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It’s Piccadilly Circus. It’s candy pink and dayglow green. It’s 19‑year‑old Davina Perrin being bought by the Birmingham Phoenix for £50,000 a couple of years after she has graduated from Ebony Rainford Brent’s ACE programme. It’s the former Leicestershire fast bowler Charles Dagnall in skinny jeans with an iPad and an interactive screen.
It’s Hero Players. It’s Vitality Wild Cards. It’s Sophie Devine and Beth Mooney being signed for £210,000, which is more than the entire women’s squad earned between them when the Hundred launched in 2021. It’s English cricket’s first player auction.
It’s that Richard Madley off Bargain Hunt with a gavel and a silk handkerchief in his top pocket, it’s a grand total of 2,667 people watching a YouTube live stream. It’s the teams’ in‑house content creators filming TikTok interviews with their bosses in a “brand performance space” at the centre of a part of London no Londoners go to unless they absolutely have to.
It’s the bright, brilliant, inclusive future of English cricket. And it’s a room full of men sitting around weighing the relative merits of young women so they can bid against each other for their services in a competitive auction.
Wait. Is that last one right?
Unfortunately, yes. It was a historic day for female cricket players. England’s Dani Gibson has become one of the best-paid sportswomen in the country after being brought for £190,000. But it wasn’t a historic day for female cricket coaches, analysts, administrators or franchise owners, who were mostly missing from the scene.
Among the 60-odd people in the room, a dozen of them were women and two of the team’s tables were entirely male. Whichever way you cut it, it was an odd look on the first day of the new era of the competition.
“It is really disappointing seeing one female senior coach in this competition,” said that one female senior coach, MI London’s Lisa Keightley. “I hope that changes over time. There’s some really good female coaches that will be disappointed not to be involved. But I will keep flying the flag.
“We have another female coach coming in as assistant. I would hope that once we get to the competition to see more females involved in those sorts of roles.”
There are a couple. Anya Shrubsole is working with the Southern Brave. “I really hope it will change,” she said. “Similarly to the playing side of things it will probably take some time for those coaches to come through. It is a chicken‑and‑egg situation. I wouldn’t want to be there if someone didn’t think I was good enough, but I was there just because I was a woman. But, equally, in order to be good enough you have to be given an opportunity.”
“Me and Anya, we love what we are doing,” says Sarah Taylor, who is working with the Manchester Super Giants. “But naturally we would like to see more people doing it, too. I’d like to think it will change. The more girls that are playing in the professional game, that are privy to these environments, then the more girls will have the knowledge for them to want to come back and coach or be part of the set-up in another role. I hope more people will go in that direction.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. The Women’s Rugby World Cup held in Britain last year was led by an entirely female executive team, who organised a final that featured an entirely female refereeing team and an entirely female groundstaff. But a loss of control over things such as this is part of what English cricket paid in return for all the money it has made by allowing private investors to take control of the teams. It was conspicuous, too, that neither of the Pakistani players in the auction were bought.
One of them, Sadia Iqbal, is No 1 in the world international T20 bowling rankings and the other, Fatima Sana, was the top scorer in a series against South Africa. There are reasons. A lot of the 32 spaces available to overseas players filled up before the auction and neither Sana nor Iqbal has played in the Hundred before.
But after all the controversy about the shadow ban on Pakistani players by the Hundred’s Indian team owners, and given the importance of the British-Pakistani population in English cricket, it was hard to avoid feeling the tension between what English cricket has earned from private investment and what it has sold.
The prices will be higher on Thursday, when it is the men’s turn. Given there are 14 Pakistani players involved, and six in the heroes list of the top 50 players, the stakes will be higher too.
