Trickling along under the current of this summer’s fixture fudge is the women’s game. England have a handful of T20s and ODIs against New Zealand and Ireland, beginning on June 29. What they mean, where they fit into the barely existent structure of the women’s game, is anybody’s guess. If the men’s game is coping with a crisis of context, its counterpart is struggling to give any meaning to any game outside of the global tournaments.

Games are infrequent, haphazard and largely restricted to contests between England, Australia and India, particularly in Test cricket. There have been seven Tests since the summer of 2005, five of which involved England. The last two Ashes ‘series’ have comprised one Test each. In the last decade South Africa have played four Tests, New Zealand three, Pakistan two and Sri Lanka none.

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England’s women get their tour of the West Indies underway tomorrow as holders of the World Cup, the World Twenty20 and the Ashes.

It is a position of strength that has allowed them to arrive in St. Kitts without two of their best players – Wisden Cricketer of the Year Claire Taylor, who has stayed at home to work on her career as a management consultant at Reading University, and Sarah Taylor, who is being rested and will undergo “a focused period of physical regeneration and conditioning over the next two months”.

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