Girls’s cricket dangers shedding momentum after the launch of The Hundred competitors was postponed till subsequent yr because of the Covid-19 pandemic, former England captain Charlotte Edwards mentioned.

The ladies’s Twenty20 World Cup in Australia proved an enormous success this yr with an 86,000-plus crowd watching the hosts beat India within the March eight closing in Melbourne.

The worldwide well being disaster has since halted skilled cricket and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) final week determined to postpone The Hundred, which was scheduled to start in mid-July.

The revolutionary franchise-based league consists of an American sports-style draft and options eight city-based males’s and ladies’s groups with names resembling London Spirit, Manchester Originals and Trent Rockets.

“There are such a lot of combined feelings actually,” Edwards, who led England to Twenty20 and one-day World Cup titles in 2009, informed BBC World Service.

“Clearly it is the suitable choice however it was such an essential yr for ladies’s cricket on the again of the massively profitable World Cup in Australia, the place practically 90,000 individuals watched the sport.

“We simply actually felt the momentum was with the ladies’s recreation and we had been additionally going to introduce contracts this summer time for 40 skilled cricketers, and it is all been placed on maintain in the meanwhile,” the 40-year-old mentioned.

For a number of uncontracted feminine cricketers in England, the brand new league was to be their solely supply of revenue this yr.

“A whole lot of gamers had been hoping to have contracts for the Hundred, which had been fairly profitable for a few of them, and everybody’s going to overlook out which is so unlucky and at such an essential time for ladies’s cricket,” Edwards mentioned.

The ECB nonetheless plans to award 40 new full-time contracts at some stage as a part of a plan to speculate 20 million pound ($24.9 million) within the ladies’s recreation.

“We’ve got been assured that the ECB will nonetheless go forward with their 20 million pound funding into the ladies’s recreation, which is one thing that’s clearly preserving us all going in the meanwhile,” Edwards mentioned.