ECB girls's cricket restructure has 16 counties bidding for 8 groups in 2025

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16 of the 18 top quality counties have bid for one in every of 8 skilled girls’s groups in a made over England and Wales home pageant beginning subsequent season.

Worcestershire and Derbyshire are the one two golf equipment amongst the ones invited to gentle who’ve showed that they didn’t bid for a Tier 1 workforce beneath the brand new construction.

Essex and Glamorgan made formal bulletins on Wednesday whilst Surrey, Lancashire, Sussex, Hampshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire all showed this week that they’d lodged tenders with the ECB.

Middlesex showed a bid on Monday, which had won “the whole improve of Marylebone Cricket Membership”. MCC, which owns Middlesex’s house floor, Lord’s, and used to be additionally invited to bid for a workforce, have no longer submitted a suggestion of their very own.

It’s understood counties will likely be notified imminently of interview slots for the following level of the method, with the ones interviews to happen via the top of March.

In February, the ECB invited all 18 top quality counties plus MCC to gentle for probably the most Tier 1 golf equipment in a transfer clear of the present regional construction which started in 2020. Recently, groups contesting the 20-over Charlotte Edwards Cup and 50-over Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy fall beneath central ECB regulate and in large part surround multiple county. Via aligning groups extra carefully with current counties – and their males’s groups – the ECB is looking for to deal with an identification disaster that has troubled one of the most regional groups with possession, accountability and governance moving to the golf equipment.

First class counties no longer awarded Tier 1 standing, plus all Nationwide Counties, will likely be invited to participate in a procedure to decide the makeup of Tier 2 and three competitions, comprising 10-14 groups and 16-20 groups respectively.

In spite of there being no plans for promotion or relegation from 2025-28, Derbyshire have taken a longer-term view, electing to “pursue the established order of a sustainable Tier 2 girls’s construction, one which can optimistically develop into Tier 1 standing” in long run. Derbyshire have hosted coaching for current regional girls’s workforce the Blaze over the wintry weather and staged no less than one England Girls’s world fixture annually for the previous seven seasons. In 2020, Derby hosted all 5 T20Is towards West Indies which comprised the England Girls’s world season amid the preliminary wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Explaining the membership’s place, Derbyshire leader government Ryan Duckett stated: “Derbyshire makes up 9% of the inhabitants of the Midlands, but 26% of ladies’s cricket that used to be performed around the area within the closing yr concerned a workforce from the county. There also are 3 avid gamers within the present senior England squad who’ve come in the course of the Derbyshire pathway, which has been led via the Derbyshire Cricket Basis, and we will be able to proceed to improve additional luck on this house.

“Our ambitions for floor construction come with enhanced coaching amenities underpinning a strong pathway construction, in addition to expanding seating capability to fulfill call for and make sure the membership keeps its standing as a bunch venue for world girls’s cricket… After truthful evaluate, we felt that within the quick time period, as a standalone county, it’ll were very important to compromise what’s lately being delivered as a collective around the area and subsequently consider this choice is in the most efficient passion of the sport.”

Worcestershire CEO Ashley Giles instructed the membership’s podcast: “At this level it might simply be extra a investment and a useful resource factor for us. Even in floor amenities, converting amenities, apply wickets, it might be truly difficult for us.

“However the following procedure from right here will likely be Tier 2 or even Tier 3 and undoubtedly we’re going to be into that. And, for us, we host the Central Sparks at the moment, which is the regional workforce, however we even have the Girls’s Rapids and I am very prepared that we begin to expand that workforce in order that after we come to these subsequent ranges, Tier 2 for instance, that we are able to move.”

The ECB will make investments no less than £1.3 million according to yr into each and every of the 8 Tier 1 groups, a share of which will likely be ring-fenced for participant salaries, sports activities science and medication and skill pathways. There will likely be no mandated minimal monetary dedication sought from the counties, who’re anticipated to stipulate their projected funding as a part of the gentle procedure.

The prevailing areas – South East Stars, Thunder, Sunrisers, Central Sparks, Western Hurricane, the Blaze, Northern Diamonds and Southern Vipers – will stay for the 2024 season.

Valkerie Baynes is a normal editor, girls’s cricket, at ESPNcricinfo

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