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In England the men’s domestic game tends to flail around incorrigibly, endlessly adding formats and complexity to make itself ever more impenetrable. The women’s game, in contrast, tends to move from one reasoned, accessible structure to another. The sheer frequency of overhauls seems to us the only meaningful attempt to alienate fans.
A few years back, we rather liked the Super League: six regional teams playing 10 games each, then semi-finals and a final. It seemed a really manageable number of teams and games to keep track of and an entirely logical format. We thought the regions were for the most part pretty coherent too.
That ended in 2019 and we then had eight regional teams competing in the Charlotte Edwards Cup and Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy. Again, these competitions had sensible formats (everyone played everyone twice) and again the regional teams were pretty decent in the sense of the areas they represented.
All change
But now that’s gone too. Today is day one of a new, three-tiered domestic competition structure with a fully professional top flight and semi-professionalism below it.
This year, eight ‘Tier 1’ counties will contest the One-Day Cup and T20 Blast. The former is underway and will continue on and off throughout the season into September. The latter steps in to cover June and most of July with The Hundred pushing both competitions aside for the whole of August.
Beneath this, 10 ‘Tier 2’ sides will compete in Division Two of the same competitions, while a dozen more National Counties will join all of these teams in the Women’s County Cup, which is a T20 knock-out competition.
There will be no promotion or relegation for the first three seasons, but after that meritocracy will reign.
Plus points
The big hope here is that the new structure will result in a massive increase in the number of professional women’s players.
More trivially, we are delighted to see that one team has misread their invitation and mistakenly arrived in fancy dress.
Because the eight teams taking part are…
- Durham
- Essex
- Hampshire
- Lancashire
- Somerset
- Surrey
- Warwickshire
- The Blaze
The Blaze are taking on Lancashire in their first match and just from a personal perspective can we say how pleasing it is to see a Lancashire side in the top flight, because the men’s team appears to be faring no better in Division 2 than it was in Divison 1.
They’ve been underwhelming the last couple of seasons, but it’s hard to convey just how far they’re falling short of expectations at this point. As Mike Atherton put it last week: “Lancs following-on to Northants at Old Trafford: My God. If that had happened about 30 years ago we’d have all got the sack.”
No chance of following-on in Division 1 of the Metro Bank One Day Cup, of course. At the time of writing, Lancs have put The Blaze out for 234 before progressing to 110-1 in their chase – so no need for lower order fire-fighting just yet. You can watch it if you want.
The post What in Blazes? English women’s domestic game restarts in (yet) another user-friendly format first appeared on King Cricket.
