Fear of change stalks women's Hundred after five years of progress

It feels like the only constant in women's cricket in England and Wales over the past five years has been change.

A successful short-format competition was ripped up, reimagined and merged with a corresponding men's tournament. A separate regional competition was established to stage the two traditional white-ball formats, then it was thrown out and realigned with established counties and their men's teams.

Unsettling? Certainly. Bad? Surely not.

The regional domestic T20 and 50-over competitions introduced unprecedented professionalism to the women's game in this country amid ongoing expansion which will continue into 2029 after becoming a county-based format as of this year.

The Kia Super League was the T20 predecessor to the Women's Hundred and only lasted four seasons from 2016 to 2019, but the Hundred has introduced a new audience to cricket, attracted some of the biggest names in the sport and offered salaries ranging from £10,000 to £65,000 for a month's work (more on that later).

So it's with a mixture of excitement, trepidation and uncertainty that many women's players are anticipating changes to the Hundred under private ownership, which will affect the men's teams too.

The new Hundred board meets today, less than 24 hours after Northern Superchargers won a maiden women's title and Oval Invincibles lifted the men's trophy for a third straight time.

As defeated captain, Southern Brave's Georgia Adams would like to change plenty about Sunday's women's final at Lord's, played before a record crowd of 22,542, but she is wary of the changes already in motion.

Renaming teams, "resetting" squads and possibly reverting to a T20 format eventually have all been mooted and it's understandable that the women's teams are apprehensive about tinkering with a product that has been upheld as a huge success story, for them in particular.

"Everyone feels like it's just starting to take off and then we keep changing things, that's been what's gone on in the women's game in the last few years," Adams said. "Every time we see something really start to take off and work and flourish, it then gets changed or altered again. Hopefully they don't change too much, but we'll just have to wait and see what's thrown at us."

Hampshire-based Brave have qualified for four women's finals in the five-year history of the Hundred, winning the title in 2023 before falling to the bottom of the table in 2024 and bouncing back to runners-up this year.

Plans to reconfigure squads are less foreign to the women, whose squads were overhauled after the second season of the Hundred while the Invincibles men have maintained a consistent group of core players.

A bid to reduce predictability in results, possibly through switching from a draft to a WPL/IPL-style player auction, also isn't unusual.

"We've got a really great group of people and we're really comfortable and confident in the group we've got moving forward," Adams said. "I think it's highly unlikely we'll be able to keep the majority of this group together.

"There's going to be some changes, but I think that's to be expected now in franchise cricket… the nature of what we're doing now in this day and age is you've just got to roll with what's happening, roll with the changes, be open to change."

It's understandable for players to be protective of competition that, in Adams' words, "put us on the map".

Figures released by the ECB on Sunday show that of the 2.5 million people to have attended the Hundred in its first five years, 1.5 million of them went to a women's game and 203,000 bought tickets to their first-ever cricket match. Some 349,401 people attended the women's competition this year, a record for total attendance at a women's cricket competition.

Over the weekend, the Hundred showed off its platform for unearthing new talent through 18-year-old Davina Perrin, who scored a scintillating 42-ball century for Superchargers in the Eliminator, witnessed by 13,623 at The Oval.

For players like Adams, who is 31 and has played just twice for her country, the Hundred has offered salaries, recognition and longevity that none of them dreamed of at the beginning of their careers.

"It's amazing for me as a domestic cricketer, not an England player, to go to the local shop and get stopped by people saying, 'we're loving watching you this summer'," she said.

"It's been so important for women's sport and providing free-to-air games, every game on YouTube, and young female cricketers having role models that they can actively see and watch.

"Clare Connor was one of my biggest role models and I don't think I ever saw her play a game of cricket. But she was my role model because of what she'd done for the game, and I think having people in front of you, seeing that, watching that is so important."

Similarly, Nicola Carey, who is also 31 and flew into the Hundred as a late replacement for injured fellow Australian Georgia Wareham, has expanded her opportunities after a 50-game international career ended in 2022. Her unbroken 60-run partnership with Annabel Sutherland took Superchargers over the finish line on Sunday.

"This group's been together for a few years now and it's such a good group," Carey said. "It'd be a shame to pick that apart and get other people in, because they've got a good thing going. I'd love to see them stick together a bit longer and see what else they can do in the next few years."

Lauren Winfield-Hill expressed similar concerns when the new three-tier women's domestic county competition launched this year, which followed the Hundred's model of aligning women's teams with the men's at the existing counties.

"They've tinkered with women's cricket enough now," Winfield-Hill told ESPNcricinfo earlier this year. "We've had that many structures, that many leagues, the Super League, then we've had the Hundred, then we've had regional, then we've had county.

"I just hope this is the last of the tinkering and you can really build something. That's the biggest challenge, how things have changed so frequently, you're trying to build a core of players and get roles, and players are finding places to live and all this sort of stuff. Just leave it alone now."

Many reservations centre on the fear of the unknown. Unless the ECB and new franchise owners communicate effectively with players, it will abound.

Nat Sciver-Brunt, the England captain, last month called for the Hundred to maintain its momentum and "sense of belonging" in the women's game under new ownership. "More investment should help both the men's side and the women's side," she told the BBC. "We don't know the details of what that will look like and what's going to happen, but I'm sure that it will be really positive."

The growth of the women's game had been the standout good news story of the Hundred. However, the valuations that teams attracted during the sale process - ranging from £275 million for London Spirit to £79 million for Sciver-Brunt's Trent Rockets - has overshadowed that narrative.

Of the four IPL franchises who own stakes in Hundred teams, only the Ambani-family-run Mumbai Indians, now partnered with Oval Invincibles, and Delhi Capitals, who have bought into Southern Brave, have WPL sides.

The revenue from the Hundred's sale is set to be divided between counties, the MCC and recreational cricket. Salaries in the Hundred are also expected to rise, with figures yet to be confirmed. But in lieu of detail on the split between men's and women's set-ups, there is a fear that the sums offered to the women will be mere scraps from the men's table.

The PCA are pushing for a narrowing of the gender salary gap but the gulf remains stark as of 2025, when the top earners in the men's competition received a 60% increase to £200,000, compared to a 30% rise in the top women's bracket to £65,000.

As long as the women who form an integral part of the competition are heard and included, there is no reason why they can't benefit from the huge levels of investment in their teams and be rewarded for their part in growing the game. For the sake of the progress that the women's game has made over the past five years, they simply must be.