Yorkshire CCC snubbed by ECB as Northern Diamonds goes to Durham - but a women's team could return in future

Yorkshire have been dropped into Tier 2, which is a mixture of first-class and national counties, and will relinquish any control of a team that played 60 per cent of its home games at Headingley.

However, Yorkshire will join Glamorgan as an expansion team in 2027 as part of a plan to extend the league to 12 teams by 2029.

Yorkshire and Durham have been jointly responsible for running the Diamonds since 2020 when the ECB merged the two as part of a restructure of the women’s game into eight regional hubs - and will continue in that responsibility for the 2024 season which begins on Saturday.

But the ECB announced this winter that it is restructuring the women’s game again, creating a three-tiered approach headed by eight women’s professional ‘Tier 1 Clubs’ – each owned, governed and operated by an individual First-Class County (FCC) or Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Teams in Tiers 2 and 3 will effectively be feeder, regional hubs.

It pitched Yorkshire and Durham against one another in a bid to take the Diamonds forward.

Durham made their bid public in early March. Yorkshire were not so forthcoming with publicising their intentions but were keen to continue building on the work they have already done in women’s cricket.

At present there are 160 women and girls’ cricket clubs in Yorkshire fielding 313 teams between them, while 446 girls took part in Yorkshire winter observations and a further 2,216 girls participated in national programmes last year. But from 2025, a two-year absence of an end point for that talent pipeline could have damaging repercussions for girls cricket.

Joining Durham in Tier 1 from 2025 are Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey and Warwickshire.

The ECB says they will commit £3m in funding to Yorkshire for the team from 2027.