England Women’s Cricket Team Retain Ashes With Win In Australian Twenty20 Match

But there's very little news about the victory. So let's celebrate

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by Sophie Wilkinson |
Published on

While you were sleeping, England Women's cricket team were busy trouncing Australia's team to retain the Ashes in the first Twenty20 games.

The success has been put down to brilliant performances from captain Charlotte Edwards and Sarah Taylor, who ran 92 and 50 not-out respectively. Which basically means they were just relaxing in the sunshine for hours and nobody could stop them. (Exactly what we'd do if we were in Australia's sunshine right now – liberally-applied sunblock included.)

The sad thing is, if you Google 'England cricket' this morning, you get a load of stories about our male cricketers worrying about how they're not going to manage to do win their own Ashes game against the Australians, and not much about the women's game, despite it being a 'walk in the park'. Little wonder, as it's proving a mission to get women into top sports jobs.

It makes sense of why Debbie Jevans, a former tennis player and current England rugby chief, is calling for quotas to fill these jobs this morning. 'You don't advance an organisation if you ignore what 50% of the population think.'

Speaking at the Women's Sports and Fitness Foundation's network event, she explained that she isn't overly keen on quotas, but they're what needs to be done in order for change to happen. 'I'm not a quota fan because I think it's a cop out, but having looked at what's happened over the last five years where there's been no changes in a demonstrable statistical sense, we do maybe need to do that to force businesses and federations [to change],' she said.

Judging by the near non-existent reaction to today's victory, she's got a point.

Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson

Photograph: Getty

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.

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