What next for England after their World Cup triumph?
When you reach the summit, where do you go next? That is the challenge the England team have to face after winning the World Cup in unimaginable style on Sunday afternoon. Coach Mark Robinson admitted at Lord’s on Monday afternoon that his England team are “into the unknown” now, “experiencing this for the first time.”
But all they can do is keep moving forward. Not just to the Ashes in Australia, in October and November, but towards a better future for women’s cricket in England and around the world. The England team know what an opportunity this is now, having captured so much attention from female cricket fans all over the country this month. The ECB cannot let this go.
There is a domestic game to grow here and after the world cup winners have all been given 10 days off, they will return to prepare for the Super League, a six-team Twenty20 competition starting on 10 August and ending in Hove on 1 September.
Robinson will take the 18 centrally contracted players at Loughborough and work them hard in preparation for their tiring winter. “After that time off we have to do some hard yards to get things going again,” he said at Lord’s on Monday. “The players give everything, which is nice, and we will have a different focus with three formats for the Ashes. Once you start looking forward again it gets exciting.”
England will play three ODIs, one Test and then three T20s out in Australia in October and November, a chance to test themselves against a side who underperformed this month and could not even reach Sunday’s final.
Then, in December and January is the Women’s Big Bash League, proven to be a huge success in Australia so far. The challenge for Robinson and the ECB is to get more cricket into the calendar, to continue to test the women’s team in an elite environment as often as possible. “We are desperately trying to organise something in March [2018], after the Big Bash, which is proving difficult,” Robinson said. “We want to play India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, where you can possibly rest Brunty [Katherine Brunt] and play some other people, get them experience. We need more tight games because sometimes losing is, not great, but it allows you to re-evaluate where people are. We’ve got to get someone to give us a game.”
The success of the England women’s team this month was a triumph for the professionalization of the English game, and the time and resources they can now give to their elite players. But as Anya Shrubsole said, the fact that this team combines the enthusiasm of the amateur era with the coaching of professionalism makes it the best of both worlds.
“When I started playing obviously it wasn't professional, we met up once every three or four weekends up in Loughborough,” Shrubsole remembered. “I genuinely didn't think, even back then, it would be where it is now in nine or 10 years. That's actually one of the really good things about women's sport. It is going through a bit of a changing period now, where people will come in as professionals. But we all genuinely play it for the love of the game because we never came into it being money-driven."
Tammy Beaumont said that financial incentives are “in the back of our minds, somewhere”, as they always would be. But she repeated Shrubsole’s point, that this is an England team built on passion, for whom professionalism is just an extra help.
“The thing with our group at the moment, none of us started playing cricket as a career,” she said. “We did it because we loved the game and I think you see that on the pitch, we still love the game and being able to do it for a job is a dream come true.”
These players are famous now, without even wanting to be, and Beaumont knows the responsibilities that will entail. “This is probably going to be a bit of a landmark moment for women’s cricket in England,” she said. “But that’s a by-product, not something that any of us are aiming for.”
That is where England have ended up, though, as they knew as they celebrated with the trophy on Sunday evening. “Going on the lap of honour and seeing how many kids stayed around, with their mothers telling us how we had inspired their children, that was brilliant to see,” Natalie Sciver said. “That was one of the goals of the tourmanet and it exceeded those expectations. It is a brilliant opportunity for cricket to grow.”