In the end, the first ever Vitality Blast Finals Day weekend was the story of the haves and the have-nots of women’s cricket.
Let’s start with Saturday. The disaster of Tier 2 Finals Day at Northampton has been well documented by Polly Starkie: a chaotic affair where there was no indoor seating for written press, one coffee truck which closed as the final was just getting underway, players apparently being randomly ejected from dressing rooms, and a lack of effort made to properly cover the square when rain fell during the first semi-final.
This was Finals Day done on the cheap, with no thought given to the player or the spectator experience. Here’s Polly and I talking about in on this week’s CRICKETher Weekly:
Contrast that with Sunday at The Oval, where the Tier 1 event was a roaring success. 5,761 fans showed up (a record for a women’s domestic T20 game), many sporting pink Vitality bucket hats, on a day of fireworks, face-painting and a twist on the traditional Mascots Race: a Mascots Hungry Hippo competition.
Kirstie Gordon, whose Blaze side lost the semi-final against Bears after winning the last Lottie Cup at Derby a year ago, was well-placed to contrast 2025 with 2024:
“[Derby] was a bit of a shambles wasn’t it? There was no food van. Fair play to everyone at The Oval and the ECB for today’s event. We’ve had a really good crowd in, it looks like there’s loads of activations going on round the venue for the kids and all sorts. That’s awesome. You look at the success that The Hundred’s had and it does all these things – that’s how we can start pushing that into days like this.”
In typical Kirstie fashion, she also found the time to express support for her Tier 2 counterparts, who hadn’t been quite so lucky:
“It’s a bit sad to hear that the Tier 2 final yesterday had a bit of a non-event with similar things [to Derby] – we need to start filtering that [The Oval event] down and make it a showcase event.”
Issy Wong was Player of the Match in that first semi-final, but hot on her heels was Sterre Kalis, who struck 45 from 33 balls after becoming perhaps the first player ever to feature in back-to-back Finals Days for two different sides.
Kalis explained after the semi-final that she had hot-footed it down from Northampton to London in an Uber on Saturday night: “I’m still Yorkshire’s player, but at the same time I want to try and win this with the Bears as well.”
There has been much debate about whether Kalis’s back-and-forth this season between Bears (where she is on loan) and Yorkshire (where she is a contracted player) is exploiting an unfortunate loophole in the loans system, which was actually designed to allow fringe Tier 1 players the chance to get some cricket instead of sitting on the sidelines.
But one thing you can’t dispute is Kalis’s commitment – to Yorkshire, to Warwickshire, and to women’s cricket. The Dutch-born Kalis doesn’t have the chance to make big bucks by representing her home nation in World Cups, so she takes her chances where she can get them, even when that means paying an exorbitant amount to take a taxi 70 miles down the road in order to play four matches in two days.
It’s difficult not to contrast that with the notable absence of England players Nat Sciver-Brunt and Amy Jones from what was designed to be a showpiece event in the new women’s calendar.
I’ll quote Kirstie Gordon again here: “That was their choice not to play today.” And when pressed on exactly whose choice (the ECB’s or Amy and Nat’s), she clarified: “The players’ choice.”
The ECB’s hastily-issued statement 10 minutes later explaining that both players had been “rested… to manage schedules and workload” was too little, too late: Kirstie’s responses, in a tone which conveyed her disdain about the decision, told the real story.
Surrey, of course, were the real winners this weekend, romping home in the final against Bears by 5 wickets with 20 balls to spare, in front of a raucous home crowd. If you want to talk about haves and have-nots, it’s worth a look at a recent report into the financial health of domestic cricket in England & Wales, which puts Surrey right at the top of a new Financial Performance Index. This season, they funded three bonus contracts for their women’s team, in addition to the funding provided by the ECB.
So where are we with women’s cricket, after the first big test of the ECB’s decision to rejig the domestic system in order to align with the men’s counties? Yet again, it seems that taking a big leap forward for one group of players hasn’t yet permeated downwards throughout the rest of the game.
It’s up to all of us, even as we celebrate the big, glorious steps forward, to continue to hold power to account on behalf of the ones who are still being left behind.
