Two weeks ago, Lauren Winfield-Hill faced a decision: Yorkshire were through to the final stages of the Tier 2 One-Day Cup, which directly clashed with the Women’s Caribbean Premier League that she was due to play in.
Guyana or a freezing cold, rainy September day at New Road? What a choice!
Except that Winfield-Hill is Yorkshire through-and-through – to the extent that, even when it became apparent 18 months ago that they had lost their bid for Tier 1 status to Durham, she still chose to remain with her home county (presumably their automatic promotion into the top tier in 2026 helped sweeten the pill, but even so).
So she stayed in England, and kissed goodbye to something in the region of $16,000.
Last weekend, Winfield-Hill failed to make a definitive contribution with the bat in Yorkshire’s semi-final against Middlesex – leaving Sterre Kalis to bake a cheesecake in her stead.
But in Sunday’s final at Worcester, she made no mistake, racing to a 27-ball half-century as Yorkshire rode roughshod over Glamorgan to win a shortened 20-over match by 9 wickets with 8.4 overs to spare. One-sided isn’t quite the word.
When I asked Winfield-Hill about the WCPL afterwards, she was pretty unequivocal: “I’ve got a long-term contract with Yorkshire, and I’m very loyal to them. And to be honest it was a no brainer – Yorkshire is my priority, that’s why I wanted to stay.”
Minutes after lifting the trophy, surrounded by her Yorkshire teammates and about to crack open the champagne, she added: “It’s a blessing because I get to share these moments with the girls.”
Three years ago, at Lord’s, Winfield-Hill won the Rachael Heyhoe-Flint Trophy with Yorkshire Northern Diamonds. How does this compare?
“It’s a different feeling, it’s a very different group and a different occasion, but it’s really special. Today was about being able to do it when it mattered,” Winfield-Hill said.
It was an interesting decision by Yorkshire to agree to reducing this final down to 20 overs before it began, after consulting with the ECB – in defiance of the playing conditions, which state that if a full game isn’t possible then the trophy will be shared.
Back in June, Yorkshire lost their T20 Blast final to Middlesex by 10 wickets, after putting just 101 on the board. (As a reminder, they were full strength, with both Winfield-Hill and Sterre Kalis in their XI.) Agreeing to foreshorten a 50-over game therefore felt, to me, like something of a gamble.
Winfield-Hill, though, described it as “common sense”: “It was probably going to be one of those where you win the toss, you bowl 50 overs, then you didn’t get to bat, which as a batter really sucks.”
“So it just made sense to make it a T20. Both teams were very much in agreement that we wanted to get a game on today and get a result. You don’t want to share a trophy.’
I must say, I feel slightly uncomfortable about the decision. Yes, it hosed it down at New Road about 10 minutes after the match ended – and it was still raining when we left the ground at 2pm.
But if you aren’t going to follow the playing conditions, what’s the point of having them in the first place?
Once the decision was taken, and agreed by the ECB, the toss became all-important: with heavy rain forecast from 1pm, making it likely that the second innings would be cut short, the team batting second would know exactly what they needed to do to stay ahead of DLS.
In fact, the toss was so critical that when the umpires oversaw it prematurely, and the commentators requested it be repeated so that it could be shown on TV, Winfield-Hill put her foot down and said she wouldn’t redo it “because I’ve already won it” – fair play to her!
As it turned out, Glamorgan’s batting effort – which started so positively – eventually fizzled out, allowing Yorkshire to get ahead of the DLS from the second ball of their chase and stay miles out in front of it the whole way through. Winfield-Hill was in her element: “I strangely quite like the pressure of DLS to frame a chase.”
For Yorkshire, the eventual result was an important one in countering some of the embarrassment felt by both the players and the ECB when they failed to win the Tier 2 Blast back in June.
“A lot of these girls were hurting from that T20 loss,” Winfield-Hill said. “There’s a bit of subconscious, ‘you’re being invested in so you should be producing the goods’. And to be honest, on reflection, in that T20 final, maybe that was a bit of the added pressure as well, that people turned up and, ‘oh Yorkshire are here, they’re paid’. I think a lot of girls felt the pressure of that.”
“Whereas today was just a really nice continuation of what we’ve been doing. I couldn’t wait to rewrite our wrong.”
