Former England and Lancashire pacer Kate Cross has said that she "felt like she wasn't good enough" to continue her playing career after losing her England central contract at the end of last summer.
Cross, who played for England 102 times across all three formats, was dropped during England's series against India last summer, and wasn't selected in the travelling squad for the 2025 World Cup. Having been one of the first tranche of players to receive the first-ever England Women's central contracts in 2014, she wasn't on the list of central contracts for 2025/26, which was announced in September last year. Cross took 140 international wickets and was part of the squad which won the Women's Ashes series in Australia in 2013/14.
Speaking on the Wisden Women's Cricket Weekly podcast, Cross said: "I didn’t feel ready to finish playing cricket. The only reason that thought [retirement] entered my mind was because I felt like I wasn’t good enough anymore, and that came from the conversations that I had from Charlotte [Edwards] and from Finchy [Jonathan Finch, England Women performance director].
"Naturally, losing your England contract you feel like you’re past your best, so that’s when those thoughts [of retirement] entered my head. But then, I felt like I had the best Hundred that I’d had out of the whole five seasons of it. I felt like it was one of my most successful ones and if that hadn’t gone as well as it had, I think I might have retired at the end of the year because I felt like I wasn’t good enough."
Cross was part of the Northern Superchargers side which won the Women's Hundred last year. She took 15 wickets at an average of 14.06 across the competition, with only Lauren Bell and Annabel Sutherland finishing higher on the wicket-taking charts. Ahead of the 2026 Hundred auction, she was retained by the re-named Sunrisers Leeds on a salary of £50,000.
Following losing her central contract, Cross signed a one-year deal with Lancashire to play for them across the 2026 county season. Having played for Lancashire for 21 years, the contract is her first as a professional at the club, with women's professional county contracts coming into the game for the first time last year.
"I’ve had a winter where I’ve been in the country a lot more, there have been some amazing pros to that," says Cross. "I’ve seen my niece and nephew so much more, but equally I’m not getting to travel the world and play cricket with my mates. So it’s been an adjustment.
"The thing I’m looking forward to most is knowing that I can’t get pulled away this summer or go anywhere else. I know where my fixtures are, where I’m going to be and what I’m going to be doing which is quite nice. It means I can wholeheartedly give myself to Lancashire this summer. I’m the kind of person where, whichever team I do play in, you get the whole of me for that period of time, and then I can do the same when I dip into Lancashire, or Superchargers, wherever I might be."
England will host the T20 World Cup this summer, as well as hosting India for a landmark Test match at Lord's. Cross, who turned 34 over the winter, has played in all but one of England's home Test matches over the last 12 years, having last played in a Test match in 2023.
On whether there would be a possibility that she may play for England again depending on performances in domestic cricket, Cross said: "Not with the conversations that Charlotte and Jonathan Finch had with me. It was very much that they’re looking elsewhere now."
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