Cross: I don't understand why anyone would think about scrapping the Hundred

Back in March, Kate Cross was on a pre-season tour to Mumbai with the Thunder watching the inaugural women's Hundred draft. Since the end of the previous season, she had been plotting Manchester Originals' strategy with their coach Stephen Parry, working out how best to recruit a team that would take them to the play-offs.

Teams were only allowed to retain four players before the draft, but Originals thought they had gamed the system. They kept hold of Sophie Ecclestone, Deandra Dottin, Emma Lamb and Ellie Threlkeld; after signing Laura Wolvaardt with their top draft pick, they would then use their Right-to-Match (RTM) card if anyone tried to sign Cross in the second round.

"We were sure that nobody would even think about signing me," Cross recalls. "I was Manchester captain, and we thought people would assume they would RTM me - which was the plan. I wasn't anticipating going in that top bracket so I was just sat there chatting to Alex Hartley in our room - and then my name popped up in purple."

Northern Superchargers, Originals' Leeds-based rivals, had signed her as a top-bracket, £31,250 pick. With Wolvaardt and Ecclestone already drafted at that salary, Originals were powerless to prevent it. Cross, a proud Mancunian, didn't know how to react; her Thunder team-mates welcomed her onto the bus the following morning by chanting: "Yorkshire! Yorkshire!"

Five months down the line, Cross' accidental move across the Pennines could hardly have worked out better. While Originals missed out on the play-offs for the third successive season, Superchargers won six of their eight group games and will play in Saturday's eliminator at The Oval.

She has twice turned out against Originals, with the Hundred structured so that designated 'rivals' play each other twice. "It wasn't horrendously weird, but you see all your team-mates as opposition for the first time: I was suddenly bowling at Emma Lamb and thinking, how am I going to get her out?"

Superchargers' opponents on Saturday are Welsh Fire, meaning Cross will come up against Hartley, her best friend and podcast co-host who is retiring from professional cricket at the end of the competition: "If we win, I'll have been there for my best friend's final game; if they beat us, I'll get to see her play at Lord's in a final."

Having covered the tournament extensively as a broadcaster as well as playing in it, Cross has seen more of the Hundred first-hand than almost anyone. She believes it has been "absolutely incredible" for both the profile and the standard of women's cricket, and is baffled by continued speculation about the tournament's future.

"I don't understand it," Cross says. "I don't know where that speculation is coming from: it doesn't seem to be the ECB and Sky certainly don't know anything about it, and they've obviously paid the broadcast bill for it. From my point of view, it's just carried on gaining the momentum that has been building over the last year.

"The crowds have grown and the standard of cricket has been better: the boundaries have been pushed out further but the average score has still managed to go up. From my point of view, it doesn't really matter what the format is, as long as you've got that element of the men and the women playing at the same grounds, on the same pitches.

"It has done so, so much for the women's game. That's what winds me up the most about people who don't buy into it. If you actually speak to people that are in the ground, so many people say what a great day out they've had but I don't think that gets reported on. The people who don't go to the games and don't like it seem to have a louder opinion than actually the people that are there."

The most familiar argument against the Hundred is that it has relegated men's county cricket to secondary status during August. "That's standard, isn't it?" Cross says. "The first thought in everyone's brain is, 'what does it do to men's cricket?' When actually, what it's done for women's cricket has been incredible. It's getting players prepared to play on the big stage.

"I don't understand why anyone would think about getting rid of that. You just want to shake the people that are saying they need to get rid of it… it just winds me up. Some people obviously have their frustrations with it, but from my point of view, it's been great."

The tournament has also given Cross the opportunity to prove herself in short-form cricket. Four years after her most recent T20I cap for England, she is part of their squad to play Sri Lanka immediately after the Hundred and says she "started to pick up a bit of rhythm" at the end of the group stages.

"I've not played a T20 for England since 2019 but I feel like I've been really close. I've not bowled as well as I could this summer - even through the Ashes, I didn't feel I was at my best - but in the last couple of games for the Chargers, I've felt a lot more threatening; back to where I was a year ago."

That should bode well for Superchargers on Saturday, as they look to set up a final against Southern Brave at Lord's 24 hours later. "We've been pretty clinical," Cross says, "and a Lord's final would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?"