England captain Heather Knight believes there’s a “real momentum” behind girls’s sport, 100 days out from the beginning of what she expects to be a “blockbuster” Ashes collection.
The extremely anticipated Ashes summer time consists of solely the second ever five-day girls’s Test, which is scheduled to start at Trent Bridge on June 22.
Knight’s workforce and Ben Stokes’ males’s facet will every be trying to regain the Ashes on house soil, with the 2 collection being performed throughout June and July for the primary time ever, with no clashes.
“(I’m) super excited, obviously,” Knight, 32, advised the PA information company forward of International Women’s Day.
“The operation the ECB have done in terms of actually scheduling the fixtures at prime time I think is so important.”
Stokes’ workforce will start their first Test in opposition to Australia at Edgbaston on June 16 and the second at Lord’s won’t begin till June 28, with the ladies’s match being performed in between in these dates.
“Kicking it (the women’s Ashes) off with a Test match at Trent Bridge is super cool,” Knight stated.
“I think everyone’s super excited for the men’s Ashes, the way Ben and his team are playing, the excitement around. This is certainly going to be a blockbuster series.
“Hopefully we can play some really entertaining cricket as well and both have lots of success.
“I think what we’ve started to do as a team, we’ve started to build something, a real sort of identity of how we want to play things and how we want to move things forward, (to) keep pushing the boundaries of the game.
“That’s a real focus for us – to entertain and play exciting cricket – so I certainly think it’s going to be a blockbuster series.”
This 12 months will see a number of the greatest tournaments in girls’s sport happen.
As properly because the Ashes and T20 World Cup, which Australia received in South Africa final month, the inaugural Women’s Premier League – an enormous step ahead for the ladies’s recreation – is at present being performed in India.
There can be golf’s Solheim Cup, happening in Spain in September, and the soccer World Cup, with European champions England seeking to triumph on the worldwide stage in Australia and New Zealand this summer time.
Knight, who performs for Royal Challengers Bangalore Women within the WPL, stated: “I think there’s a real momentum behind women’s sport at the moment.
“I also think the Lionesses winning the Euros last summer just catapulted women’s sport into the limelight again.
“It feels like the investment that there’s been over the last few years started to really capture the public’s imagination and them wanting to watch really high quality sport is pretty awesome. It’s a good time to be involved.”
Over the previous few years cricket in England has sought to draw a wider viewers to the sport, and shift its notion in British society, with The Hundred event a serious car for that.
For England bowler Stuart Broad, the expansion of ladies’s cricket is a part of attempting to develop the sport as a complete.
“It’s nice to have both Ashes be side by side,” Broad stated.
“When we’ve got days off we’ll be watching the Women’s Ashes and vice-versa. I think it works well in bringing us all together.
“I remember watching the 2005 Ashes celebrations and the women’s team were a part of that, on the open-top bus, and I think as we have seen in The Hundred, when you put the men’s and women’s game together you help grow the whole game’s audience and that’s a really important step forward for cricket to keep taking.”
Both England Test groups might be searching for higher this summer time after forgettable Ashes excursions to Australia in 2021-22.
Neither workforce received a single aggressive match Down Under, with the lads crashing to a 4-0 defeat of their five-match Test collection and the ladies shedding their multi-format collection 12-4.
Broad, a part of a new-look England set-up rejuvenated underneath captain Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, stated: “It would be really lovely for both teams to win the Ashes in the same summer.
“Obviously the way we’re currently playing under Brendon is likely to be entertaining for the fans and I know the women’s team are approaching their game in a similar fashion, so hopefully we’ll see lots of entertaining cricket across the men’s and women’s Ashes.”