England Women get match charges hike to be equal with England Men

England’s girls cricketers are to obtain equal match charges to their male counterparts, starting with Friday’s first T20I towards Sri Lanka, following an explosion of curiosity within the format this summer season, together with record-breaking crowds of 110,000 over the course of seven Ashes matches in June and July.

The ICEC report, which discovered that the common England Women’s wage was 20.6% of their male equivalents (the ECB considers this determine nearer to 30%), additionally set targets for equalising pay at home degree by 2029 and for internationals by 2030.

Heather Knight, England Women’s captain, mentioned the primary steps had been vital in making cricket an “increasingly attractive” profession possibility for ladies and younger girls entering into the sport.

“It’s really important that we continue to drive the women’s game forward and it’s fantastic to see equal match fees for England Women and England Men,” she mentioned. “The direction of travel for the women’s game has always been the most important thing, creating a sustainable product that people want to watch and play, and I’m sure this will make cricket an increasingly attractive sport to girls and young women as we continue to grow the game.

“I might additionally wish to thank the PCA and England Women’s Player Partnership for his or her assist in representing the gamers and the expansion of the skilled sport.”

The multi-format Ashes series saw new attendance records for women’s matches set consecutively at Edgbaston, the Kia Oval and Lord’s, the first ever sold-out women’s ODI series and an overall increase in tickets sales of more than 200% from 2019.

Richard Gould, the ECB’s chief executive officer, said: “This summer season’s thrilling Metro Bank Women’s Ashes collection demonstrated how girls’s cricket is continuous to develop at tempo on this nation, with document attendances and TV viewing. Growing the ladies’s and women’ sport is a key precedence for us, and in recent times we now have significantly elevated funding each in constructing a home girls’s construction to supply the gamers of the longer term, and in rising participant rewards.

“In the years ahead, we will continue to invest ahead of revenues. We are currently considering all the recommendations made by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, but equalising match fees is one immediate step we are pleased to make now. We all want cricket to be the team sport of choice for female athletes, and with the investments we are making – and increasingly lucrative opportunities around the world – we are seeing cricketers become some of the highest earning female athletes in UK team sports. However, we know there is still much further to go as we ultimately strive for equality across the game.

“As we proceed to develop girls’s cricket, we are going to proceed to give attention to making thought of investments that stretch far and large throughout the ladies’s cricket buildings, delivering a thriving, worthwhile and future-proofed sport.”

Knight agreed with that sentiment, adding that the objective now was to ensure that girls get an equal opportunity to make a career in cricket, by hitting those targets for equal pay throughout the sport’s pathways as set out in the ICEC report.

“The precedence is making girls’s cricket sustainable, and ensuring the pathway is there,” Knight added. “Quite typically you get women of comparable ages that, once they come to make their worldwide debut, they’ve performed hardly any video games in comparison with the fellows. We need to guarantee that women are getting as a lot alternative to play cricket and develop their abilities within the home sport as they do within the males’s.

“We’re starting to see players that are a lot more ready to play international cricket because they’ve been professional cricketers for a few years and played in high-standard competitions,” she added. “So continuing to grow that is important, although obviously there’s not an infinite pot of money. But this is another unbelievable step forward. And we’re hoping those steps continue to be in a forward direction.”