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It has been a historic month for women’s cricket with a record-breaking T20 World Cup and first Test at Lord’s, so what is next for the game?
Women’s cricket in England became semi-professional in the 2010s and fully professional in the 2020s. The equivalent stage for men: in the 1870s the game became semi-professional, and in the 1880s fully professional. England’s Test team, in other words, consisted of cricketers who played for their counties in summer and usually toured Australia every other winter.
The nature and standard of England men’s Test cricket did not alter significantly from the 1880s until the late 1920s. The game-changer then was the emergence of pace bowlers from the coal-mines of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire (from 1921 to 1946 inclusive, only Yorkshire, Lancashire and these two counties won the championship). These mines had their own cricket grounds and teams. The most notable of these bowlers were Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, who introduced Bodyline.
The strength and conditioning provided by work in the mines of England is no longer an option for men or women. But they do now have experts in physiology. The 80mph mark will be the next game-changer in England women’s cricket. Shabnim Ismail of South Africa has bowled the fastest ball recorded to date, 82.08mph in the Women’s Premier League in 2024, but surely it is only a matter of time before it becomes a regular occurrence.
England’s Lauren Bell bowled at 70-72mph in the first women’s Test at Lord’s, against India, using the women’s ball, which is about half an ounce lighter. She must be roughly the same speed as England’s male pace bowlers in the 1880s.
Bell’s opening partner, Lauren Filer, has stated her ambition to become the first English female bowler to hit 80mph. We have no data, no measurements, no film footage of bowlers in action from the Victorian era. My guess – I hope an informed guess, based on reading accounts of the time – is that the first male bowler to touch 80mph was the Surrey and England bowler Tom Richardson in the 1890s, and the first to exceed it was the Essex amateur Charlie Kortright. One piece of evidence in Kortright’s case was that he delivered a ball which, after pitching as normal, landed a second time at a distance that was later measured as 63 yards from the stumps.
The marked difference between then and now was the pitches. Any Victorian bowler operating at 70mph, on pitches that were unrolled and exposed to the elements, was physically dangerous: no helmets existed, or thigh pads or chest protectors, while batting gloves were flimsy. Hence male pace bowlers with fearsome nicknames such as George “Tear ‘em” Tarrant and John “Foghorn” Jackson. But they did not play Test cricket: it was a waste of a place if you selected a fast bowler because he could not run in if and when the ground was damp.
Raising the speed of fast bowlers is the surest way to raise the standards of batting, bowling, slip-fielding and wicketkeeping. As well as increased pace, there also needs to be more consistency and accuracy. England lost control of the women’s Test against India in the opening session when, after putting their opponents in, they conceded 122-3 off only 25 overs.
Where England women can look for substantial improvement, in a readily attainable way, is to Australia, where female cricketers often grow up playing other sports. The first teenager to take a hat-trick in the Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL), Caoimhe Bray, whose speed has been timed at 70mph though she is only 16, is also the goalkeeper for the Australia Under-17s football team. Ellyse Perry, the pace-bowling all-rounder and arguably Australia’s leading female cricketer, also represented the Matildas in a Fifa World Cup.
Their superior physicality and athleticism, after a childhood that has included more sport than cricket, can be seen in a WBBL dismissal in which Bray follows through, picks up the ball, swivels and throws down the bowler’s stumps for a run-out. It could also be seen in the T20 World Cup final between England and Australia earlier this month, which Australia won by the margins of seven wickets and 17 balls.
The benefits of playing a range of sports are also evident historically in men’s cricket. The standard of men’s batting rose during the 1880s, not so much because of W. G. Grace, because he was inimitable, as because of the quality of off-driving. Batsmen were coming out of private schools with strong wrists developed in racket sports as well as cricket.
My guess is that Nat Sciver-Brunt, the England women’s captain, would slot seamlessly into a men’s batting line-up of the 1880s. She would have a far broader range of stroke, of course, if she were wearing her helmet. Nobody in a mere cap would risk a reverse-sweep or scoop or ramp.
These days children in England are often encouraged to focus on cricket early, which ignores the advantages of developing skills in different sports that can then be applied to cricket later. Other sports, too, discourage their young players from being diverse in their activities. The Government might consider a law to stop sports bodies forcing young players to confine themselves to one sport before the age of 16.
In other departments of cricket, England’s women are of comparable standard to men at the same stage of professionalism.
Women’s wicketkeeping now might well be better than men’s wicketkeeping back then. Sarah Taylor, currently a fielding coach for the England men’s team, raised the bar a long way when she kept wicket. There is so much coaching and practising nowadays in this department, whereas the men who did the job in days of yore might do little more than buy a steak to shove into their gloves to serve as inners.
The huge amount of white-ball cricket has helped to drive up our contemporary standards: more throw-ins per over to be caught for a start. And wicketkeepers now have to stand up to the stumps to stop Australians, such as Phoebe Litchfield, running down the pitch.
I would also expect the England women’s team of today to have the edge in fielding compared with the men’s team of the 1880s, while Women’s T20 World Cup winners, Australia, would be distinctly superior. There is very little evidence of any form of cricket practice in the 1880s beyond batting and bowling in nets and the middle. Diving in the field to make stops was then unknown, except for a slip catch. Until the 1970s in England, in any format, the crowd would applaud an accurate throw from the boundary, whereas now it is a “non-negotiable”.
Allowances should be made for the fact that no England cricketer in the 19th century could wear spectacles, let alone contact lenses. The England captain Allan Steel averaged 35 with the bat and 20 with the ball in Tests but dropped four catches in one innings in Australia. There was no remedy for his near-sightedness.
No department of the game has evolved or changed so little as left-arm spin. I believe the England men who bowled left-arm spin in the 1880s would recognise Sophie Ecclestone, who took eight wickets in the last Test, as one of their own: the same pace, targeting the stumps. In the bar after a game, though, the likes of Bobby Peel and Johnny Briggs might take her aside to talk about the angle of her wrist, so she can add the slower, wider, flightier ball that spins away from right-handers. Any spinner aged 27, like Ecclestone, is still learning.
Faster bowlers, fleeter footwork in batting, more athleticism bred by other sports: the trajectory of England women’s cricket need not tail off, to judge by men’s experience at a similar stage of evolution.
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