‘It’s mad what the Hundred has done for women’s cricket’

It was the end of the 17th over in the first innings at Lord’s that Grace Harris pranced down the wicket to hit back-to-back sixes on her way to an unbeaten 89 from 42 balls. They were two of the 13 boundaries Harris hit in a swashbuckling display of powerful hitting. London Spirit finished with the second-highest women’s score in the history of the Hundred and began the defence of their title with a win over rivals Oval Invincibles.

For Harris, it was simply the continuation of an impressive summer. She was player of the match for Surrey as they won the T20 Vitality Blast competition in July. Few watching at Lord’s would have known that though. Despite the Blast final drawing a record crowd of 5,761 – particularly impressive given a certain other women’s team were competing in the Euro 2025 final that day – there were an extra 10,000 people watching Harris’s knock this time.

The Hundred has no shortage of detractors. This week marked the start of the fifth season of the competition and distaste from certain sections of the cricketing world has been even more marked, especially as it comes hot on the heels of the end of the riveting England-India Test series.

The criticisms are not unwarranted. The format does feel jarring, and may well change with the arrival of the new owners of the franchises, and the forced fun in the form of music acts is more often cringe than invigorating.

Yet the scoffing that can often be heard tends to disregard the fact that half of the tournament is a women’s competition.

“I can’t emphasise enough how much of a difference the Hundred has made to women’s cricket,” says Heather Knight, the currently injured former England captain and winner of the Hundred as captain of the London Spirit last year.

“The idea of 15,000 people watching a domestic game on a Tuesday afternoon is crazy. That was unheard of even a few years ago. How it’s grown throughout as well has been remarkable. It’s a fun format to play because you have to think a bit differently. I enjoy captaining it because you have to make more decisions, and it’s quite chaotic.”

Part of why the women’s Hundred has been particularly successful has been through the use of double-headers since 2021. This idea, where the women play in the afternoon and the men play in the evening, has been eschewed by other sports such as football to avoid the women’s games seeming like an afterthought.

“We used to play double-header T20s with England and I wasn’t a huge fan of them,” says Knight. “The gap between games would be too long and sometimes they wouldn’t even be publicised. But the Hundred double-headers feel different. They’re so close together, they’re the same teams, and it really does feel like one club.”

The decision to use this format was something of a happy accident, with the England and Wales Cricket Board originally intending to have the women play at smaller grounds, until fears around Covid security led to the decision to keep matches together. The ECB has said they may consider “decoupling” some of the Hundred matches in the future as commercial interest grows.

“I really enjoy it,” says Annabel Sutherland, who plays for the Northern Superchargers. “It’s something different. We get to play on the best grounds around the country, and get really good crowds, and it brings that one-club feel that gets missed in other tournaments.”

Research carried out by Bournemouth University following the first season of the Hundred showed that the value for money from a double-header was a key part of the attractiveness of the tournament. That same research found that men in focus groups expressed surprise at how high the standard of the women’s cricket was in the Hundred.

The growth of the women’s Hundred has coincided with the increasing popularity of women’s franchise cricket. The established success of the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia in combination with the Women’s Premier League in India has given female cricketers a genuine option of playing all year round in franchise cricket.

Oval Invincibles bowler Amanda-Jade Wellington told ESPNcricinfo prior to the start of this tournament that she preferred to play franchise cricket over playing for Australia.

“If there was ever an opportunity to play [international cricket], I would personally prioritise franchise cricket over that.”

For Sutherland, while she sees playing for Australia as the pinnacle of her career, she believes that having the option can only be good for the women’s game.

“For me, playing for my country trumps everything,” she said. “That’s probably always going to be my feeling towards it, but I understand other players’ perspectives on it.”

The notion around the Hundred was that it would bring new fans into the game, but ECB chief executive Richard Gould’s admission that there was no evidence that the Hundred had generated interest in other forms of cricket from new fans was hardly a vote of confidence in the idea that it can save English domestic cricket.

Knight, however, believes that a variety of crowds should be seen as a positive. “People don’t celebrate the strength that cricket has in its ability to appeal to lots of different people. It shouldn’t be seen as a weakness that the crowds at the Hundred are so different from those at a men’s Test match. One shouldn’t take away from the other.

“The money coming into the game is going to help everything as a whole. It’s going to inject a lot into the counties which you’d hope ultimately is going to help the future of Test cricket in this country.”

In the end, when it comes to the impact that the Hundred has had on women’s cricket, one line from Knight is the most telling. Asked to reflect on how the past five years had played out, she pauses and says: “What it’s done for the women’s game has just been mad.”

Photograph by Harry Trump/ECB via Getty Images