The new elite women’s domestic structure which replaces county cricket officially gets off the ground on Saturday, with the first round of matches taking place in the one-off 50-over Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy.
The Trophy is being contested by the eight new regional women’s teams which broadly align geographically with the Hundred sides, and which are formed of conglomerations of counties. While six of the regional team names have carried over from the Kia Super League – including Western Storm (which covers the south-west and Wales), Southern Vipers (Hampshire and Sussex), South East Stars (Surrey and Kent), Lightning (which covers the east Midlands), Thunder (Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria) and Northern Diamonds (Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland) – two are brand new. The West Midlands side which will feature players from Warwickshire and Worcestershire, for example, will be known as the Central Sparks.
The eight teams – split into a North group and a South group – will each be in action twice across the bank holiday weekend, going on to play in four further matches, with the top team in each group progressing to a final at Edgbaston on 27 September, which will be televised live on Sky Sports. The matches are all taking place behind closed doors at first-class men’s county grounds, with action on Saturday at Chelmsford, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge and Beckenham.
While the England players will be available for the first two rounds before re-entering a separate biosecure bubble for their series against West Indies, the competition is being viewed largely as a development opportunity for younger, less-established players to make their mark – a sentiment echoed by Trevor Griffin, head coach of the new Sunrisers team, which is based at Lord’s and covers Middlesex, Essex and Northamptonshire.
Griffin, who previously won the KSL twice as head coach of Western Storm, said: “If we go back to March, there was real concern that we wouldn’t see any cricket at all. It’s a real bonus.
“I want to focus on building the future of the Sunrisers, and developing these players ready for full competition next year. This [new setup] gives me the opportunity to work with players all year round. A lot of these players have got ambitions to play for England and this is an opportunity to help them achieve that.”
While the competition is a one-off, designed to allow the teams a chance to play competitive cricket despite Covid-19 disruptions, the new regional set-up is a permanent move away from the now defunct Women’s County Championship and is aimed at professionalising the domestic structure. Twenty-five of the players across the eight squads are currently on professional “retainer” contracts, with 15 more to be added to the payroll in October. All players are being paid match fees to participate.
The establishment of the new structure has been overseen by eight regional directors of women’s cricket, who were appointed pre-lockdown but have had to move at speed in recent weeks to ensure that their sides have full cohorts of coaching staff in place before the competition commences. Many of those involved have long pedigrees in the women’s game: Laura MacLeod, who represented England between 1997 and 2007, is the regional director of the Sparks, while the former England captain Charlotte Edwards has taken up the mantle as head coach of Southern Vipers.
The competition has been named in honour of one of the pioneers of women’s cricket, the former England captain Heyhoe Flint, who died in 2017. She was the driving force behind the first Women’s Cricket World Cup in 1973 and went on to lead a successful campaign for women’s admission to membership of the MCC in the 1990s.
