The Women's Ashes in England: Points, History and Venues

The Women's Ashes is the contest England's women's team is measured by, and it is played under rules that exist nowhere else in top-level cricket. Since 2013 the series has not been a set of Tests, nor a one-day series, but a single competition spread across three formats — one Test match, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 internationals — with points awarded for every match and the Ashes going to whichever side finishes with more. A spectator arriving from the men's game finds the same opponent, the same name and an entirely different machine underneath it.

This guide explains that machine: how the points system works, why it was designed, where the trophy actually came from, and what a Women's Ashes summer in England looks like from the ground. The longer story of the England team itself — the 1934-35 pioneers, the amateur decades, professionalisation — is told in our England women's cricket history, and this page leans on it rather than repeating it. Here the subject is the series.

A rivalry older than the trophy

England and Australia have been each other's defining opponents in women's cricket since the first women's Test was played between them in Brisbane over the New Year of 1934-35. For more than sixty years afterwards, though, the fixture had no trophy and, strictly speaking, no name. Series came and went — some tight, many one-sided, all infrequent — and the label "Ashes" was borrowed informally from the men's rivalry rather than earned by an urn of its own. The men's original, and the 1882 mock obituary that started it, is a separate story told on our Ashes page.

The women's game fixed the omission in 1998, and did it with a certain dry wit. To mark the occasion — the last season before the Women's Cricket Association handed the English game to the ECB — a bat signed by both teams was burned and the ashes sealed inside a ball-shaped trophy. Where the men's urn was a joke that hardened into an institution, the women's trophy was a deliberate act of institution-building: a rivalry that had existed in practice since 1934 finally given its object. Results before 1998 are counted retrospectively as part of the same lineage, which is why record books speak of the Women's Ashes beginning in 1934-35 even though nothing called that existed at the time.

Two dates in the pre-trophy era matter for an England supporter. In 1963 England won a home series against Australia and then did not beat them in a series again for forty-two years. And in 2005 — the same extraordinary summer in which the men ended their own long drought — England's women finally won again, a symmetry that did as much as any marketing campaign to attach the Ashes name to the women's fixture in the public mind.

Why the series was redesigned

By the early 2010s the traditional shape of the contest had stopped working. Women's Test cricket had become vanishingly rare — a handful of matches worldwide in a decade — and a stand-alone Test series could no longer carry a modern tour. Broadcasters wanted white-ball cricket; players spent their careers almost entirely in one-day and T20 formats and then met once every couple of years in a format nobody practised; and a short Test series could be over, as a contest, within a week of starting.

The answer, agreed between the ECB and Cricket Australia and first used in England in 2013, was to stop treating the formats as separate series and combine them into one. Every match of the tour — Test, ODI and T20 alike — would count towards a single points total, and the Ashes would go to the team with more points at the end. The Test survived, protected by a points weighting that made it impossible to ignore; the white-ball matches acquired a significance they had never had on Ashes tours; and the contest was guaranteed to run, alive, across several weeks.

It is worth being clear about how unusual this was. Cricket has always kept its formats in separate boxes — separate rankings, separate records, separate series. The multi-format Ashes was the first major contest to insist that a Test and a T20 could be chapters of the same story, and it remains the most successful piece of competition design in the modern women's game. Other boards have since borrowed the structure for their own bilateral series, which is the sincerest available compliment.

How the points system works

The scoring has been adjusted once since 2013, and the current shape is straightforward.

Match	Win	Draw, tie or no result	Loss
The Test	4 points	2 points each	0
Each ODI (three played)	2 points	1 point each	0
Each T20 international (three played)	2 points	1 point each	0

Sixteen points are available in all. The Test is worth two white-ball wins; a team that loses it must win the equivalent of two extra matches elsewhere to recover. In the first two multi-format editions the Test carried six points rather than four, which made it worth three white-ball wins — close to decisive on its own — and the weighting was softened so that no single result could settle the series before the white-ball legs had meaning.

Two consequences of the design are worth understanding before watching a series, because they drive how the teams behave.

First, the draw is a live result. A drawn Test shares four points, so a side behind in the match will bat for safety in a way white-ball audiences find alien, and a side ahead will gamble with declarations to convert two points into four. The multi-format Test is, for this reason, one of the few places left in cricket where classical match management — time, weather, the follow-on, the fourth-innings equation — still decides a major prize.

Second, the trophy is retained, not shared, on a tie. If the series finishes eight points each, the holders keep the Ashes, exactly as in the men's tradition. This is not a footnote: two multi-format editions have finished level, and both times Australia, as holders, kept the trophy. A challenger must win the series outright, which means England, chasing since the mid-2010s, have generally needed nine points on the board rather than eight.

The multi-format era so far

England won the first multi-format edition at home in 2013 and the return series in Australia immediately afterwards. Since Australia took the trophy back in England in 2015, however, the traffic has been one-way: Australia have held the Ashes ever since, through home wins, away wins and the two drawn series that their holders' advantage converted into retentions. The nadir from an English point of view came in the 2025 series in Australia, which the hosts won sixteen points to nil — the first clean sweep of the multi-format era, and the result that triggered the most searching inquest into the English women's game since professionalisation.

The pattern behind the results is structural rather than mysterious, and it is the same one that runs through our guide to women's domestic cricket in England: Australia professionalised its domestic tier earlier and deeper, and for a decade its selectors have chosen from a bigger pool of full-time cricketers. England's rebuilt domestic structure — regional hubs, then professional county tiers — is an attempt to close exactly the gap the Ashes scoreline keeps measuring. The series has become, among other things, the audit by which England's domestic reforms are judged every two years.

The 2023 edition in England deserves its own paragraph, because it is the best advertisement the format has produced. Australia won the Test and moved six points clear; England then won both white-ball legs, taking the series to the final matches and finishing level at eight points each. Australia retained the trophy, England won the summer's argument — record crowds for women's cricket in England, a full Lord's, and the first widely shared sense that a Women's Ashes could hold the country's attention for a month. A drawn series that both sides could plausibly call a triumph is a rare thing, and the points system built it.

The Test match and where England stage it

The single Test is the series' centre of gravity, and its staging in England has its own short history of upgrades. The first multi-format Test, in 2013, was played at Wormsley, the estate ground in the Chilterns — a beautiful venue and a statement of the fixture's modest commercial expectations. The 2015 Test went to Canterbury, the 2019 Test to Taunton — by then the established home of England women's cricket — and in 2023 the Test moved to Trent Bridge, a full-scale international ground, and drew the biggest crowds a women's Test in England had ever seen. The trajectory — country house, county ground, Test ground — is the women's game's recent growth plotted in venues, and the backgrounds of those grounds are covered in our guide to English cricket grounds.

The Test is also where the series' distinctive tension lives. England and Australia are, in most years, the only teams playing women's Test cricket with anything at stake, and the players themselves meet the format only in Ashes years. Preparation is a genuine problem — a cricketer can reach an Ashes Test having played more international tournaments than first-class matches — and it rewards the sides that plan for it. The four-day women's Test, longer than the format's traditional three days, has become standard in the series precisely because so many earlier matches ran out of time and drained the fixture of results.

White-ball legs are spread around the country in the way England's home internationals usually are, with the ODIs and T20s taken to a mix of Test grounds and county venues. A home Women's Ashes now typically shares its summer with a full men's international season, and in 2023 the men's and women's series ran side by side — a scheduling experiment that let each feed the other's audience and that the ECB has treated as a template since. Lord's, whose institutional history with the women's game is a story of exclusion followed by embrace — told in our Lord's history — has staged Women's Ashes matches in front of full houses that would have been unimaginable when women were first permitted to play there in the 1970s.

Following a home series

Practically, the Women's Ashes is one of the easiest major series in England to watch. Tickets for white-ball matches and for most days of the Test are cheaper than their men's equivalents and, outside the marquee fixtures, usually available close to the match; the marquee days — a Lord's fixture, the opening day of the Test — now sell out and want booking when tickets are released, which is a recent and telling change. Every match is televised live, and radio commentary covers the series ball by ball in the manner English cricket audiences expect. The general practicalities of broadcast rights, highlights and streaming are covered in our guide to how to watch cricket in the UK, and they apply to the women's series as fully as the men's.

For a newcomer choosing one day of a Women's Ashes to attend, the honest advice is the Test. The white-ball matches are excellent and familiar; the Test is the thing you cannot see anywhere else — two fully professional sides playing a format they meet only here, with a quarter of the series' points riding on it. The rhythm of a points-series Test, in which every session shifts a calculation the whole month depends on, is the format's best argument for itself.

The players the series has made

Because it is the women's game's most watched contest, the Ashes has been the stage on which its reputations are settled, on both sides. Australia's dominant generation built its standing largely on Ashes performance, and England's modern icons — the World Cup winners of 2017, the leaders of the professional era — are measured, fairly or not, by what they did against Australia. The series's gravitational pull also shapes careers in a quieter way: an English cricketer's route to it now runs through the professional county tiers and The Hundred, whose franchise teams have become the shop window from which Ashes squads are partly assembled — a relationship explained in our guide to how The Hundred works.

The rivalry's founding figures belong to the history told elsewhere on this site: the 1934-35 tourists who won the first series, the 1963 winners, the 2005 side that ended the long wait. What the multi-format era has added is a new kind of Ashes cricketer — one who must be good enough at three formats to be picked for a contest that switches discipline every few days, a demand no other series in cricket makes of a player.

What the format has proved

A decade and more into the experiment, the multi-format Ashes has settled most of the arguments made against it. It has kept women's Test cricket alive in the two countries that most wanted to preserve it, by making the Test the most valuable match either side plays. It has turned a scattering of fixtures into a month-long narrative that broadcasters schedule around and newspapers follow daily. And it has produced drama reliably — level finishes, comebacks, series alive into their final match — because a points system across seven matches is simply harder to kill than a three-Test series between unequal sides.

What it has not done, from an English perspective, is deliver the trophy. Australia's long hold on the Ashes is the standing measurement of the gap the English game's reforms are trying to close, and every two years the series re-takes the measurement in public. That, in the end, is what the points system built: not a gimmick, but an honest instrument — and the day it shows England ahead again will be the biggest day the women's game in this country has had since 2017. The wider context for that wait — the national team's history, the country's cricket structures — is all one story, and it starts at the cricket in England hub and the broader history of England cricket.

Sources and method

This guide is based on the public record of the England-Australia women's rivalry: the documented history of the first Test series of 1934-35, the creation of the Women's Ashes trophy in 1998, and the multi-format structure introduced in 2013, including the published playing conditions that set the current points values and the retention rule. Series outcomes are described in terms of well-established results — the 2013 and 2013-14 England wins, Australia's hold on the trophy since 2015, the drawn 2023 series and the 2025 whitewash — and patterns rather than disputed detail. Attendance and ticketing are characterised as trends, not figures, because they change season by season; venue history for the England-hosted Tests (Wormsley 2013, Canterbury 2015, Taunton 2019, Trent Bridge 2023) is a matter of record. We are an independent site with no affiliation to the ECB, Cricket Australia or the ICC.