Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2016

34 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society twitter: @scloverssociety Since I last spoke at the Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society about 18 months ago much has happened in the women’s game. The ECB’s ground breaking first step of professionalising the women’s game, by offering 18 players professional contracts, was announced in the Spring of 2014. This step has given the players a greater opportunity to spend more time on developing and applying fundamental training principles and allowing for more time on task, developing and applying their cricket skills. From my perspective it has allowed me to work with our support team and together develop the England Programme into a world class programme that offers each of the players the appropriate blend of support and challenge to move them towards world leading players. Professionalisation has enabled our specialist coaches and support staff to spend more time with the players - they now spend two full days per week at the National Cricket Performance Centre in Loughborough. The move to go professional has brought added media opportunities for our players which was needed and has been a positive step in raising the profile of the women’s game. The flip side to the media exposure is the fact that there is an added expectation on the players to perform well consistently, by winning games of cricket and playing a brand of cricket that excites the British public. On the cricketing side the team lost their first game, since becoming professional cricketers, to India in a one- off test match in August 2014 at Wormsley. Since then the team have beaten India 2-0 in last summer’s ODI series and followed that up by beating South Africa 3-0 in the T20I series. After a positive end to the summer of 2014 the team trained hard at the National Cricket Performance Centre, Loughborough for four months before travelling to New Zealand to take on a much improved New Zealand outfit. We beat New Zealand 3-2 in the ODI series and 2-1 in the T20I series, both series proving to be very competitive. by Paul Shaw - Head of England Women’s Performance on England Women’s Cricket Reflections