Finally the Women’s Ashes is not an afterthought – and fans are flooding in

Contrary to popular belief, this is not the first time the women’s and men’s Ashes have run concurrently, nor is it the first attempt at joined-up marketing by the England and Wales Cricket Board. The 2013 “#RISE for the Ashes” campaign featured Alastair Cook and Charlotte Edwards, admittedly on separate posters, with the same squiggly orange flames as the backdrop.

The following summer, with Waitrose on board as the new £3m sponsor of men’s and women’s Test cricket, a TV advert showed Stuart Broad, Jimmy Anderson and Katherine Brunt shopping in what purported to be their local supermarket, while Jonathan Agnew commentated on their choice of groceries.

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What did both campaigns have in common? Women’s cricket was present, but only as an afterthought. Sky promoted the 2013 Women’s Ashes using the tagline: “One Down, One to go: See if the women’s team can secure our second Ashes victory of the summer.”

The Waitrose ad was an unmitigated disaster, with Anderson and Broad failing to acknowledge Brunt while Agnew’s voiceover ignored her presence completely. For all the recognition she got, she might as well have been a random extra who had wandered in off the streets to do her shopping wearing an England shirt. Fortunately for the ECB, the advert was swiftly pulled from the airwaves because of controversy over Agnew’s involvement.

Ten years later, the marketing looks a little different. The award-winning “Ashes, Two Ashes” campaign centres on a 30-second TV advert with split-screen images, flitting between footage and commentary from the women’s and men’s games, and concludes with the slogan: “The only thing better than an Ashes series? Two.” Two weeks ago, images of the England captains – Heather Knight and Ben Stokes – were projected side by side on Tower Bridge.

It’s worlds away from Brunt playing Supermarket Sweep by herself and it’s working. Almost 75,000 tickets have been sold for the Women’s Ashes; the ODI at Taunton is sold out, 16,000 tickets have been sold for the Edgbaston T20I and another 13,000 for the five days of the Trent Bridge Test. It appears someone at the ECB has finally woken up and realised that if you want people to show up to watch the England Women’s team play, it helps to act like they may be some people’s first choice.

“It’s been a huge mindset shift internally,” says Beth Barrett-Wild, director of the women’s professional game at the ECB. “It’s about demonstrating the value we are placing on these fixtures, recognising that we think people would want to come and shifting perceptions about England Women’s cricket in the process.”

The ECB’s planning for the dual-Ashes summer, she says, started early, with a meeting in March 2022. “It was after the first season of the Hundred. There had been this swell of engagement and we all said the same: ‘2023 is our big year.’ It was a case of sitting down and going: ‘How do we make the most of this?’”

“Historically, England Women’s internationals haven’t been at the top of the list of matches we’ve scheduled and it’s usually been left fairly late. Doing it early and alongside the men was a very conscious decision, to make sure that this Ashes summer was very much seen as a men’s and women’s Ashes season combined.”

The result of that early conversation was twofold: for the first time, the dates and venues for the 2023 women’s and men’s fixtures were announced concurrently (in September 2022). Meanwhile, the venues and schedule for the Women’s Ashes reflected a new ambition for women’s cricket – evening matches at Lord’s, the Oval, and Edgbaston, a Sunday ODI at the Rose Bowl and a five-day Test at Trent Bridge.

“The key part was starting with the fan,” Barrett-Wild says. “I was looking back at the 2019 women’s Ashes schedule and we started on a Tuesday with an ODI at Leicester, followed by another ODI at Leicester on the Thursday. That is not a fan-centric schedule. With all the marketing in the world, that’s never going to generate massive attendances. It’s recognising how much the women’s game has shifted since that moment and making sure we’re doing a proper service to it this summer.”

Barrett-Wild doesn’t say so, but it is clear she’s been one of the driving forces behind this culture shift at the ECB. Since October 2018, she has headed up the women’s Hundred, which she says “blew the lid off everything that we thought about where the women’s game was”.

“I’ve always known women’s cricket has got this potential, if you just invest in it then it will work, but this is a massive proof of concept. It shows people will watch women’s cricket if you present it at scale, market it and give it that visibility. It would have taken many, many years to get to that stage if we’d carried on as we were.”

Barrett-Wild is ensuring the ideas she and her team incubated in the Hundred – equal marketing budgets; playing women’s matches at the biggest grounds – permeate out into the rest of the ECB. Last week, the ECB released the major match venues for 2025-31: England Women will play at Lord’s in each of the seven years during this period, with the Oval, Edgbaston, Headingley, Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and the Rose Bowl hosting the team at least four times.

“We’ve invested heavily into the professionalisation of the women’s game on the field. Now it’s a case of: ‘Right, we need to catch up in terms of what we are doing to support this team off the field,’” she says.

Are there concerns this may be a one-off, given the scale and visibility of the Ashes compared with other women’s bilateral series? “Our objective is to create a blueprint which will enable exponential growth in attendances in future years. Sales for the Sri Lanka series [in September] aren’t as high as the Ashes sales but they are significantly up on where they normally would be.”

As someone who understands the recent growth of women’s sport – “I don’t want cricket to be left behind, I’m a very competitive person” – Barrett-Wild already has her sights firmly set on 2026 when England host the Women’s T20 World Cup. “That will be our Women’s Euros moment,” she says.

Before then, though, there’s an Ashes series to focus on, one that will be enjoyed live by a record number of fans.

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