WNCL changes confirmed, but grander plans afoot

Further changes to the Women's National Cricket League schedule have been confirmed, with the states and territories reaffirming their willingness to make sacrifices to ensure a full domestic 50-over season can go ahead.

The updates come as prominent figures in the game continue to call for the Women's National Cricket League to be extended to a full home-and-away season in coming summers.

The latest tweaks see changes in match-ups, dates and venues over the coming weeks, designed to give the season the best chance of going ahead during a time of instability and unpredictable border closures.

Most notably, New South Wales and Western Australia will not meet this season, with the border between the states remaining closed.

At least 14 matches will be streamed for free on cricket.com.au, with this season set to feature more live coverage than the previous 24 seasons combined.

"I really appreciate what Cricket Australia are doing to keep us on the park, and at the end of the day it's eight days of cricket (each) ... thankfully the high performance managers have got together and they're all driven with the same purpose of getting the girls on the park," NSW Breakers coach Dom Thornely told cricket.com.au.

"We are not going to be playing against WA this year purely because of COVID … we're the only teams out of the whole group who won't play everyone once and frankly my stance on that is that ensuring they all get eight games of cricket is the most important thing.

"Game time is my priority at the moment, and we don't want to lose any of those games – too many people before me have worked too hard to even get eight games up."

The sense that teams and organisers were willing to adopt a 'whatever it takes' approach was evident in game one. With the original venue in Canberra waterlogged from overnight rain, the unusual move was made on the day to relocate the match to another nearby ground.

In pre-COVID times, an imbalance of home matches would also have been a cause of significant angst, but this season the mood is distinctly different. One coach remarked in the lead-up to the season: "Wherever they put us, I don't think the players would care, they just want to play."

Unlike the men's state domestic calendar, which in a typical year includes a 10-round Marsh Sheffield Shield and a final alongside the Marsh One-Day Cup, the women's state fixture only includes one-day cricket.

Currently, each of the seven teams play eight matches each WNCL season (a number that increased from six two summers ago), with state contracted players training together throughout the year for those games, minus the two months they spend with their respective Rebel WBBL clubs.

"At the end of the day we don't play enough cricket. We don't play anywhere near enough female cricket for what we're doing with our program," said Thornely, referring to the work he and Cricket NSW Head of Female Cricket Leah Poulton put into the NSW Breakers squad, and the NSW talent pathway.

"We start in May and we finish at the end of March and the girls get eight games of cricket out of that whole time.

"We would love a full home-and-away season and that's the end goal and everyone knows it, everyone is driven to try and get there."

His sentiments were recently echoed by NSW allrounder Sammy-Jo Johnson and Australia great Lisa Sthalekar, while Australia high performance manager Shawn Flegler has confirmed the shift to be on his radar.

Speaking following her induction to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, Sthalekar explained the strength of the WNCL – the only semi-professional women's domestic 50-over league in the world – was a key cog in the development of Australian talent.

"When you look at T20 cricket and you get a gauge of how many balls the No.5 or No.6 batter face, and how many overs the second-change bowler bowls, that's not a lot of cricket," Sthalekar told The Scoop podcast.

"The 50-over format – which is basically our Sheffield Shield – it's the breeding ground and it's what has made Australian cricket so dominant, because that competition has such fierce contests between all the states.

"I would love to see a full home-and-away competition come in."

Speaking to cricket.com.au during the opening round of matches in Canberra, Flegler – also head selector of the Australia women's team – said it was the direction he wanted to see the competition heading in.

"I imagine it'll happen," he said. "Ideally that's where it gets to. Where it all fits in the schedule is a tough thing when you're trying to balance (semi-professional) players' lives outside of cricket.

"I'd love to see a full home-and-away schedule, it doesn't mean the Australia players could be available for the whole thing but that's part of the evolution of the game."

An increasingly busy international schedule (pandemic aside) already means the Australia-contracted players are less available to play for their states than they were in the past, and that situation will likely be exacerbated should the competition expand in the coming years, but in Johnson's view, this is a positive, exposing up-and-coming talent to the elite state competition.

"You don't have Australian ODI teams winning World Cups, you can't pick an Australian team without this tournament," Johnson said.

"The Big Bash is the shopfront window there, but the hard work goes on back at your states where these girls bust their backsides for months at a time to play only eight games of cricket.

"Credit to CA and the ACA for extending that because it was only six, but I'm hoping we can get a full home-and-away season at some point where we're playing 12-plus games in a summer.

"There's youngsters coming through the pathways now who train all year and might only get eight games – or even less, if there is the full complement of the squad where the Australians are available.

"There's also girls who might not have Big Bash contracts or might not make as much impact in Big Bash games with players coming from all around the world.

"An extended series in the WNCL would give them more opportunity to show their skills."

ACA general manager Brendan Drew said his organisation had been an advocate for more WNCL matches for more than a decade.

"There remains a widespread view that at a domestic level, teams need even more opportunities to compete in more WNCL matches," Drew  said.

"The players understand that it is the competition that shapes and forms a player.

"Our female players would overwhelmingly support a further increase to the number of WNCL matches played during each season."