Yorkshire Post

ECB snub Yorkshire by choosing Durham to run the Diamonds

- Nick Westby SPORTS EDITOR

YORKSHIRE have lost control of the Northern Diamonds after the England and Wales Cricket Board chose Durham to run the club – but a women’s team will be coming back to Yorkshire in 2027.

The ECB has selected Durham County Cricket Club over Yorkshire to operate the Diamonds from next season as one of eight ‘Tier 1 Clubs’ in the country.

Yorkshire have been dropped into Tier 2, which is a mixture of firstclass and national counties, and will relinquish any control of a team that played 60 per cent of its home games at Headingley.

However, Yorkshire will join

Glamorgan as an expansion team in 2027 as part of a plan to extend the league to 12 teams by 2029.

Yorkshire and Durham have been jointly responsibl­e for running the Diamonds since 2020 when the ECB merged the two as part of a restructur­e of the women’s game into eight regional hubs - and will continue in that responsibi­lity for the 2024 season which begins on Saturday.

But the ECB announced this winter that it is restructur­ing the women’s game again, creating a threetiere­d approach headed by eight women’s profession­al ‘Tier 1 Clubs’ – each owned, governed and operated by an individual First-Class County (FCC) or Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Teams in Tiers 2 and 3 will effectivel­y be feeder, regional hubs.

It pitched Yorkshire and Durham against one another in a bid to take the Diamonds forward.

Durham made their bid public in early March. Yorkshire were not so forthcomin­g with publicisin­g their intentions but were keen to continue building on the work they have already done in women’s cricket.

At present there are 160 women and girls’ cricket clubs in Yorkshire fielding 313 teams between them, while 446 girls took part in Yorkshire winter observatio­ns and a further 2,216 girls participat­ed in national programmes last year. But from 2025, a two-year absence of an end point for that talent pipeline could have damaging repercussi­ons for girls cricket.

Joining Durham in Tier 1 from 2025 are Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Nottingham­shire, Somerset, Surrey and Warwickshi­re.

The ECB says they will commit £3m in funding to Yorkshire for the team from 2027.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom