Not a bang, but a whimper: T20 Blast finals day draws women’s summer of cricket to sparse end

Last week we were celebrating a historic first-ever women’s Test match at Lord’s. Five days before that we’d just come to the end of a women’s cricket T20 World Cup which broke all attendance records, bringing in more than 245,000 spectators and culminating in a sell-out final. This is the summer of women’s cricket.

But apparently the people who scheduled Women’s T20 Blast finals day at The Oval on Friday didn’t get that memo.

Two years ago, women’s cricket underwent a wholesale restructure, morphing from regions into counties. This was done, the England & Wales Cricket Board said at the time, to grow the sport’s fanbase and enable greater visibility. A year ago, a crowd of 5,761 attended the first ever Women’s Blast finals day at this same ground, an all-time record for a domestic women’s T20 match.

This year, the stakes were raised by introducing a second semi-final. Oh, and one other change: finals day was moved from a Saturday to a Friday. In term time.

Women’s cricket attracts families; on Friday, tickets for children were priced at just £1 (adult tickets £25). But London schools don’t break up until next week, so you would have struggled to find many kids in amongst the sparse crowd.

Ask the ECB about this (as I did when the date was first announced) and they will point to scheduling constraints. It was felt imperative to avoid a clash with the women’s Lord’s Test last weekend, while The Hundred gets underway here at The Oval on Tuesday.

But the most galling justification was the need to give men’s Blast Finals Day its own window. This summer it was brought forward from September to July, and thus – in the only free weekend in the cricketing calendar – claimed the prime real estate of Saturday. Could we have used Sunday for the women, perhaps? No: that is the men’s reserve day.

“What I want is to play a finals day here [at The Oval], and give ourselves the best chance to put on a show and show people what women’s cricket is doing in this country,” Surrey’s head coach Johann Myburgh said. “If we were playing in the final tonight and there’s lots of kids arriving here after school, it probably would have been great.”

Only, of course, they weren’t. In Friday’s first semi-final, the reigning champions were bowled out for 105 by a surprised Blaze team, who had no idea that reaching the final would be quite so easy. On a slow, tacky pitch, a succession of Surrey batters decided to attempt the ramp or ping easy return catches back to the bowler. Danni Wyatt-Hodge, returning to Surrey duty after finishing as the leading run-scorer in the T20 World Cup, set the tone when she completely misjudged the angle from slingy left-arm seamer Grace Ballinger and was bowled for a duck. Nottinghamshire-based team The Blaze chased down the runs in 16.3 overs, winning by six wickets.

Surrey, and sponsors Vitality, did their best with the scheduling hand they were dealt. Throughout the day on Friday, face-painting and hair-braiding were on offer around The Oval’s concourse. A mascot-jousting event, won by Essex’s Ellie the Eagle, was valiantly narrated by Sky’s Charles Dagnall. As his booming commentary vibrated through the Surrey pavilion, Hampshire captain Georgia Adams – no stranger to finals days in Hampshire’s previous iteration as the Southern Vipers – reflected on the recent changes. “It feels like maybe some efforts behind the scenes from the ECB and from the clubs individually as well to market this competition has gone up a little bit,” she said. “It’s ramped up a notch.”

“I’ve absolutely loved the double-headers,” Adams added. “We had a game at the Utilita Bowl a couple of Sundays ago and it wasn’t a double-header, and then after the game we were like: ‘What do we do now?’ We’ve got so used to the atmosphere and the one-club approach.”

Fair dos: Hampshire’s weekend Blast double-header against Surrey in Southampton in May attracted a crowd of almost 5,000. And yet as trophy favourites, Hampshire crashed out of finals day on Friday, when surprisingly losing the second semi-final in the final over against an unfancied Durham, the crowd at The Oval looked well short of that number.

The day concluded with the grand finale: Blaze vs Durham. By then the heat had gone out of the day, and the cricket. Durham scraped together 117 for eight, Lauren Filer leaked runs, and days after Tammy Beaumont announced her retirement from international cricket, she struck a match-winning half-century as Blaze romped home by the small margin of 10 wickets.

“Today was probably a day that kept me going through the last 10 days,” Beaumont said. “One door is closing with international cricket, but for me, there was The Blaze with all three trophies still up for grabs. That was a real motivator.”

It was the perfect day out for the coterie of Blaze supporters who took over a corner of the JM Finn Stand, complete with orange flags and a chant of “Olé, olé, olé, olé, feeling Knott, Knott, Knott” in celebration of Aussies overseas Charli Knott, who was named player of the tournament (petition to rename it Knottinghamshire, anybody?).

But as the celebration fireworks burst into life at the end of the day, just 3,852 spectators were inside The Oval to watch them fizzle. The ECB’s mantra for this summer’s World Cup was that it would be “A movement, not a moment” for women’s cricket. Less than a fortnight on from the end of the tournament, it seems like the engine has already stalled.

Photograph by Steve Bardens/ECB via Getty Images