Spin class: for exciting cricket England’s women are a match for the men

Given that I didn’t get together with my wife until I was 22, I don’t think it will cause trouble if I say that cricket is the longest-standing passion of my life.

My first memories of the sport are variously of hitting a ball around a damp Welsh beach, and of watching the beguiling bowling of Phil Edmonds on TV in around 1986. From that point on, my parents regularly took me to watch Cambridge University’s matches, which in those days had first-class status. Mike Atherton, a mere student in 1987, became my cricketing hero and inspired me to be a leg-spinner long before Shane Warne made it trendy.

I went to my first test match in 1989, coincidentally Atherton’s debut, at Trent Bridge against the Aussies. We missed his second ball duck (and Martyn Moxon’s third ball duck), having left our seats between innings to buy an ice cream. Watching England was largely painful (and sometimes dull) for a long time.

Thirty-four years on, much has changed – a lot, but not all, for the better. Watching England’s men is certainly no longer boring, even if it can occasionally still be agonising.

Perhaps the most positive change of all has been the advance of the women’s game. When I was a teenager, the closest I ever got to an England player was when I bought a bat from a factory outlet shop in Huntingdon, where Charlotte Edwards – who had made her international debut that year – happened to be working her weekend job. I recognised her because I’d regularly seen pictures of her in the Cambridge Evening News, but safe to say that most people wouldn’t have known who she was, and might have been surprised to find an England player behind the till. Women’s cricket back then was massively under-funded, very little watched, and went largely unnoticed.

By contrast, at the Oval on Wednesday, I was among 20,000 people cheering on a team of paid-up professionals as they beat Australia in a thrilling T20 to keep the Ashes alive. My son, usually an India fan, became so excited he even deigned to refer to England as “us”.

A couple of weeks before, I’d taken him to Nottingham to watch the one-off test which formed the first element of the multi-format series between the two teams. We watched Tammy Beaumont score a brilliant double-century, and an exciting cameo from fast-scoring Danni Wyatt, as well as some exceptional bowling by Australia’s off-spinner, Ash Gardner. The crowd was not at capacity, but nor was it boorish or bladdered, as it sometimes can be at men’s matches. And it only cost about £25 for us both to get in.

The test ultimately went Australia’s way, which made England’s win at the Oval all the sweeter. Wyatt was again on fine form with the bat, and England’s bowlers kept their nerve expertly to close the game out in the final over. It was the most thrilling match I’d seen live since my daughter and I went to Lord’s to see England’s women beat India to claim the World Cup in 2017.

Yet despite the advances, women’s cricket still doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. The recent report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket was a damning read on many fronts, including its findings about misogyny in the game, and the second-class treatment of women cricketers. Plainly there remains much to do.

One (though not the only) way to address the issue is to get more people watching and listening to women’s matches – and things are going in the right direction. England’s men may be playing in an amazingly free-wheeling, exhilarating way at the moment, but so are the women. Watching Wyatt hit four boundaries in a row on Wednesday was just as glorious as seeing Ben Stokes or Harry Brook on the charge, and Sophie Ecclestone’s spinning skills are no less exciting than Moeen Ali’s.

Cheaper tickets and less beered-up crowds provide other good incentives to follow the women’s game. But the main reason to do so is that the quality of the cricket is high and rapidly getting even better. You’d be batty to miss out.