As new investors gear up to take full control, questions around what the future will look like leave a lingering sense of unease for the female players it's benefited most.
The sound of 13,000 people jumping to their feet at The Oval wasn’t enough to drown out how well Davina Perrin could hear her mum’s celebrations when she reached a magnificent hundred on Saturday. The camera struggled to pick up a blur of purple as she turned straight towards them, having hit the fastest century on record by an English woman.
“They’re [family] the first people I call when I’m feeling low, and in moments like this they’re the first people I’m going to run to,” Perrin told BBC Sport after the game. “They’re so loud. I could hear them out there. There are that many people here and I can still only hear my Mum!”
But the scale of what Perrin achieved in one hour in South London can only partly be measured by how many people were there to witness it. She carved away at London Spirit’s star-studded bowling attack, peppering the crowd with sixes. There was the swagger of her West Indies idols, learned from the YouTube videos of Viv Richards and Brian Lara her Dad showed her as a child. Here, in an 18-year-old, who was the youngest player ever signed in The Hundred, someone who could harness its power to the max.
Davina Perrin smashed a blistering hundred off just 42 balls in The Hundred Eliminator 💯
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) August 30, 2025
It is the fastest in the women’s competition, shattering Tammy Beaumont’s 52-ball record from 2023 🔥 pic.twitter.com/gtELUaWY3x
Women’s cricket doesn’t always lend itself to producing characters, or even superstars. The biggest names in the game are created through longevity, consistency of excellence and silverware. But, the expansion of franchise leagues has drawn out those rough diamonds, bursting with personality and potential who have broken out from the screen and into the mainstream. Alice Capsey was The Hundred’s original poster-girl, and a year later she was an England regular. Issy Wong’s WPL hat-trick kept her as one of the most marketable English cricketers in the world, even as she slipped out of the national side.
For Perrin, who has long been spoken of as a future star, and speaks with passion and authority beyond her years about paving the way for the next generation of black girls, chronically under-represented in English cricket, that innings has the potential to surpass those moments. But, as The Hundred gears up for significant change under its new investment, the position the women’s competition holds must be prioritised if this moment isn’t to be looked back on as a high-point.
Uncertainty has lingered this year, as investors who have bought their way into the English cricketing summer have begun to flex their muscles. Perhaps their most visible power will be when IPL team names merge into franchise titles and those brands are printed on billboards and crisp packets. Or perhaps if, in a few years time, the competition’s title will be done away with altogether, with the original USP of an exclusive format no longer required in favour of universal T20 cricket.
The risk the ECB have taken with selling off their Hundred teams is that, without the control they’ve had for the last five years, there’ll be little to stop the new owners from subtly hollowing out all the factors which have made the women’s competition a success, and directing focus towards their men’s teams. It’s something everyone involved with the deal has been at pains to deny. Vikram Banerjee, managing director of The Hundred, has insisted that the new owners have “bought into” the “two for one deal” when they dropped extraordinary amounts of cash on the teams.
Beth Barrett-Wild, director of the women’s professional game in England and previously head of the women’s Hundred, looked to soothe fears over the sense of uncertainty. “There are elements which have been protected through various legal documents,” she told Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly podcast in July. “Like the shared platform and the co-position of the men and women, the double-headers, all those things are within those agreements. I’m very confident about the positioning of the women’s competition in that.”
But all the confidence and good faith in the world cannot outweigh what the ECB have given away – control. The buzzwords spoken in boardrooms, championing equality and buying into that crucial part of the competition’s brand will mean little if not followed through. Really, aside from those words, there’s little substance to guarantee their meaning. Of the four investors who own IPL teams, two successfully bid for WPL franchises in 2023. Capri International, who own UP Warriorz in the WPL, were outbid for Welsh Fire by MLC Washington Freedom owner Sanjay Govil.
There’s also a decision to be made on whether the competition stays as its neat, marketable, two-for-one product. The double-header model was a happy accident. Unintended, but with a boosting effects for the competition as a whole and the women’s game in England. The only edition where those double-headers have been reduced, when the Commonwealth Games clashed with the tournament in 2022, saw a much-reduced spectacle. However, ECB chief executive Richard Gould has stated his ambition for at least a partial decoupling of the competitions, in a bid to maximise ticket sales.
If it ain't broke, why fix it? This year has seen record crowds again, and with the women’s county game now aligning with the men’s teams, it seems asymmetrical to embark on the opposite process for The Hundred. But there are gains to be made. By splitting the competition up at some stage, you potentially double ticket sale revenue, and give the women’s competition space to shine in its own light. Lord’s could see a sell-out crowd for a women’s final played under lights rather than being got out of the way before the men’s event.
Where the owners come into play is how that process is handled. It mustn’t be a shove to the side, but a continued joint platform side by side. There’s understandable anxiety among players over any changes being floated. “Every time we see something really start to take off and work and flourish, it then gets changed or altered again,” said Southern Brave captain Georgia Adams.
Women’s players have been consistently let down in terms of priorities of those in control, and are understandably apprehensive until proven otherwise. On the most basic measure – pay – women’s Hundred players have been consistently short-changed despite the equal platform. With the depth of pockets their new owners have, surely throwing a bit of spare change towards female player salaries would go a long way towards generating some good will, and showing their new bosses aren’t all talk.
The underlying issue around all of this is the uncertainty. For the men, it’s uncertainty around playing groups, branding and what the competition actually looks like. For the women, its uncertainty over whether they’re fundamentally valued, both financially and on principle. The Hundred has driven growth in every measure across the women’s game over the last five years. With radical change afoot, those nerves of what comes next are understandable.
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