundred. If a cutthroat executive is told that they will be paid a bonus based on attendance rather than profits, surely all of them would sacrifice the latter to boost attendance even one iota?
One thing which must be acknowledged is that even considering the sale of teams or the competition as a whole means that Plan A has failed. The Hundred was supposed to be very profitable from Year 1, with the ability to grow from there to near-IPL revenue. You don’t sell a goose which is laying golden eggs.
The first response I have seen from most cricket fans to this news is bewilderment. If The Hundred is losing money every year, why would anyone else want to own it? There are three fairly solid reasons why: Profit, speculation and power.
For all of the issues listed in the previous section, it would be very simple for someone to come in and make a profit with The Hundred. There are so many absolutely unneccesary expenses which could be cut with almost no difference to the final product. There’s genuinely as much money being spent on fireworks at a group game as there is at some towns’ November 5th fireworks displays. The marketing budget for each team is ridiculously high, and could be reduced by about 90% whilst still being higher than a county’s T20 Blast spending. Developing a bespoke app for ticketing or a non-monetised fantasy game adds no financial value and could be replaced with cheaper alternatives. Last, and perhaps most importantly, there would presumably be no more £24.7m ‘dividend’ payment to the 18 counties and the MCC because they would no longer be ‘shareholders’ in the competition.
The analogy I would use to explain this is a shop in a great location and with a strong fundamental business model which has the misfortune of being run by absolute idiots. A smart investor will look at this shop and think “I’m not an absolute idiot. I could buy this place cheaply, fix its main issues within a week and turn it into a goldmine.”
At the same time, it is no secret that several counties (*cough*Middlesex*cough*) and perhaps the ECB themselves are desperate for more money, which is rarely conducive to wise decision making or holding out for something’s full worth. On a very basic level, I don’t trust anyone in English cricket not to screw themselves over when dealing with successful business leaders and highly competent lawyers.
Potential investors might also believe that The Hundred as a whole will increase in value over time, and seek to make profit on their purchase by selling it at a later date. This is speculating. It could be short term investment where they attempt to make it profitable as quickly as possible, and then sell it on. Alternatively, they could hold onto their stake for longer and collect the annual income whilst hoping that its value increases over time.
It seems likely that the process of private investment in The Hundred will be slow and gradual, with investors perhaps purchasing a minority stake in a team to start with, which brings us to the third benefit for investors: Power.
Right now, the ECB and counties have total control of The Hundred. They can add and remove teams, rename them, change the schedule or format, even scrap the whole thing if they wanted. The moment an outside investor becomes involved, every one of these things becomes significantly more difficult. Wealthy people don’t just hand over large sums of money without contracts and safeguards in place to protect their investments, which will ultimately mean any changes to the competition going forward would need to be negotiated with shareholders who only care about making more money for themselves.
Becoming the ECB’s partner in The Hundred could aid investors in broader ways too. The ECB has proven to be a very forthright supporter of Sky in all respects, and if IPL team owners were to co-own most of The Hundred’s teams then the ECB would probably be more amenable to (for example) supporting IPL-friendly measures at ICC meetings. An Indian billionaire might look at the possibility of extending the IPL (and its international window) to four months and consider that a £20m investment in London Spirit is worth it if it makes it more likely they can make more profit with their main team.
Creating A New TV Audience
There is an argument that everything mentioned so far is largely unimportant. Who cares if The Hundred is costing English cricket a bit of money if it’s drawing in new fans? Or, as the ECB probably calls them, customers.
The primary means The Hundred’s using to achieve this bold aim is airing up to 18 matches on free to air TV (currently BBC Two) every year. This is after a void of fifteen summers without regularly scheduled, live English cricket available to the majority of the viewing public (The number of caveats in that last sentence is because there were still England highlights, several seasons of the IPL and occasional single matches such as the 2019 World Cup final on FTA TV). Over fifty hours of exciting T20 cricket, much of which is in prime timeslots, will surely build a new generation of cricket fans!
It has not worked. This is not so say that The Hundred has not attracted any new people to the sport at all, but not in any great number. Certainly not in sufficient quantities to justify also losing millions of pounds every year.
TV figures are quite obscure in this country, which usually makes talking about ratings difficult due to a lack of information. Fortunately, The Hundred is one of the most popular women’s sports competitions in the UK (a topic which will be covered later) which means that it features prominently in the Women’s Sports Trust‘s annual reports. These reports in 2021, 2022 and 2023 include detailed breakdowns of how many people watched both the men’s and women’s Hundred in each year, which allows us to see how the competitions are faring.
In terms of the total number of people watching any part of The Hundred (known as the ‘reach’ of a programme), it has declined year on year. In 2021, the total number of people who watched was 16.0 million, which has fallen to 12.1 million by 2023.
This is a 24.4% decline from the first year. Essentially, people gave it a chance when it launched but did not come back to it afterwards. This year’s Women’s Trust report also includes the average viewing figures (the mean number of people watching a programme at any given point in time) for both Sky-exclusive matches and the 18 which are shown on BBC 2.
Average viewing figures
2021
2023
% Change
Men’s BBC/Sky Games
1,021,000
771,000
-24.49%
Women’s BBC/Sky Games
628,000
428,000
-31.85%
Men’s Sky Exclusive
431,000
275,000
-36.19%
Women’s Sky Exclusive
127,000
134,000
+5.51%
From these numbers, we can infer that average BBC-only viewing figures in 2023 were roughly 500,000 for men’s matches and 300,000 for women’s (by subtracting the Sky-exclusive totals from the simulcast games). This presents a significant problem for the ECB, because these are almost certainly below what the BBC would have been hoping for.
The men’s Hundred occupies prime timeslots on weekday evenings and weekend afternoons, which brings with it certain expectations. Only Connect typically attracts well over two million viewers a night on BBC 2, for example. Not only are the BBC paying the ECB for permission to show The Hundred, but it will be very expensive for them to produce relative to a studio quiz show or a reality/documentary show like Fake Or Fortune? or Bargain Hunt. I expect even repeats of these popular shows would attract more viewers on BBC 2 than The Hundred, at a fraction of the cost to the BBC.
In short: The Hundred is very poor value for money for them.
Sky were obviously quite happy with the first year’s ratings, which is why they extended their TV deal before the 2022 Hundred even began for a further four years to 2028 (It is not clear whether they anticipated a 36% drop in average men’s match viewers, so it is possible they feel differently now). It is noticeable that the BBC has not renewed their own TV deal yet as we enter its last year. To put that silence into context, the current free-to-air TV deal was announced over two years before it was due to begin. It seems likely that the BBC are not interested in bidding for live cricket again. Not only that, but other broadcasters might look at these ratings and make the same decision. Almost the whole point of The Hundred is to attract new fans to the sport through exposure to as many people as possible, and it’s not inconceivable that it won’t even be on terrestrial TV at all next year.
The Hundred follows the typical scheduling format of T20 competitions, which means prioritising and maximising the TV audience. No overlapping men’s matches, at least one of which is played every day, and all during the prime TV viewing hours. This compares to the T20 Blast which uses the more typical UK sports model, aiming to maximise attendance through matches being largely scheduled on weekends and Friday nights. It is therefore interesting to note that the T20 Blast’s group stages attracted an average TV audience of 187,000 in 2021 compared to the men’s Hundred 275,000 (for Sky-exclusive matches) in 2023. Obviously The men’s Hundred still attracts 50% more viewers on average, but it is also costing Sky significantly more than 50% extra in terms of rights, marketing and production costs.
But all of this isn’t even really the worst part. You may remember that a lot was made during The Hundred’s launch about how it would appeal to a younger demographic, to “mums and kids”, which would help secure the long term future of the sport. This is why The Hundred uses garish colours, bold designs, hosts pop acts during the break and otherwise does everything a middle-aged marketing executive can do to scream “This is for you, kids!”.
Even in this small, limited objective it has not worked. Of everyone who watched The Hundred (either men’s or women’s) in 2023, 7.2% were aged under 16 and another 15.2% were aged between 16 and 34. Or, to put it another way, 77.5% of the people who saw last season’s competition on TV were 35 and over. To put that figure in context, 49.3% of the UK population is aged 39 or less. It’s not just that average viewing figures have declined, but they aren’t even the viewers that the ECB wanted.
Attracting New Fans To The Grounds
One objective of The Hundred was to bring a new audience to English cricket grounds, with England and county cricket fans being generalised as “pale, stale and male“. The Hundred has had some limited success in this objective. The number of tickets ‘sold and issued’ increased from 510,000 in 2021 to 580,000 in 2023, but at a great cost. Literally.
From the fan’s perspective, getting to watch two games for less than half the price of a T20 Blast ticket is exceptional value. How many fans of white ball cricket would honestly turn that down?
When a retailer offers a product at a loss (called a ‘loss leader‘), the intention is typically to bring new customers in who you will then persuade to buy more things and in this way make your money back (and more). An example of this is when UK supermarkets reduced the price of baked beans tins to as little as 3p in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any obvious indication of benefits being felt elsewhere in terms of ticket sales. The T20 Blast has seen a large drop in attendance since The Hundred began, from 920,000 in 2019 to 800,000 in both 2022 and 2023. The Charlotte Edwards Cup also had very low crowd numbers compared to The Hundred, despite sharing the majority of the players with the women’s Hundred teams.
One obstacle that The Hundred faces in acting as a conduit to other cricket competitions is its placement in the schedule. The T20 Blast and Charlotte Edwards Cup both largely take place in June whilst The Hundred is in August. This means that even in a scenario where a new cricket fan enjoys a match in The Hundred and might be interested in broadening their horizons, they face a 10 month wait until the next professional T20 matches in this country.
The other obstacle would be the absolute and total lack of effort on the part of the ECB. I have followed @TheHundred on Twitter since it launched, and also signed up to The Hundred’s mailing list in 2020. Neither one has mentioned the T20 Blast once in that time. For a competition meant to rescue county cricket, this seems like an oversight.
It could also be a mistake to blindly assume a large proportion of people attending are ‘new’, rather than pre-existing attendees. County members have access to exclusive pre-sales and bargain prices for The Hundred, as well as some counties including The Hundred in county membership packages. According to Surrey CCC’s latest annual report, an average of 3,732 members attended T20 Blast games in 2022 compared to an average of 3,115 Surrey members at each Oval Invincibles home game. The drop in Blast attendances might also indicate that some people who had been attending county matches have switched to The Hundred instead.
Growing Women’s Cricket
The women’s Hundred is, by almost every metric, a success.
The total attendance in each of the three seasons (reaching 310,751 in 2023) of the women’s Hundred are the highest competition attendances in women’s cricket. Higher than any ICC World Cup, higher than the WBBL, higher even than the debut season of the Women’s Premier League. In terms of total viewing hours, it was the most-watched women’s competition on Sky Sports in 2023 beating the Women’s Super League, the Solheim Cup and the T20 World Cup. It is widely regarded as one of the top 3 women’s T20 competitions in the world, being able to attract overseas players of the highest calibre.
Any success the women’s Hundred has garnered is almost entirely thanks to COVID-19. Looking at the planned schedule for 2020, the women’s Hundred is clearly considered a lesser competition in every respect. It features 4 fewer group matches than the men, because the men’s teams played against their local ‘rivals’ home and away but the women’s teams didn’t. Of those 28 women’s group games, only 9 would have been at the team’s home venues (each team hosting once, except for 2 at Old Trafford) whilst 4 would have been at amateur club and school grounds. 12 of the group games overlapped with each other and only 9 didn’t overlap with a men’s match (either in The Hundred or the Test series occurring at the same time). The women’s final was due to take place at Hove on a Friday night, rather than at Lord’s.
Sky would not have been able to broadcast the majority of women’s matches, and some may not even have had streaming or radio commentary available. 310,751 people wouldn’t have been able to watch the women’s games because the grounds they were due to play in couldn’t even hold that many. Welsh Fire were due to only play a single match in Wales.
In short, the women’s Hundred was initially designed by the ECB not to maximise exposure but to minimise costs.
When the ECB was organising the 2021 competition, they implemented protocols which meant that COVID-19 testing was required at every venue. It was not practical to manage this at multiple grounds simultaneously, as the originally planned schedule would have needed, and so they decided to make every game (bar the two openers) a men’s/women’s doubleheader. When people saw women’s cricket, both in person and on TV, they enjoyed it (or at least as much as they did the men’s games) and the women’s Hundred exploded onto the scene.
Unfortunately, this early success has not resulted in the ECB treating the women’s competition with as much respect and importance as the men’s. The Hundred in 2022 was scheduled at the same time as a women’s international T20 competition, something which would never have happened with the men, which meant the women’s Hundred started later and had 8 fewer matches than the men’s that year. On the other hand, at least there was one women’s game in the evening because neither of the following seasons did.
The women’s games also don’t receive much benefit from the extensive and expensive entertainment at The Hundred matches. The fireworks and live music, costing on average £200,000 per game, all largely take place after their match is finished. If someone who wasn’t already a cricket fan wanted to go to a game purely for a band and a fireworks display, which is the whole point of having them there in the first place, they could skip the women’s match and barely miss a thing.
There is virtually no cross promotion from The Hundred for the women’s regional teams, despite them sharing virtually identical rosters. Whilst this is also true of the men’s teams, it is far more impactful with the women’s. Men’s county cricket already has its own fanbase, built over a century or more. The women’s regional teams literally didn’t exist four years ago. Nor do the Charlotte Edwards Cup or Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy have official social media accounts run by the ECB. The Hundred’s social media accounts are by far the most popular domestic women’s cricket accounts in this country and yet are almost entirely silent 11 months of the year. It is a waste.
The ECB’s undervaluing of the women’s Hundred occurs in the financial sense too. In 2023, the women’s competition was responsible for approximately 39% of the overall attendance and 33% of the overall Sky TV audience for The Hundred. This alone would account for over £14m of revenue, even before you begin to consider the high prominence of women cricketers in terms of sponsorship. According to the ECB, the entireity of women’s cricket in this country earns £10-11m per year. There is no possible way that could be true, unless the ECB believes that a viewer or attendee of a women’s cricket match to be worth less monetarily than one of a men’s match.
Nor is the women’s Hundred seemingly being considered by the ECB when it comes to discussions about the competition’s future. When the proposal regarding the sale of The Hundred franchises (which consist of both men’s and women’s teams) to private investors was mooted, it is stated that only men’s professional cricket which will receive the proceeds. There is also no mention of whether team owners will be under any obligation to promote their women’s teams at all. When the idea of expanding The Hundred to 10 teams was floated, the question about where the extra women cricketers will come from when there are only 8 professional domestic teams for the competition to draw from was clearly a secondary concern. The women’s Hundred appears not to be a factor in the debate at all within the ECB.
There is one thing people seem to value about the women’s Hundred though: It acts as excellent political cover. To question or criticise any aspect of The Hundred is to oppose the growth of women’s cricket, at least in the minds of some. There are undoubtedly some dinosaurs who loathe women’s sports on principle, but being able to paint everyone who thinks The Hundred has issues as being one of them is a handy tool in any debate on the subject. A real bargain, considering they are paying women 2.85x less than the men in the tournament.
Increasing Junior Participation
One of the many issues that The Hundred was supposed to address was the lack of kids playing at their local clubs, which were having to close through a lack of interest. The main vehicles for the competition to achieves its aims were All Stars and Dynamos cricket. All Stars is an 8-week programme designed for 5-8 year olds launched in 2017, and Dynamos is a follow-on scheme for 8-11 year olds was launched in 2020 and specifically tied in to The Hundred.
There is very little promotion of All Stars and Dynamos Cricket within the coverage of the tournament although, as with attendance, the competition’s position in the cricket calendar does not help with it taking place after the junior cricket season has effectively ended. All Stars and Dynamos programmes typically begin in May, nine months after The Hundred is on television. However, there also seems to be no advertising of either scheme from The Hundred’s social media or mailing lists either.
What makes this particularly egregious is that All Stars and Dynamos Cricket are used to promote The Hundred quite extensively. One of the very first questions you are asked when you install the Dynamos mobile app is: “Which Hundred team is your favourite?”, which leads to the colour themes taking that team’s colours. The app features videos of cricketers in their Hundred kits demonstrating the various skills or drills used. Kids in the Dynamos scheme are given free The Hundred trading cards.
To be clear: I’m not against any of this. I want more children to become cricket fans. My issue is that it is only working in one direction. Kids playing cricket should be encouraged to watch it on TV, but kids watching it on TV (and their parents) should also be encouraged to go to their local clubs.
In terms of the total number of kids in the All Stars/Dynamos programmes, it has decreased every year The Hundred has been held so far. It was “over 101,000” in 2021 (which was before the competition began), “over 100,000” in 2022 and “just over 97,000” in 2023. Likewise, there has a slight decrease in girls within the programmes from 27,000 in 2021 to 26,752 in 2023.
From these figures (and the ECB doesn’t release broader participation data), you could honestly make the argument that The Hundred is hurting junior cricket participation in this country.
Conclusion
Everything about The Hundred ranges from a missed opportunity to a fundamentally flawed concept. Even the women’s competition, the one shining beacon of light in the whole thing, fails to lead anywhere else beyond attracting an audience for itself.
Obviously it works out pretty well for some people. Anyone employed as a marketer or PR consultant in North London, for example, or the eight ECB executives who pocketed a huge bonus cheque. A large selection of mediocre men’s T20 cricketers also have good reason to be thankful.
Beyond that, the greatest success The Hundred has had is in persuading people to say that it’s successful.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments on this, the Test series or anything else, please leave them below.
It is almost universally acknowledged that the women’s portion of The Hundred has been ‘a success’ so far. Women’s matches in the competition have been praised for their high quality, but also noted for attracting a significant audience both on TV and at the grounds. Cricket fans and administrators have tried to identify what the reasons for this have been, in order to replicate it elsewhere. Their answer, almost universally, has been doubleheaders with men’s matches.
“I think the progress and movement on women’s cricket over the last three or four years is incredible and we’re on the brink of really punching through in terms of making a proper commercial success. When I look back at team sports over the last twenty years, how women’s sport has been treated whether it’s rugby, football or cricket, it’s shameful. It’s only now that we’re starting to look and go ‘Oh my word. What have we missed out on over those years?’ And that’s where The Hundred has helped us as a game, punch through, when we’ve got the doubleheaders.”
The early evidence from this season’s T20 Blast/Charlotte Edwards Cup, and attempts from previous years stretching back to the Kia Super League, suggest that this approach doesn’t work outside of The Hundred.
One of the great myths about The Hundred is that it was designed by the ECB to push women’s cricket to the forefront, and therefore establish gender equality within the English game. The planned fixtures for the women’s Hundred in 2020 show that it was considered a lesser competition in almost every aspect. Whilst the men played every home match at one of the eight largest cricket stadia in the country, each of the women’s teams would have had to make do with one per season. Welsh Fire’s women were only scheduled to play a single match in Wales every year, making their team name appear utterly ridiculous. Instead, they were due to play at smaller county grounds and, in some cases, amateur club grounds. Sky Sports hadn’t committed to broadcasting any women’s matches on their main TV channels beyond the nine planned doubleheaders and probably the final, which was to be held at Hove rather than Lord’s.
In other words, the women’s Hundred looked an awful lot like the Charlotte Edwards Cup does now and would probably have had a fairly similar attendance and impact.
Then COVID-19 hit. The 2020 Hundred is cancelled and the ECB has to implement bio-security bubbles around all matches to make sure it can be held in 2021. Given the high demand for such measures at the time, and therefore the high cost, they decided that it would be cheaper to hold every women’s match at the same ground on the same day to save money. With every match shown live on TV and played in a big city as a result, the women’s Hundred attracted fans in a way that the men’s competition didn’t. Whilst attendance for the men’s games shrank from 2021 to 2022, it grew for the women.
It’s important to point out that the women’s Hundred is not the only success that women’s cricket has had in England. The 2017 World Cup final at Lord’s was a sell out, the women’s cricket competition in the 2022 Commonwealth Games had an average of roughly 10,000 people attending every match, and this year’s women’s Ashes appear to have very strong sales. None of these had any ties to men’s games, no doubleheaders involved.
If being a doubleheader (offering existing fans of men’s cricket a chance to see a women’s match for free) does not automatically build an audience for the women’s game, then what is it about the women’s Hundred that has led to it being successful? One answer is that it gave each team a home ground. The connection between a team and a town or city is practically the foundation upon which all English sport is built. People don’t attend matches (whether football or cricket) if they don’t care who wins or loses, and local pride is a quick and easy way to make people care. When Western Storm play their only T20 match at Cardiff this year, they are as much a visiting team as their opponents despite it being nominally their ‘home ground’. It is virtually impossible to develop a relationship between a team and the local populace with just one game per year. The women’s Hundred guarantees four home group matches in the same city and, perhaps even more importantly, no home games in other towns or cities. The teams have a clear local identity, even if they are named after rivers or broad geographical areas. The only Charlotte Edwards Cup team to play more than two group matches in the same ground this year is the Yorkshire Diamonds.
An annoying side effect of being hosted by multiple grounds is that every cricket club in the country seems to require a different app to buy tickets and enter the ground. If you’re a fan of Western Storm, for example, you might need the Glamorgan, Gloucestershire and Somerset apps in order to attend their home matches.
There is also the issue of capacity. If the Charlotte Edwards Cup only has thirteen matches this season at the eight largest stadia in the country, then it stands to reason that most women’s matches are being held in grounds with lower capacities. It’s impossible to achieve an average attendance of 10,423, like the women’s Hundred did in 2022, if the women’s teams play most of their matches in places which can’t hold 10,423 people. I know this argument annoys a lot of people who read this blog, particularly those who support counties which don’t host teams in The Hundred, but women’s cricket in England needs to maximise its revenue in a way that men’s county cricket doesn’t have to. A county team can play in front of a mostly-empty ground, not develop any England players for well over a decade, and still receive a huge payout from the ECB every year without anyone batting an eyelid. Any money spent on women’s cricket, on the other hand, is instantly attacked (often by people who unironically use the phrase “I’m not being sexist, but…”) as subsidising an unprofitable aspect of the sport rather than being an investment for the future of the game. Playing professional women’s matches at small amateur club and school grounds in 2023 removes any possibility that they can attract the ticket revenue they need to become profitable.
There are few examples of the disparity between how men’s and women’s cricket are treated in this regard than the ECB’s plans for The Hundred in 2020. Whilst the women’s teams were relegated to smaller stadia (often amateur club grounds) in order to save money, the budget for local marketing and in-the-ground entertainment at the men’s matches was more than twice as much as they stood to make from ticket sales. Once the local adverts, posters, social media campaigns, fireworks and musicians are all accounted for, it costs the ECB roughly £2 for every £1 they get on the gate. This meant that the women’s competition received an absolutely enormous boost in terms of cash allocated to attracting fans once every match became a doubleheader in 2021, because they received the benefits of the profligate promotional budget available for the men compared to the skeletal and largely token amounts they would otherwise have been allocated.
On this topic, Richard Gould claimed that the ECB are “probably spending three times more than the revenues that are being created” by women’s cricket in England. By my reckoning, the women’s competition is responsible roughly a third of the total TV views for The Hundred and around two-fifths of the total attendance. If The Hundred’s total annual revenue is £51m, then the women’s matches contribute £15-20m of that. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable suggestion that the value of England women’s team is at least £10m per year when the TV figures, ticket sales and sponsorships are all considered. This leaves two possibilities: The ECB is spending upwards of £75m on women’s cricket every year or the ECB may be undervaluing the financial contributions of women’s cricket, perhaps in order to justify the lack of investment from themselves and the counties.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the Charlotte Edwards Cup doubleheaders is that none of them have been televised on Sky Sports so far. In the original plans for The Hundred in 2020, virtually the whole reason for the nine planned doubleheaders (out of thirty matches) was to allow those women’s games to be shown on Sky and the BBC with minimal extra expense to the TV companies. There have even been cases where Sky have broadcast the men’s T20 Blast match from a doubleheader but not the women’s Charlotte Edwards Cup game, despite obviously having all of the crew and equipment there at the ground. There is a very large difference between the potential audiences on Sky Sports and the current internet streams. Whilst women’s cricket matches might attract a few hundred thousand UK viewers on TV, the comparable figures on YouTube might be a tenth as much. Although streams are free to access, compared to Sky Sports’ expensive subscription, they don’t reach as many people in reality. This has a huge impact in terms of promoting the competition. Sky’s blanket coverage of the women’s Hundred allowed its popularity to grow because a lot of people watched women’s domestic cricket on television, possibly for the first time, and they liked what they saw. If the Charlotte Edwards Cup isn’t afforded the same exposure, it can’t possibly have the same effect.
Ultimately, a lot of this lack of direction and investment comes from an almost total lack of accountability within the ECB when it comes to women’s cricket. If a men’s T20 competition like The Hundred was attracting an average crowd of less than a thousand people, every senior executive and manager involved would be fired. As a result of incredibly low expectations, zero investment of money and resources with regards to marketing and promotion, and no willingness whatsoever to persuade Sky to maybe show a few more women’s matches, progress in English women’s cricket will always be ponderously slow.
England might currently be the second-most advanced country in the world with regards to women’s cricket, behind Australia, but that is no excuse for progress not being made as quickly as it could or should be. It’s certainly no excuse for relying on doubleheaders to magically build an audience for it when the examples of what does work are plain to see. The things the 2017 World Cup final, the women’s Hundred and the 2022 Commonwealth Games tournament all have in common are a strong marketing campaign, extensive TV coverage, large grounds and, most importantly, the will to actually commit to women’s cricket rather than just going through the motions and hoping for the best.
Thanks for reading my post. If you have any comments on it, the Ashes, or anything else, please leave them below.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of hyperbole when considering where the England Test team stand right now. In the last Test match, they lost all ten wickets for fewer than 200 runs in both innings. In the first half of the English season, they won four consecutive Test matches against two of the top teams in the world. Before that, they went 16 months without winning a single Test series.
It seems like there is no middle ground for this team. They seem unable to grind out a close win, or lose a tightly contested arm wrestle. They will either blow their opposition away like a hurricane hitting a matchstick factory, or collapse like… Well, like an England Test team.
England have announced a single change to their lineup, with Ollie Robinson replacing Matthew Potts. It is precisely what you would expect from England. Dropping a bowler after the batsmen embarassed themselves is textbook ECB practice from the last decade. Zak Crawley is visibly struggling, as is Alex Lees, but let’s instead get rid of the bowler who took more wickets than Anderson in the first Test. Classic.
At the same time, it would be foolish to discount England’s chances of drawing level in this series. South Africa are not a great Test side, and none of their batters currently have a Test average above 40 (unlike England’s Joe Root). It really wouldn’t take much for England to win by almost as big a margin as they lost the last game. If they had an X-factor bowler such as Jofra Archer, they’d possibly be favourites.
In other news, it has been announced that several Test grounds will host women’s internationals in 2023. This is a huge step forward. Since the sold-out 2017 Women’s World Cup final at Lord’s, the ECB have only played a single match (a 2018 ODI at Headingley) at one of the eight largest cricket grounds, in the seven largest cities in England and Wales. You might remember that the ECB’s reasoning for The Hundred included the idea that holding it in smaller grounds, smaller towns, would limit its potential growth and profitability. The logical extension of that would be that they were actively attempting to sabotage women’s cricket in this country by refusing to let them play in the largest markets. It is perhaps no coincidence that this announcement only came three months after Tom Harrison quit.
If you have any comments about the Test, women’s cricket, or anything else, please leave them below.
Tomorrow, the ECB and several county chairs are going before the Digital, Culture, Media And Sport Parliamentary committee to answer questions regarding racism within English cricket and their responses to it (or the lack thereof). This is certainly an important issue which should be questioned and addressed, but it is far from the only problem that the sport has regarding diversity and equality. The treatment of women cricketers by the ECB and the counties has been (and continues to be) shameful.
This genuinely angers me, and never more so than when the ECB posts press releases, promotional videos and friendly articles by useful idiots in the press declaring how committed they are to gender equality. It is absolute bullshit. I’ve posted about this before, after the ECB posted a series of videos on Twitter proclaiming their support for the International Women’s Day 2020 campaign ‘Each For Equal’. It’s fair to say that I was not impressed.
In the first season of The Hundred, the total player wage bill for the women’s competition was £1.3m compared to £6.7m for the men. This meant that the average man was paid £45,000 more than the average woman. The ECB announced pay rises for everyone in this year’s competition, which was presented by some useful idiots in the press as being a “108%” (or “more than doubled”) increase for the women compared to ‘just’ 25% for the men. A real blow for equality in sport. This was technically accurate, but hardly tells the full story. With the total wage bills being £8.3m and £2.3m in 2022, the average pay gap for women cricketers has actually increased by £5,000 to £50,000.
The first question this scenario begs to be asked is whether it is legal. If you had a company with a 50-50 gender split and every single woman was paid £50,000 less than a man in the same job, you could expect to spend most of your time in lawyers’ offices and employment tribunals.
We understand in sport that men’s and women’s sports are typically separate, with their own discrete economic and competition structures and therefore it is not unfair for Cristiano Ronaldo to be paid more than Ella Toone, for example. However, it is not immediately apparent that this would apply to The Hundred. Almost every source of income is pooled together from both competitions, with no distinction for what proportion can (or should) be attributed to the men or women. The TV deals all include both men’s and women’s games. Every ticket sold (barring the season openers) is for both a men’s and women’s game. The same sponsorship deals cover both competitions. At the same time, it would seem like women do the same amount of work as the men in The Hundred, playing the same number of games and having apparently equal media and sponsorship commitments. It would be very interesting to hear what someone with more knowledge than me regarding employment law had to say on the issue.
Even if total pay equity is not legally required, the current balance is significantly out of proportion to the value they bring to the competition and the compensation they therefore deserve. With wage budgets of £8m and £2m, the women will on average be paid 25% as much as the men this season. According to the ECB’s own figures, the women’s Hundred had 52.4% of the attendance and (for the final) 58.3% of the TV viewers compared to the men’s games. It would seem to logically follow that the women therefore deserve to be paid at least 50% of what the men receive, or double what they are currently due in 2022.
To be clear: The TV audiences are the key statistic regarding how much income can be attributed to the women’s competition. The Sky and BBC TV deals alone account for £36.5m, roughly 70% of The Hundred’s revenue. If women’s cricket is attracting 52.4% of the men’s audience (and it is) then it follows that they are earning 34.4% (0.524/1.524) of those TV deals, or £12.5m. This would mean that the women’s competition is already making a profit, and would continue to do so even if their total wage budget was increased to £8m per year.
At the same time, the men’s competition has significantly greater costs. As well as having higher salaries for the players, it also requires an annual payment to the counties of £24.7m to compensate them for losing contracted men’s players during the season as well as lost income from hosting fewer, lower status men’s games in the middle of summer. This means that the men’s competition earns £24m in UK TV revenue (65.6% of £36.5m) but costs at least £32.7m. Even if you attribute 100% of ticket revenue (around £6.5m) to the men’s Hundred, it would still be making a significant loss. In short: The women’s Hundred appears to be subsidising the men’s.
However, these attendance and viewing figures don’t tell the whole story. The scheduling of The Hundred in the first year was entirely focussed on the men’s competition. Every single men’s game in 2021 was in a primetime television/attendance slot, by which I mean outside of work hours and avoiding clashes with the men’s Test series against India. By contrast, every weekday women’s game (bar the season opener) started at 3pm or 3.30pm and there were also ten women’s games scheduled to take place at the same time as the Tests.
That the women attracted such a large audience in spite of these handicaps placed on them by the ECB is incredible and, I would argue, suggests that they are significantly undervalued. After all, if the roles were reversed and every women’s game was given this kind of priority, would the men’s attendances and TV audiences still be higher? There is a reason why almost no sports play their games during work hours, if they can avoid it.
It bears saying that achieving equal pay in The Hundred would be much easier with the support of the PCA. The women players are all members, and you might expect that their union would be supporting them gaining more (and, I would argue, fairer) pay. However, the most obvious way for the ECB to implement this would having a £5m wage budget for each competition, which would represent a 37.5% pay cut for men. As I have previously posted, the PCA always seems to prioritise the interests of their male members over everyone else.
Even so, to pay women cricketers so little would seem to be too hypocritical even for the ECB to stomach. After all, they post lovely videos on all of their social media accounts proclaiming their support for International Women’s Day every single year. Given that one of the key themes running through every single International Women’s Day campaign is the fight against pay disparity, and the ECB actively promotes these campaigns, supporting equal pay in their new competition would seem like a no-brainer.
Which should tell you exactly how much I rate the ‘brains’ at the ECB.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, please leave them below.
Today, as almost ninety thousand cricket fans crammed into the MCG and millions of TV viewers around the world watched the Women’s T20 World Cup final, seems an excellent opportunity to look at the status of women’s cricket here in England. The perception seems to be that we are making good progress towards a professional and popular women’s game. And, relative to some countries, we are. But there have been numerous opportunities squandered, a multitude of promises unfulfilled, and far too many empty platitudes.
Personally, I’ve found it frustrating that England has seemed to lag behind Australia in developing women’s cricket recently. England awarded the first full time central contracts in 2014, followed by Australia in 2015. Other than that, Australia have really taken the lead in the women’s game. Cricket Australia started the Women’s Big Bash League in 2015, followed by the ECB’s Kia Super League in 2016. When Australia’s domestic competition went fully professional in 2017, I naturally waited for the ECB to follow suit soon after. And waited. And waited. And waited.
Eventually, in 2019, the ECB finally seemed to come through on the next logical step for women’s cricket when the PCA announced that 100 new professional domestic cricketers would be created in 2020. It was included in the ‘Heads Of Agreement’ which detailed exactly what pay and other considerations professional players and the PCA could expect for the duration of the new £220m per year Sky TV deal. Meanwhile, people from the ECB were saying that there would be eight full time teams, based in the same cities as The Hundred, where these new professional players would play throughout the summer.
The creation of a professional domestic structure is absolutely key for the future of women’s cricket in England. It should provide a high standard of competition, which improves the ability to develop players for international cricket and also makes the game more entertaining for potential supporters. In the best case scenario, if you build women’s cricket up like Cricket Australia have with the Women’s Big Bash League, you can even reach a point where women’s cricket is profitable rather than something subsidised by men’s cricket. Which is, frankly, more than men’s county cricket seems to manage.
Recent developments seem to suggest that we are a long way from the ECB committing to this kind of growth. First, the ECB reduced the number of new full time contracts from 100 to 40. Now, around 5 weeks before the English cricket season begins, we haven’t heard a single thing about any of these new players being signed or even the teams they’re supposed to play for. I’m starting to think that the ECB may have abandoned even these modest goals.
The reduction from 100 to 40 professional crickets is incredibly important for two main reasons. Firstly, it massively restricts the opportunities for women to make a career playing cricket. Australia’s star player, Ellyse Perry, had the option of either football or cricket as a career and chose cricket because there were more opportunities and higher wages in Australia. If she was English, it seems very likely that she would have become a footballer instead. Other prospective cricketers will have left the sport because they will have had to choose their full time job over cricket, because training and playing cricket in your free time in the hopes of gaining a rare full time contract just isn’t financially realistic for many people.
The second, and perhaps more important reason, is that a reduction to 40 new full time cricketers reduces The Hundred and the new 8-team domestic competitions (if they arrive) to semi-professional status. It’s simple arithmetic. If there are 21 cricketers with England central contracts, the 40 new domestic players and 24 overseas draft picks, that equals 85 total professionals. There are 8 teams in The Hundred with a squad of 15 each, meaning that there is a total of 120 players. So at least 35 squad members in The Hundred this year will be amateurs. Club cricketers. A far cry from the rhetoric about it being an elite competition.
The reduction also acts as a reminder to all of us (not that anyone here needs reminding) that the ECB are not to be trusted, nor should their promises be believed. In another related example, England’s women cricketers were reportedly told that their pay brackets in The Hundred would range from £50,000 to £15,000. When the final figures were announced, it was actually from £15,000 to £3,000. Quite a difference.
I almost don’t blame the ECB for constantly lying and cheating though, because everyone else seems to just let them get away with it. The press don’t seem to care enough to write about it. The counties can’t even collectively act in their own interests, so the idea that they might somehow get their act together to help women’s cricket is almost laughable. The most disappointing to me is the PCA, who are supposed to represent and protect these women cricketers from abuse and deceit by their employers. Not for the first time, the PCA’s response appears to be silence and inaction.
But most of this isn’t new. Whilst I’ve been angry about this consistent failure by the ECB to build up women’s cricket in England, the thing which really spurred me to write my first blog post in about six weeks was a couple of smug, arrogant and incredibly misleading tweets by the new “@TheHundred” Twitter account.
#EachForEqual is the official theme and hashtag for this year’s International Women’s Day (which is today). It is meant to represent support for “the gender equal boardroom, a gender equal government, gender equal media coverage, gender equal workplaces, gender equal sports coverage, [and] more gender equality in health and wealth.” So let’s examine how the ECB are doing on these aspirations which they are publicly supporting.
Gender equal boardroom – 4 out of 12 on the ECB board. There’s just one woman acting as a representative for the 40 counties and the MCC who elect the chairman and approve the board, I believe.
Gender equal media coverage – The ECB are always at pains to say that the men’s and women’s competitions are inextricably linked, and that both will gain signficant exposure. In the real world, Sky are committed to showing all 34 men’s games and just 11 women’s games whilst the BBC seem likely to air only the final. To put this into context: Sky showed 12 Kia Super League games in 2019, which means that the total coverage of women’s cricket by Sky will actually decrease this year.
Gender equal sports coverage – In The Hundred, the men will play 34 games at 8 grounds. All televised, all in big cities. The women, on the other hand, will play 30 games at 20 grounds, mostly in small towns and mostly not on television (and quite possibly not even streamed or with radio commentary).
Equality in wealth – Even including the £300,000 team bonus for winning, which is the same in both competitions, the average wage in The Hundred for a woman is around £60,000 less than for a man.
In other words, they’re achieving none of it. I don’t think they’re even working towards it. It’s just a meaningless hashtag and phrase.
The huge new TV deal and The Hundred were supposed to usher in a new era for women’s cricket in England. Whilst the press release platitudes and slick social media marketing still proclaim that to be true, the reality is far different. No amount of flashy videos, hashtags or other nonsense should distract us all from the fact that the ECB is absolutely screwing up the women’s cricket. Somehow even worse than they’ve done to the men’s game.
And the most frustrating thing to me is that hardly anyone seems to care.
Women are pretty stupid, it seems. They can’t count to six. They can’t fathom how to use a velcro fastening. They can’t even understand the most basic laws of cricket.
These are not my personal views, I hasten to add, nor the views of any of the other writers here at Being Outside Cricket (as far as I’m aware). They do however appear to quite accurately describe how the ECB sees women.
There are a few clear examples of this thinking in recent weeks. The first was the launch of the 100-ball format in April. When Andrew Strauss was talking about the rationale for the new competition on BBC Radio 5 Live, this is how he described it:
“Well very simple. I think what we’re trying to do with our new city-based tournament is really appeal to a new audience. So people that aren’t necessarily traditional cricket fans, and in particular looking at mums and kids during the summer holidays.So, what we’re trying to do is find a way of making the game as simple as possible for them to understand and, you know, if you imagine that sort of countdown from 100 balls down to 0 and the runs going up, I think that’s a pretty simple way of playing the game.”
This was a bad statement in a number of ways. Firstly, it concedes the rather ridiculous point that cricket is complicated and hard to understand. For an attention-seeking idiot like Stan Collymore to say it is one thing, for a sport’s own national board to state it as a fact is quite another. Secondly, it insults non-cricket fans by suggesting that the only reason they don’t like the game is because they’re too stupid to understand it. I don’t like football, but I feel confident that I understand it. Since people who aren’t already cricket fans are apparently the target market for the ECB’s competition, it might be wise not to insult them all. Because Strauss prefaces it by saying that the new competition was targeting mothers, the ones who bore the brunt of this insult were women.
But some clumsy wording in a live interview isn’t really enough to warrant sitting down and writing a full post about. For that, you’d need something more premeditated. Something that dozens of people at the ECB will have worked on and not seen a problem.
The first thing to note is that it is a sponsored tweet from @EnglandCricket, or in other words a targeted advert. So let’s look at the target, @LydiaJane13: She’s a woman, she lives in England, and she’s a pretty big fan of cricket. In other words, exactly the kind of person that the ECB should be trying to attract to their local cricket clubs (assuming she doesn’t already play). Certainly, it would seem pointless trying to attract non-cricket fans to attend a cricket festival.
So having correctly found their audience, how should the ECB entice them to their events? Evidently, their answer to this question was to call them all morons. Cricket fans, regardless of gender, rarely find the laws of cricket “baffling”. Nor are cricket pads particularly difficult to put on for an adult. They might be expensive, cumbersome, and in the case of old ones belonging to a club probably not in great shape, but they aren’t “fiddly”. Certainly, as several people have remarked on Twitter, cricket pads aren’t more fiddly than bras, necklaces, and other items women routinely wear.
The most annoying thing about the ECB’s missteps in this advert is that, as is often the case, there is actually a decent idea behind their inept execution. As a middle-aged man who left my local cricket club around the age of 13, I’ve never been particularly tempted to go back. It was around that point where the focus of training shifted from ‘having fun’ to ‘winning games’, and I simply wasn’t good enough to compete. If I did want to return, I can’t say the idea of facing a hard ball or paying hundreds of pounds on a bat and pads really enthuses me. So, whilst I wouldn’t seriously consider playing ‘proper’ cricket, I might play a soft ball version if my friends or workplace formed a team. It’s a good format to promote to adult cricket fans, male or female. In fact, I genuinely think that it could become cricket’s equivalent to five-a-side football with enough promotion and support. Or, if not support and promotion, at least choosing not to insult your target demographic.
Something that perhaps makes the ECB’s oblivious sexism seem even worse is the ascent of England’s women cricketers in recent years. They won last year’s World Cup (a feat the men’s team have failed in emulate in 11 attempts), comprised three of Wisden’s five 2018 Cricketers Of The Year, and drew their most recent Ashes series in Australia rather than losing it 4-0. They are, as the kids might say, crushing it.
But even here, amidst this almost unqualified success, there are major problems on the horizon. Whilst England have benefitted from four years of their senior squad having professional contracts, most other major international boards are now at least matching that commitment. Australia have gone several steps further by giving many domestic players professional contracts. As England’s coach Mark Robinson said earlier this year, “We have to broaden our talent pool. Australia have 92 pros, we have 18.” To put that number into context: according to StephenFH’s research, there are 338 England-qualified men in county cricket first team squads. Virtually all of them will be on full-time professional contracts.
There may also be a sense that the ECB are letting this unique opportunity to market women’s cricket in England slip away. Last summer, over 26,000 people at Lord’s and 1.1 million people at home watched England’s victorious World Cup final performance. Today, in what was the team’s first game back on home soil since beating India at Lord’s last July, not much more than a thousand people went to New Road to watch them play against South Africa. It seems unlikely that over a million English fans of women’s cricket disappeared into the ether over just 10 months, so why so little interest? I suspect that the answer lies largely in a lack of promotion by the ECB and others.
If you were looking for a reason why the interests of women cricketers and cricket fans are dismissed so easily, you only have to look at the lack of female representation at the ECB. The 41 members of the ECB consist of 39 major and minor county chairmen plus the chairmen of the MCC and Minor Counties Cricket Association, As far as I’m aware, all of them are men. Not only that, but the organisations they represent cater almost entirely to men’s cricket. It gets a bit better on the ECB’s twelve-person management board which has four women, but of those four only Lucy Pearson has any official responsibility for women’s cricket. All four are also independent directors which means, as Andy Nash’s recent experience shows, they can easily be ignored or even not informed about things the ECB is doing. Considering these problems, I am dubious that these endemic issues can be resolved quickly or easily.
Pressure. It’s all about pressure. Some people thrive on it, others don’t. When it came down to it, amid the carnage of a frenetic and ever more panicky run chase, it was Anya Shrubsole who held her nerve, bowled straight and stole a win for England that they had no right to claim. What a time to produce career best ODI bowling figures of 6-46.
England’s total of 228-7 was competitive, just – but better than it looked like it was going to be when they slumped to 164-6 with the dismissal of Natalie Sciver for a well made 51. Jenny Gunn’s coolness with the bat helped England into the final, and here alongside Katherine Brunt she got her team to at least a defendable total, if not one that left anyone with a great deal of certainty that they could do so.
A couple of early wickets were just what was needed and the crazy run out of Mithali Raj probably gave notice of what was to come. Yet India after that point were serene. If Kaur didn’t provide the explosiveness of her semi final innings, she instead batted responsibly and with the outstanding Punam Raut took her side most of the way to victory.
191-3, a required rate well below 6 an over, just 38 needed. In print it looks a doddle but even at the time the tension was there, and the feeling that India weren’t totally confident of getting there prevalent. Perhaps it’s not surprising, reaching the World Cup final was a huge achievement for them and one that will stand women’s cricket in India in good stead for the future, however it feels this evening.
The Indian collapse was extraordinary. Seven wickets for 28 runs in under six overs, and they will unquestionably feel they threw the game away. They weren’t alone in feeling the tension, Jenny Gunn of all people dropped a sitter just before the coup de grace, fielders made errors, and even the third umpire had to adjudicate on the tightest of stumping decisions as the game was in the balance.
Some of the shots played were dire, a reflection of the tenseness of the situation rather than anything else. Anyone who has played will know the feeling of desperation that can afflict a side who aren’t certain of their ability to get over the line. No matter how many times the players might say to each other that knocking the ball about is all that’s needed, it doesn’t happen, and each batter plays the kind of shot that leaves them aghast afterwards, and unable to explain why they did it.
Yet it only happens if the opposition are gutsy enough to stay in a game that they’re losing, that keeps it tight, waiting for the one mistake that lets them back in. Shrubsole gave little away in her final spell, creating the feeling among the batting side that the shackles needed to be broken. Laura Marsh had gone wicketless, but she was the one who started to claw the match back, the necessary precursor to allow her team mate to seize the moment.
It may be thought afterwards that there was a inevitability about the way England won, but Deepti Sharma nearly got her team there, and the manner of her dismissal, having played so calmly, came as something of a surprise. It was the last hope gone.
As for what it means for women’s cricket, this final had more attention than any previous edition, and the sell out crowd at Lords were perhaps more animated than is normally the case. It was a match that deserved a sellout and the reasonable pricing for tickets allowed that to happen, although given the ECB and Lords track record on this, doubtless next time it will be seen as an opportunity to increase them substantially. But it seems a reasonable bet that there will be more demand, and as posted yesterday this had the feel of women’s cricket coming of age.
It was flawed, but it was thrilling. Congratulations to England and for India, it may well just be the start.
Women’s cricket has come a huge way over the last decade or so, and those pioneers of the game can reflect on a job so well done that this World Cup has gained more attention, and sold more tickets, than any previous edition. The final at Lords tomorrow is sold out, a state of affairs scarcely imaginable only a few short years ago.
The fact that England, who have been strong in the women’s game for many years, are facing India adds to the global appeal, and for the first time this tournament has been broadcast live there. There is little doubt, women’s cricket is on the march, and the BCCI have announced significant bonuses for their players for reaching the final.
It’s also true that as far as England is concerned, the ECB can take satisfaction in the increase in both profile and the levels of participation, which have shown significant rises in recent years. Indeed, such has been the progress that overall participation figures would look truly grim were it not for the female half making up for the decline in recreational cricket.
Many clubs now have a women’s section, indeed some are pushing towards having 2nd XIs, a tribute to the hard work put in creating it from scratch. As ever, the silent heroes and heroines are the ones who do this unpaid for no other reason than that they think it’s worth doing.
When I first started playing there were some women and girls who played, but they could only do so in the men’s teams and there was unquestionably a patronising attitude towards them. Being bowled by a girl would be grounds for mirth and teasing, something those playing couldn’t have been unaware of, but who still wanted to go out and enjoy a sport that they loved. For those who did so, the current attention must feel like vindication. Those battles aren’t over by any means – having been slightly involved with the creation of a women’s team, I can recall the fight to ensure the team was called the Women’s 1st XI not the Ladies.
With the development of the sport, so have standards risen. Any club side can see how much better all the players are from starting out as novices, and at the highest levels the quality of play is infinitely higher than it was. If they aren’t household names, then there is a degree of player recognition that wasn’t present until very recently. Sarah Taylor is recognised as not just an outstanding wicketkeeper in women’s cricket, but one who is very likely every bit as good as most male professionals, and arguably better than a couple of international keepers too. She is genuinely superb behind the stumps. For India, Harmanpreet Kaur played an innings in the semi-final that was breathtakingly audacious, and there will be a buzz when she gets to the crease tomorrow.
And that sentence still needs saying, for it is still the case that some patronising views remain prevalent, although the players involved are significantly better than those who tend to adopt such positions. And equally, unintentional condescension – the pat on the head for doing very well – is too often seen. For this is a side of the game that should be celebrated, and is being celebrated.
Sporting occasions are often described as seminal, but this does have the feel of a breakthrough moment. The recent TV deal which included free to air coverage for the England teams notably included the women, and given the more limited scale of female international cricket, that might well raise the profile significantly.
As for the match, England are the favourites, but not overwhelmingly so. They have shown signs of nerves when chasing, not least against South Africa in the semi-final, when a comfortable chase became a tense affair that went right to the wire. Jenny Gunn in particular demonstrated a calm mind at just the right time.
This is the first post from this blog specifically about a women’s match, and there was discussion in the team about whether that would be seen as jumping on a bandwagon. But it feels like the right time, and it won’t be the last.
Being Outside Cricket 
