Five days after T20 World Cup final misery tickets are selling fast for India clash in a rare fixture at the home of cricket
England’s historic first Test at Lord’s, which begins on Friday against India, will be the swansong for at least one great of the game, after Tammy Beaumont announced her retirement from international cricket on Wednesday.
It is possible that more retirements may follow at the end of the summer; after England lost last Sunday’s T20 World Cup final to Australia, head coach Charlotte Edwards said that “a lot of younger players are now staking a claim” and that she planned to review the situation after The Hundred. Beaumont, though, has chosen to get ahead of the pack and go into the forthcoming Test with the certain knowledge that it will be the last time she pulls on an England shirt.
“There have been a couple of conversations with Lottie [Edwards] around the future of this team and it just feels like the right time for me to make this decision for myself and for my family as well,” she said in an emotional press conference at Lord’s on Wednesday.
Beaumont retires as England’s leading ODI centurion, with 12 hundreds to her name. She was player of the tournament in 2017, the last time England lifted a World Cup, and scored a memorable Test double-century during the 2023 Ashes Test. She will continue to play domestic cricket for the Blaze, but after being omitted from England’s squad for the T20 World Cup, the writing seems to have been on the wall for her international career.
“When you get the wrong side of 30 and people talk about it whenever you have a slump in form you start to think about it more than you want to,” Beaumont said. “It’s been a long time coming. At the back end of the 50-over World Cup I started to think about what ending I might want. Obviously being left out of the 50-over stuff earlier in the year was a bit of a blow. It’s the right time for me to move on, and see what’s out there away from international cricket.”
Some feared that this one-off Test might fall flat, given that it is taking place just five days after England lost the T20 World Cup final at the same ground; Beaumont’s announcement will certainly give the occasion added poignancy. All the same, Wednesday was an odd day for the England squad, who reassembled for a red-ball net session with Lord’s still full of signage urging them to “Catch the Spirit” – the slogan of a tournament which did not quite end with the fairytale they wanted.
“I really feel for them,” Beaumont said. “Some of them either haven’t gone home or have had one night in their own bed and then they’re back here doing literally the opposite end of cricket that you can do. They’re going to have to settle into long spells, get used to leaving the ball again. They’re turning up with a brilliant attitude. The rest of us have got to try to moderate that and get involved and gel together pretty quickly.”
India, meanwhile, have enjoyed the luxury of an extra week of red-ball practice after being knocked out of the World Cup without reaching the semi-finals. Such is their confidence that their scheduled training session at Lord’s on Thursday did not go ahead.
Women’s Tests are so few and far between that it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from previous encounters between these teams; their most recent Test took place in December 2023 and India won by a mammoth 347 runs, but the conditions at Lord’s will be a world away from those in Navi Mumbai. The two teams last played a Test on English soil in summer 2021 at Bristol, when a rearguard effort from off-spinner Sneh Rana helped India pull off a miraculous draw; England’s last multi-day game was their Ashes disaster at the G 18 months ago.
The real importance of this match is its historical significance: 50 years on from the first women’s match at Lord’s, and three years on from the independent commission for equity in cricket calling out the lack of a women’s Test at Lord’s as “truly appalling”, the last bastion of cricketing misogyny will finally be breached. Ticket sales are reportedly excellent; should it go to four days, the match could even break the overall attendance record for a women’s Test, currently 35,365 set at the MCG in January/February 2025.
“It’s a very emotional moment,” said India’s Jemimah Rodrigues, who is expected to bat at No 4. “You dream of playing cricket for India, then you dream of playing Test cricket for India. And to do it where it all started at the home of cricket, nothing can get bigger than that. It’s a dream for millions, but I’m getting to live it.”
