WBBL needs clear air for international flair: Jones

The Rebel WBBL needs a clear window in the international cricket calendar to ensure the best overseas talent is available to play for the entirety of the tournament, Australia great Mel Jones believes.

As the end of the WBBL|05 regular season approaches, finals hopefuls Perth Scorchers and Melbourne Renegades are both confronted with losing two of their three marquee internationals should they qualify for the play-offs, to be held on the weekend of December 7-8.

The WBBL moved to a standalone window this season, starting in October and wrapping up before the start of the men's KFC BBL.

It’s expected the WBBL will continue to occupy that slot in the schedule, and Jones – a Fox Cricket commentator who recently joined the Cricket Australia board – wants to see cricket boards work together to ensure international series are scheduled around it.

With the WBBL widely acknowledged as the world’s leading women’s domestic T20 competition, presenting opportunities for overseas players to develop against strong opposition, Jones believes such a move would benefit both the players and clubs.

"You create heroes and a game plan and all of these things with a certain set of players, and then you lose them for finals, that’s pretty tough," Jones told cricket.com.au.

"At the end of the day it’s down to the boards to plan ahead and make sure they’re supporting their players to earn more money and develop their games."

This season, no Indian players featured in the WBBL due to a limited-overs tour of the West Indies, while West Indies captain Stafanie Taylor played just two games for the Adelaide Strikers at the start of the season before turning home for those matches.

In previous tournaments, Taylor and Indian stars Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana have been among the league’s top players.

England’s upcoming tour against Pakistan, to be played in Malaysia from December 9, will hit finals hopefuls Scorchers and Renegades, should they advance.

The Scorchers, who sit third on the ladder with one week of the regular season remaining, will lose star internationals Amy Jones and Nat Sciver, while the fifth-placed Renegades would lose star batters Danni Wyatt and Tammy Beaumont if they advance.

Players must appear in at least one regular season game to qualify for finals and should the Scorchers advance, Irish pace bowler Kim Garth will be their only international.

"We want to field the strongest side that we can, so it’s not ideal that we lose the English players but other teams are in the same boat," Scorchers (and Australia) captain Meg Lanning said.

"You want the world’s best players playing and we’ve seen players want to be involved in this competition.

"It’s unfortunate this year that the Indian and West Indies players weren’t able to participate … I think the competition is better for them playing in it, so hopefully down the track there’s a clear window and we can keep improving the quality of the competition."

While that Pakistan-England series had long been slated for some time in December, the fixture was only announced publicly when England named their squad on November 13.

The England players themselves only became aware of the date they would be travelling to Malaysia in early October.

Meanwhile, the fixture for India’s tour of the West Indies was only announced in September.

While the ICC determines when World Cups are held and assigns windows for each round of the ICC Women’s ODI Championship, the fixturing of bilateral series comes down to individual boards.

Jones hopes boards can work together in the future to take the Big Bash, as well as England’s new Hundred competition and any future women’s IPL games, into consideration when planning their schedules.

"We need to find a way for the national bodies to work together and plan the international calendar out in advance a little bit more, so players know where they’re going to be 24 months in advance," Jones said.

"I think (at the moment) some of the other nations probably aren’t thinking outside of getting their national teams playing more, so then they don’t think about what else could be impacted (by their scheduling).

"Hopefully this can be an awareness campaign to say this is where world cricket is at, and we’d love to have players from Bangladesh and Pakistan play more and more in WBBL, but for that to happen we need to clear these windows."