The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) pronounces the following stage within the evolution of ladies’s cricket with the creation of a three-tiered home competitors construction and a shift within the possession mannequin underpinning the ladies’s skilled sport.
As well as, the ECB has additionally confirmed that it’s going to make investments an additional £4m-£5m per yr into the ladies’s skilled sport from 2025-2028, taking the annual funding on this house to £16m.
Beneath the plans, the prevailing eight girls’s Regional groups (presently hosted by FCCs in a collaborative Regional Mannequin) will evolve to develop into eight girls’s skilled ‘Tier 1 Golf equipment’ – every owned, ruled, and operated by a person First Class County (FCC) or Marylebone Cricket Membership (MCC).
These eight golf equipment will compete within the prime degree of an expanded three-tiered girls’s home construction – taking part within the ECB’s girls’s skilled T20 and 50-over competitions – from the 2025 season.
The 18 FCCs and MCC have due to this fact every now obtained an invite to tender to develop into a girls’s Tier 1 Membership and have till 10 March 2024 to submit a bid.
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Following the conclusion of the tender course of, it’s anticipated that FCCs who weren’t awarded Tier 1 standing and, individually, all Nationwide Counties will likely be invited to be concerned in a course of to find out the composition of Tier 2 and Tier 3 within the new-look girls’s home competitors construction.
It’s anticipated that the result of this course of will likely be confirmed by September 2024, able to launch the developed girls’s home construction in full in 2025.
During the 2025-2028 seasons all three tiers will likely be ‘closed’, with no promotion or relegation.
The three-tier construction goals to construct on the affect of the Regional Mannequin, which has accelerated efficiency ranges inside girls’s cricket and laid strong foundations, to additional develop the depth and attain of the ladies’s skilled sport.
ECB Chief Govt Officer Richard Gould mentioned: “Since 2020, by means of the appearance of the ladies’s Regional Mannequin, we’ve got seen important progress within the professionalisation of ladies’s cricket, however we’re nonetheless solely simply scratching the floor of its potential.
“To proceed transferring ahead, and to make cricket a gender-balanced sport, we’d like a change within the possession mannequin and governance construction underpinning the ladies’s skilled sport.
“This invitation to tender and the uplift in funding due to this fact represents our subsequent step: a step that may embed the possession of our eight girls’s skilled groups inside the sport, drive accountability, and elevate the standing of ladies’s home cricket to allow it to go additional, develop quicker and attain its full potential.”
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ECB Director of Ladies’s Skilled Sport Beth Barrett-Wild mentioned: “The tempo and nature of change inside the girls’s cricket panorama during the last ten years, however particularly the final 5, has been speedy and transformational.
“The variety of alternatives for women and girls to entry the game has by no means been higher, and the variety of folks following and falling in love with the ladies’s sport has by no means been larger.
“We consider that the following chapter is much less in regards to the separate transformation of ladies’s cricket and extra about the entire sport evolving collectively.
“The invitation to tender issued to all 18 of our FCCs and MCC at this time to progress the possession and governance of our eight girls’s skilled groups, together with the numerous enlargement of the ladies’s home competitors construction from 2025 and uplift in funding, symbolize essential subsequent steps in cricket evolving into the game we wish it to be.
“One with equality of alternative for women and men, girls and boys, to really feel like it’s a sport for them.”