The England and Wales Cricket Board has introduced the eight counties that may host skilled girls’s groups as a part of a significant restructure of the home sport from 2025.
Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey and Warwickshire have all been awarded Tier 1 standing.
Glamorgan and Yorkshire be a part of them in 2027 as a part of an enlargement.
The ECB additionally intends so as to add an additional two groups in 2029.
In 2025, the eight chosen counties will exchange the areas which have competed within the Charlotte Edwards Cup and Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy in recent times.
The plans will see the creation of a three-tiered home competitors construction which the ECB says might result in an 80% enhance in skilled girls’s gamers in England and Wales by 2029.
There shall be £8m of recent funding yearly for the ladies’s home sport by 2027, taking annual funding to about £19m.
Glamorgan and Yorkshire will obtain extra funding from 2025 to run their very own ‘Tier 1 normal’ expertise pathways in preparation for becoming a member of the highest tier in 2027.
The placement of the 2 groups to be added in 2029 has not been determined.
“By this course of we have seen an enormous urge for food from top quality counties to have a girls’s skilled workforce, and an actual dedication to rising girls’s and ladies’ cricket on this nation,” stated ECB chief government officer Richard Gould.
“Extra skilled groups means extra girls capable of make a profession out of being a cricketer, extra function fashions to encourage future generations, and extra of the nation having a girls’s skilled workforce to comply with close by.”
ECB director of girls’s skilled sport, Beth Barrett-Wild, added: “It is clear that the sport is united in eager to take the ladies’s skilled sport ahead, and in wanting to supply commercially vibrant groups and competitions that excite followers and showcase the standard of our skilled gamers.”
All 18 first-class counties and the MCC have been invited to tender to grow to be a girls’s Tier 1 membership, with the “overwhelming majority” submitting bids.
Counties not profitable shall be requested to be “in a course of to find out the composition of Tier 2 and Tier 3” with the result to be confirmed by September 2024.
There shall be no promotion or relegation between tiers from 2025 till 2028.
