Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

5 the first time; from playing in the armed services during the First World War with makeshift equipment, to filling the stands of first-class county grounds in the late 1930s. I can now say with pride that the game has surpassed the exploits of these formative years. I first reported on the England women’s team at the 2005 World Cup in South Africa, when the game was still governed by the International Women’s Cricket Council. From that year onwards, the International Cricket Council started running the women’s game, but at a more local level the England and Wales Cricket Board and their head of women’s cricket at the time, Clare Connor, began leading the way with coaching contracts for their players, where they could combine playing for their country with flexible employment through the cricket charity Chance to Shine. These coaching contracts were the forerunners of what we see today in the top cricketing countries around the world: professional contracts for women. That’s not to say that all women are paid sufficiently to regard themselves as full time cricketers. There is a huge disparity between the top and bottom nations when it comes to the structure of their women’s cricket and what their players can earn. Australia has now leapt ahead of England with professional contracts for all their domestic players, whereas only the best 18 players in England are paid as professionals by the ECB, which are still only two-year deals. The rest can earn a small amount of money through playing in the three-week long Kia Super League, the domestic Twenty20 competition that was launched in 2016 in response to Cricket Australia’s Women’s Big Bash, which has seen the sport catapulted onto free-to-air television down under. Women’s cricket can look optimistically into the future, and will hopefully continue to surpass the mighty accomplishments of its past. Foreword by Alison Mitchell