England World Cup winner Lauren Winfield-Hill was picked up for £27,500 by Sunrisers Leeds in the Hundred's first-ever auction. She explains what it's like as a player.
My first thought was, I'm actually so excited to play with Kate Cross again. And I'm really glad to be playing at home. You've always got a couple of teams that you really hope that you get picked up by, and as a local girl, being at Headingley in familiar surroundings, friends and family can come watch a bit easier, and the crowd's always great, and I know the staff so there's a bit of continuity there. I would have liked to have not gone down in price, I'm not going to lie about that, but I'm really pleased with the team.
But actually being in the auction, honestly, it’s awful, there's no two ways about it. I don't think anybody really enjoys somebody else having the power to pick your value. My wife Courtney last night was asking, ‘How do you feel about it?’ And I was like, ‘You know what? A lot of it's just ego’. Comparison is the thief of joy. If you’d said to me, ‘You're staying at home, you're playing for the Sunrisers, and this is your figure’, I’d have said, ‘Okay, great. I'm happy with that outcome.’ But then you look at the whole comparison, and you're like, ‘I'm a bit bummed in some ways.’
A lot of it is just the ego bruise, in terms of your value compared to someone else you might look at. Being completely transparent, when you’ve played 100 games for your country, and you compare yourself to somebody who hasn't necessarily had that experience all around the world, it has a little bit more of a sting in it. It's just an uncomfortable thing. Anybody in any workplace would find that uncomfortable. If you were suddenly talking about your salaries in the lunch room, someone would be really happy with where they're at in the corporate world and what they're earning, and then you'll hear somebody else say what they're on, and you're like, ‘Oh, that's a bit stiff’. I think it's just generally quite an uncomfortable experience for most players. And I don't think that's just speaking for myself as someone who's not one of the best players in the world. I think even players who have huge value and big expectations from the auction feel the same because they're so unpredictable. It’s down to supply and demand and the timing of when you get pulled out of the auction hat. There's so many different variables that are quite unpredictable, which just makes people a little bit uneasy.
The conversation when we found out that it was going to be an auction was that it's not really something that the players necessarily want. And because of how females are quite often wired, in the women's game, we wanted it even less. There’s just a little bit more insecurity and self doubt in the women's game generally. We’re not talking do or die, but it can be quite confronting when you've got a figure attached to you, whether it's not what you think you deserve, or even the other way. It's not just talking as somebody who maybe feels like they didn't get quite what they'd have liked. Even for a Dani Gibson, people know what you're on, and people know that it is a shitload of money, and you’ve got to live up to that. And people might have an opinion on whether the Sunrisers have paid overs for her or not. There's some players who got an extremely large sum of money, but what comes with that is massive expectation and massive pressure. So it can work on both ends of the scale, really.
The top salaries are crazy money. What I'm earning as a professional cricketer, I’m still very, very happy and very comfortable. But there's some girls out there now that are earning an absolute truckload. The fact that the top-paid overseas girls got more than the top-paid overseas blokes in the auction is the headline bit, isn't it? That's the bit that you're putting out on BBC Sports and Sky Sports News to say, wow, isn’t it amazing where the game is at? But then nobody reads the small print. There's the other side of it, where it's not so glitzy and glamorous, there’s not massive pay packets, but it's just the nature of the beast, isn't it? It's where it's at with privatization. There's a handful of players that everybody is absolutely desperate to get their hands on. They're generally all-rounders or they use their left limb. The rich get richer.
The other point, comparing the men’s and women’s auctions, is that for the men there’s more of a wider game. For example, Jason Roy goes for not a huge value. But he might feel that it's alright, because there’s the ILT20, the SA20, the Global T20 Canada, the Nepal Premier League. There’s all these other men’s competitions all around the world. So they're not too stressed. They're pretty happy with it, whereas there's a lot more riding on it for women, because in the grand scheme of your annual salary as an English domestic player, the Hundred has the potential to double your salary, or not add a great deal to it. You look at the opportunities all around the world, and you're probably going to play one or two comps, if you're lucky, as a domestic player that's not playing international cricket.
One good thing is, the money involved in the comp now is turning heads big time. When you compare it to the Big Bash or even a lot of the WPL salaries, it's like, holy cow. This competition is just going to be the best in the world. It's as simple as that. With the finances, and if you're playing four overseas instead of three, the standard is going to go through the roof. I think it's easily going to be the best franchise competition in the world.
I was speaking to Adi Birrell, the Sunrisers Leeds head coach. He did the rounds and rang all the players and said ‘Welcome to the Sunrisers’. And he said – I can't remember what day he said – but I'll see you on this day. And it feels like it’s miles away! It feels like this season has been so eagerly anticipated, with the auction, it feels like the build-up started even before last year’s Hundred. But I'm sure it'll come around pretty quick.
