The Women's Ashes: The Multi-Format Points System Explained
The Women's Ashes points system: four points for the Test, two for each ODI and T20I, sixteen in all, and how every multi-format series has finished.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's cricket19 min read
- Points available
- Sixteen across one Test and six white-ball matches
- Test match
- Four points to the winner and two to each side for a draw
- White-ball match
- Two points for a win in each ODI and each Twenty20 international
- Multi-format era began
- The 2013 series in England
- Original Test weighting
- Six points, used only for the 2013 and 2013-14 series
- Series level on points
- 2017-18 and 2023, both finishing eight points each
- Only clean sweep of the points
- Australia in the 2024-25 series in Australia
- Next scheduled series
- England in June and July 2027, with the return in Australia in early 2029
The Women's Ashes are decided on points, not on a single match. One Test, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 internationals are played across roughly three weeks, and each result feeds a single table. The Test is worth four points to the winner, or two points to each side if it is drawn. Every white-ball match — one-day or Twenty20, it makes no difference — is worth two points to the winner. Sixteen points are available in total, and whoever has more when the last ball of the tour is bowled wins the series. If the points finish level, the side already holding the trophy keeps it.
That structure has been in place since 2013, and it is the single most misunderstood thing about the fixture. A Test win is not a series win. A one-day sweep is not a series win either. What the multi-format model does is force both sides to be competent across three quite different games in a compressed window, which is a harder ask than any single-format series and produces a different kind of contest from anything in the men's calendar.
This page sets out how the sixteen points are divided, why the Test used to be worth six and is now worth four, what happens when rain or a draw intervenes, how every multi-format series since 2013 has actually finished, and how the arithmetic changes what a captain does on the fourth afternoon of a Test she cannot lose. If you want the wider story of the Australian women's team rather than the mechanics of the trophy, the Cricket Australia section covers that separately.
How the sixteen points are divided
The allocation is deliberately simple, which is part of why it has survived.
- Test win: four points
- Test draw or tie: two points each
- One-day international win: two points
- Twenty20 international win: two points
- Any white-ball match with no result: one point each
Four plus twelve is sixteen. Nothing is held back, nothing is bonus, and there are no partial points for margin, net run rate or anything else. A one-run win in a dead-rubber Twenty20 at Adelaide Oval is worth exactly as much as a hundred-run win in the first one-day international at North Sydney Oval.
The consequence is that the Test carries a third of the available points on its own — 25 per cent of the total in a single match, against roughly 12.5 per cent for each of the other six. That is a large weighting for one fixture, and it is intentional. Without it, the Test would be the least commercially attractive fixture on the tour and would eventually be dropped.
- Test match25.0%
- One-day internationals37.5%
- Twenty20 internationals37.5%
Structural count of points available in the current format, not a record of points won. One Test at four points, three ODIs and three T20Is at two points each.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Test match | 4 |
| One-day internationals | 6 |
| Twenty20 internationals | 6 |
Why the multi-format Women's Ashes exists at all
Until 2013 the Women's Ashes were a Test contest, and by the early 2010s that had become a problem. Women's Test cricket had thinned out almost everywhere. Series were sometimes a single Test, sometimes none, and the trophy could sit unplayed-for across long stretches while both countries played each other repeatedly in white-ball formats that counted for nothing.
The multi-format model solved two problems at once. It gave the surviving Test a reason to exist by making it the most valuable fixture on the tour, and it gave commercial meaning to the one-day and Twenty20 matches that were already being scheduled and broadcast. Instead of a Test that mattered and six exhibition games that did not, the whole tour became one contest.
The design goal was not neutrality. It was preservation. Anyone arguing that the Test should be worth the same as a Twenty20 game is arguing, in effect, for the Test to disappear from the schedule within a decade.
The six-point Test and why it was cut to four
The first two multi-format series used a different table. In 2013 and again in 2013-14, a Test win was worth six points, a Test draw two points each, and a white-ball win two points. That put eighteen points on the table in a seven-match series and made the Test worth three white-ball wins.
The problem showed up immediately. Six points is a very large head start, and a side that won the Test could effectively require the other to sweep everything else. From the 2015 series onward the Test was reduced to four, bringing the total to sixteen and making it possible for a side to lose the Test and still win the Ashes with a strong white-ball tour. That is exactly what has happened more than once since.
The draw allocation was left alone. Two points each for a drawn Test has been constant across the whole multi-format era, which matters more in the women's game than it would in the men's, because women's Tests are four days long and draws were for years the normal outcome.
What happens when the points finish level
The holder retains. This is inherited directly from the men's Ashes convention and it is the reason the trophy has not changed hands since 2015 despite two series finishing eight points each.
In 2017-18, in Australia, the series finished level and Australia — the holder going in — kept the trophy. In 2023, in England, the series finished level again after England had recovered from a nought-four deficit, and Australia kept it again on the same principle. England won the last four matches of that tour and still went home without the Ashes.
Whether that is fair is a genuine argument. The counter-argument is that it is the same rule the men's contest has used for well over a century, and that changing it for the women's version alone would create an oddity rather than remove one.
Every multi-format Women's Ashes and how it finished
| Series | Host | Test result | ODIs | T20Is | Points | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | England | Drawn | England 2-1 | England 3-0 | England 12 - Australia 4 | England won |
| 2013-14 | Australia | England won | Australia 2-1 | Australia 2-1 | England 10 - Australia 8 | England retained |
| 2015 | England | Australia won | Australia 2-1 | Australia 2-1 | Australia 10 - England 6 | Australia won |
| 2017-18 | Australia | Drawn | Australia 2-1 | England 2-1 | Level, 8 each | Australia retained |
| 2019 | England | Drawn | Australia 3-0 | Australia 2-1 | Australia 12 - England 4 | Australia retained |
| 2021-22 | Australia | Drawn | Australia 3-0 | Australia 1-0 | Australia 12 - England 4 | Australia retained |
| 2023 | England | Australia won | England 2-1 | England 2-1 | Level, 8 each | Australia retained |
| 2024-25 | Australia | Australia won | Australia 3-0 | Australia 3-0 | Australia 16 - England 0 | Australia retained |
Two things stand out. The first is that England's two series wins both came in the six-point-Test era and both involved winning the white-ball matches, not the Test. The second is that four of the eight Tests in the table were drawn, all of them before 2023.
2013: England set the template
The first multi-format series was played in England in the middle of 2013. The Test at Wormsley was drawn, splitting the six points two each, and England then won the one-day series 2-1 and swept the Twenty20 internationals 3-0. Twelve points to four.
It was an emphatic start for the new structure in one specific sense: England did not win the Test and still won the Ashes comfortably. That was precisely the outcome the old Test-only format could not produce, and it proved the model worked as intended.
2013-14: England retain in an Australian summer
The return series that Australian summer was much closer, and it inverted the previous result. England won the Test. Australia then won both white-ball series 2-1. Six plus four to England against eight to Australia — England ten, Australia eight — and England retained the trophy having won a single match more than nothing across six white-ball fixtures.
This is the series most often cited when people argue the six-point Test was too heavy. Australia won four of the six limited-overs matches and lost the Ashes. The reduction to four points followed.
2015 and 2017-18: Australia take it back and then hold
In England in 2015, Australia won the Test at Canterbury and both white-ball series 2-1, finishing ten-six. That is the series that started the current holding streak.
Two and a half years later, in the 2017-18 Australian summer, the trophy was defended rather than won. The Test at North Sydney Oval was drawn. Australia won the one-day series 2-1 and England won the Twenty20 series 2-1. Eight each, and Australia kept the Ashes as holder. It was the first time the retention rule had been used in the multi-format era, and it will not be the last.
2019 and 2021-22: two twelve-four margins
The 2019 series in England and the 2021-22 series in Australia produced identical scorelines by slightly different routes. In both, the Test was drawn — Taunton in 2019, Manuka Oval in Canberra in 2021-22 — and in both Australia swept the one-day internationals 3-0.
The 2021-22 series is worth noting for a reason that has nothing to do with cricket. Two of the three Twenty20 internationals were washed out entirely, splitting their points one each, which is how Australia's winning margin came to be twelve-four rather than something larger. It remains the clearest example of the format's weather exposure: a third of the white-ball programme disappeared and the points still had to be distributed.
2023: the eight-eight series England should have won
The 2023 series in England is the best advertisement the format has. Australia won the Test at Trent Bridge by 89 runs — the first result in a women's Test since 2015, ending a run of six consecutive draws — and then won the opening Twenty20 international at Edgbaston. Nought-four became England's problem to solve with five matches left.
England then won the next two Twenty20 internationals, at the Kia Oval by three runs and at Lord's on the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, and took the one-day series 2-1 with wins at Bristol and Taunton. That last result was Australia's first one-day series defeat in a decade. The points finished eight-eight and Australia went home still holding the trophy.
Nobody who watched that tour thought the format had failed. A Test that produced a result, three genuinely close Twenty20 games and a one-day series that swung on a rain-affected chase is roughly the best case the model can deliver.
2024-25: the first sixteen-nil
The 2024-25 series in Australia went the other way completely. Australia won the one-day internationals at North Sydney Oval by four wickets, at the Junction Oval by 21 runs and at Bellerive Oval by 86 runs. They won the Twenty20 internationals at the Sydney Cricket Ground by 57 runs, at Manuka Oval by six runs on Duckworth-Lewis-Stern and at Adelaide Oval by 72 runs.
Then came the Test, played as a day-night fixture at the Melbourne Cricket Ground from 30 January to 2 February 2025 — the first women's Test at that ground under lights, staged to mark ninety years since the first women's Test series. England made 170 and 148. Australia made 440, with Annabel Sutherland scoring 163 and Alana King taking nine wickets across the match. An innings and 122 runs.
Sixteen-nil is the only clean sweep of the points in the format's history. It also demonstrated the one thing the multi-format table cannot fix: when one side is comprehensively better across all three formats, the structure produces the same lopsided result any format would.
What the points do to a captain's thinking
The arithmetic changes decisions in ways that a single-format series does not.
The most obvious effect is on the fourth afternoon of a Test. In a Test-only Ashes, a captain who cannot win pushes for the draw and that is the end of it. Under the points system, a draw hands two points to the opposition, so the calculation becomes whether risking a loss — four points to them — is worth chasing four points of her own. In practice captains have been conservative, which is one reason so many of these Tests were drawn.
The second effect is on squad construction. A seven-match tour across three formats in three weeks demands players who can transfer between them, and selectors have visibly favoured multi-format cricketers over specialists. That is a different selection logic from anything the men's game applies, where Test and Twenty20 squads have drifted steadily apart.
The third is on the dead rubber. Points already won cannot be taken away, so a match played after the series is settled has no bearing on the trophy. Some sides have used those matches to blood players. Others have treated them as pride fixtures. Either way the format creates them, and scheduling the Test last would eliminate most of them.
The one-off Test and its outsized weight
Four points in a single four-day match is the pressure point of the whole design. Get it right and a side is a third of the way to the trophy in one fixture. Get it wrong and the recovery job is heavy — England needed to win five of six white-ball matches in 2023 and managed four.
There is a persistent argument for a five-day women's Test, on the basis that the draw rate before 2023 was a function of insufficient time rather than defensive cricket. Scores in women's Tests are frequently large, over rates are slow, and four days is simply not long enough to force twenty wickets on a good surface. That argument gained ground after Trent Bridge and the MCG both produced results, which cuts both ways: the shorter format did produce results in the end.
Nothing has been announced for 2027. The Headingley Test in that series is scheduled across four days.
The Australian summer and where the home matches go
A home Women's Ashes sits inside a crowded Australian summer that already contains the men's international programme, the Big Bash League and the Women's Big Bash League. January is the pressure point, and the 2024-25 series ran from 12 January to 2 February for that reason — after the WBBL final, alongside the back half of the men's BBL.
Venue selection follows a pattern. One-day internationals go to grounds built for the women's game at a sensible scale — North Sydney Oval, the Junction Oval, Bellerive. Twenty20 internationals and the Test go to the big stadiums: the Sydney Cricket Ground, Adelaide Oval, Manuka Oval, the MCG. The logic is straightforward — a fifty-over game on a Tuesday will not fill a 100,000-seat stadium, and a Twenty20 international on a Saturday night might fill a large part of one.
For a rundown of the venues themselves, the Australian cricket grounds guide covers each in detail.
Following the points as a series unfolds
- Seven matches scheduledOne Test, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 internationals are locked into a three-week window in the host country.
- Points allocated per resultThe Test pays four to the winner or two each for a draw, and each white-ball win pays two, with a washout splitting one each.
- Running table maintainedPoints accumulate across the whole tour rather than resetting between formats, so a one-day sweep and a Test loss can still leave a side ahead.
- Clinch or continueA side that reaches nine points cannot be caught, and remaining matches become dead rubbers that do not affect the trophy.
- Level points resolvedIf the tally finishes level, no decider is played and the side that already held the Ashes retains them.
The sequence of decisions that produces a result. Match order varies between series and can change when a side clinches.
The practical advice for a viewer is to track the table rather than the individual series. Australian and English broadcasters both carry a running points graphic, and it is the only score that matters. A commentator saying England have won the one-day series is describing a subplot; the number on the graphic is the plot. Broadcast and streaming arrangements for Australian viewers are covered in the guide to watching cricket in Australia.
The criticisms that keep coming back
Three complaints recur, and all three have merit.
The first is weather. A one-point split for an abandoned match is a defensible rule but a poor outcome, and the 2021-22 series showed it can materially change a margin. No reserve days exist for the white-ball fixtures in the standard schedule.
The second is the early clinch. Because points are front-loaded when the Test is played first, series have been decided with matches remaining. Moving the Test to the end would largely fix this, at the cost of making the tour's most demanding fixture the last one after three weeks of travel.
The third is the retention rule. England's 2023 recovery produced a level series and no trophy, and there is no obvious sporting reason a level series should reward the incumbent other than tradition. The men's contest does exactly the same thing, which is either the answer or the problem depending on where you sit.
How this differs from the men's Ashes
The comparison is instructive. The men's Ashes is five Tests, decided on matches won, with the urn retained on a drawn series. There is no points table, and the white-ball fixtures that surround an Ashes tour count for nothing.
The women's version has one Test and six white-ball games and a table that binds them. That means the two contests test different things. The men's Ashes tests whether a side can play Test cricket for six weeks. The women's Ashes tests whether a side can play three formats inside three weeks. Neither is a lesser question, but they are not the same question, and describing the women's contest as a smaller version of the men's misreads it entirely.
The shared elements are the retention rule and the biennial rhythm, alternating between England and Australia. Everything else is different by design.
What is scheduled next
The next series is in England in 2027. The published fixture list has the Test at Headingley from 24 June, Twenty20 internationals at Trent Bridge, the Kia Oval and Old Trafford across early July, and one-day internationals at the Rose Bowl, Lord's and Edgbaston, closing on 20 July. That is a Test-first order again, with the one-day series as the closing act.
The return leg in Australia is in the women's Future Tours Programme for early 2029, which places it inside an Australian summer and, on current patterns, in the January window alongside the back end of the WBBL and BBL seasons. Venues for that series have not been announced.
Both boards have the ability to renegotiate the points allocation before either series. Nothing suggests they intend to, but the fact that the Test weighting has already been changed once means the current table should be read as the present agreement rather than a permanent rule.
Selecting a squad for a three-format tour
The points table has quietly reshaped how Australia picks a Women's Ashes squad, and it is one of the few places where the format writes itself into team sheets.
Because all seven matches count toward one total, there is no reward for building a specialist Test side and a separate white-ball side. A squad of fifteen to eighteen has to cover a four-day Test with a red or pink ball, a fifty-over game and a twenty-over game inside a three-week block, often with two days between fixtures and interstate travel in between. The players who survive that are all-format cricketers: batters who can bat time and also hit at speed, spinners who can bowl defensively over four days and at the death, seamers who can back up.
The 2024-25 series showed what that looks like when it works. Alana King took four for 25 in a one-day international at the Junction Oval and then nine wickets in the Test at the MCG. Ashleigh Gardner took three for 19 in the opening one-day international, made a maiden one-day century at Bellerive and played through the whole tour. A format-specialist squad would have needed twice the personnel to produce the same coverage.
The workload consequence is real. Fast bowlers in particular are managed across a Women's Ashes in a way they are not in a single-format series, and rotation in the dead rubbers is now routine rather than remarkable. The domestic pathway that produces these players — the Women's National Cricket League and the Women's Big Bash League — is built on the same all-format assumption.
What the format does to attendances and broadcast
A seven-match tour with a running points total is a far easier thing to sell than a single Test, and both boards have leaned on that.
The commercial argument for the multi-format model was never subtle: seven broadcast windows in three weeks, each one carrying stakes, beats one Test plus six friendlies. In Australia that has meant free-to-air and subscription coverage across the whole tour rather than selective pickup, and it has meant that the Twenty20 internationals — the fixtures most likely to draw a large walk-up crowd — sit in prime evening slots at the biggest venues available.
The Test is the exception that proves the rule. Staging the 2024-25 Test as a day-night fixture at the MCG was a scheduling decision aimed squarely at attendance, putting the highest-value match in the biggest stadium at the hours when people can actually attend. It was the first women's Test at that ground played under lights.
There is a cost to the model here too. Because a series can be settled early, the last fixtures of a tour occasionally go to market with nothing on them, which is exactly the problem the format was invented to solve at the other end of the schedule.
Individual awards inside a team contest
The points decide the trophy, but the series also produces individual recognition, and the multi-format structure makes those awards unusual.
A player of the series award in a Women's Ashes has to weigh a Test performance against white-ball ones, which is not a comparison any other trophy asks a panel to make. Alana King's award for the 2024-25 series is a good illustration: four for 25 in Melbourne, five for 46 in Hobart and nine wickets in a day-night Test at the MCG is a body of work spread across three formats and three ball types in three weeks.
Individual match awards follow the usual per-format logic and carry no points, which is worth stating plainly because it is a common misreading. A player of the match award has no bearing on the table. Only results do.
Quick reference for a new viewer
If you are watching a Women's Ashes series for the first time, four things will get you most of the way.
The table is the score. Individual format series are interesting but not decisive. The Test is worth double any other match, so it is the fixture that moves the table hardest. A drawn Test or an abandoned white-ball match still pays out, split evenly. And a level series means the holder keeps the trophy, which since 2015 has meant Australia.
Everything else — the venues, the day-night Test, the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern finishes, the dead rubbers — sits on top of those four rules. For the wider Australian context, including the domestic structures that feed the national side, the Australia hub and the cricket section are the starting points, and the two companion pages on Indigenous cricket and multicultural cricket cover who the game in this country is actually made of.