But after that, progress didn’t come as quickly as she’d imagined. The Kia Super League helped raise the level of women’s cricket, but matches were not regularly televised and players were not full-time professionals.
Until the end of 2020, there were only 16 full-time professional contracts in women’s cricket, reserved for England internationals.
Hartley says it is “remarkable” that it took so long for England to return to Lord’s as well. Between 2008 and 2014, one women’s international was played every year. A win at the World Cup should only have strengthened the women’s team’s claim to play in the “Home of Cricket”, but instead the 2017 final was their only appearance at Lord’s in the past eight years.
Until this summer, the women had only played one home game on a men’s test field since that groundbreaking day five years ago. “It’s like we’re now pushing the fact that England are playing at Lord’s and it’s an incredible moment – but should it be?” says Hartley.
‘You just feel part of this huge community’
There are signs that will change, as an MCC spokesperson told ESPNcricinfo in January that it was “working closely with the ECB to bring international women’s cricket back to Lord’s on an annual basis”.
Lydia Greenway, who has appeared in 14 Tests, 126 ODIs and 85 T20 internationals for England, is delighted to be back at Lord’s as well. In 2017 she recently retired and commented on the final and her strongest memory remains that of the audience. “I was at the Women’s European Championship final to watch the Lionesses and it felt like that day at Lord’s,” she says. “I looked around and it was like that feeling when you found your tribe. Wembley, like Lord’s, was full of female sports enthusiasts. You just feel part of this huge community.”
Looking at the odds in domestic cricket now, both she and Hartley agree that the women’s game is on its way to where they want to be, with the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy and Charlotte Edwards Cup working alongside the Hundred to close the odds. enlarge. The restructuring of the ECB into a regional format allowed women’s academies to develop, and at the elite level, the second season of the hundreds of thousands this year saw an average of 10,400 spectators per game. Edgbaston also attracted an impressive crowd at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
“Looking back to when I made my England debut when I was 17, I wasn’t nearly as well-known when it comes to the level of cricket the girls are playing now,” said Greenway. “That’s why it’s so nice to see them really make the best of everything they get.”
How and why did the Women’s Hundred avoid the second season’s slump?
While the men’s competition struggled to raise the bar or capture the imagination, the women’s version was a success
By Tim Wigmore
If the second season’s syndrome was inescapable in this year’s Hundred of Men, it happily escaped the women’s league. Despite the tournament being watered down by the Commonwealth Games, this year’s hundred could claim to have beaten last year’s.
With a higher caliber of foreign players, the quality of cricket improved. Even with 10 games less, the most notable stats were also positive: Compared to 2021, this year’s women’s league saw more sixes. Most importantly, more fans came to watch: 271,000 in total, an average of 10,400 per game.
Perhaps the best indication of the Hundred’s evolution came in the final: not on the field, but off it. For Oval Invincibles, Dane van Niekerk, the official team captain and player of last year’s final match, watched from the sidelines: not because she was injured, but because she didn’t get into the sidelines. Van Niekerk fell victim to a change in the rules for foreign players. Like last year, teams could only place three foreign players in their 11th place, but they could now sign four at a time, meaning a once illustrious international player would now have to miss out.