A historic day at Hundred auction but barely any women were there to see it | Andy Bull

A historic day at Hundred auction but barely any women were there to se There were £210,00 deals for Sophie Devine and Beth Mooney in what was meant to herald a new era, but it was still mostly men making decisions I t’s Piccadilly Circus. It’s candy pink and dayglow green. It’s 19-year-old Davina Perrin being bought by the Birmingham Phoenix for £50,000 a couple of years after she has graduated from Ebony Rainford Brent’s ACE programme . It’s the former Leicestershire fast bowler Charles Dagnall in skinny jeans with an iPad and an interactive screen. It’s Hero Players. It’s Vitality Wild Cards. It’s Sophie Devine and Beth Mooney being signed for £210,000, which is more than the entire women’s squad earned between them when the Hundred launched in 2021. It’s English cricket’s first player auction. It’s that Richard Madley off Bargain Hunt with a gavel and a silk handkerchief in his top pocket, it’s a grand total of 2,667 people watching a YouTube live stream. It’s the teams’ in-house content creators filming TikTok interviews with their bosses in a “brand performance space” at the centre of a part of London no Londoners go to unless they absolutely have to. It’s the bright, brilliant, inclusive future of English cricket. And it’s a room full of men sitting around weighing the relative merits of young women so they can bid against each other for their services in a competitive auction. Wait. Is that last one right? Unfortunately, yes. It was a historic day for female cricket players. England’s Dani Gibson has become one of the best-paid sportswomen in the country after being brought for £190,000. But it wasn’t a historic day for female cricket coaches, analysts, administrators or franchise owners, who were mostly missing from the scene. Among the 60-odd people in the room, a dozen of them were women and two of the team’s tables were entirely male. Whichever way you cut it, it was an odd look on the first day of the new era of the competition. “It is really disappoint...