he past year has thrown up challenges like no other in our lifetimes, but as we look ahead hopefully to the return of some kind of normality in 2021, to the delayed launch of the Hundred, a hectic international schedule for England’s men including home and away series against India, and the start of a period of real excitement and potential in the women’s game, I’m optimistic. We’ve had a hard reset, but we might just come out of it better positioned to face the future. When we first went into lockdown and all sport temporarily ended my fear was that the women’s game would be completely parked until the crisis was over, with all attention going to more high-profile action. In many sports it did feel like women were sent to the back of the queue, for obvious commercial reasons, but in cricket what I saw was a shift in the narrative. We have come a long way over the past three or four years and instead of sidelining women the England and Wales Cricket Board delivered. Arranging a five-match Twenty20 series against West Indies at the last minute, doing everything possible to get it on, showed how far the game has already come. At Surrey we played a women’s game under lights before any men’s cricket was played and to be sitting in meetings where the chief executive was insisting the women’s game had to be back was a different conversation to the one we would have had five years ago. There has been powerful progress, women’s sport is now valued, valuable and necessary and the game has the massive potential boost of women’s cricket at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham next year, a World Cup that has been rescheduled from next month to early in 2022 and a Twenty20 World Cup in 2023. Internationally, there are some issues. Australia have really kicked on in the past few years, having a good domestic structure in place and followed that with investment in the game. England are playing catch-up, with a good head coach in Lisa Keightley and a chance to get the formula right. But the pandemic has caused more problems elsewhere: Australia got in a full Big Bash, India had the Women’s T20 Challenge, the ECB organised a 50-over tournament and the West Indies tour so the fully funded nations, even in the most challenging time, had some high-quality domestic and international cricket. The fear is the gap between the top three nations and the rest has been extended. Support has to be built in from governing bodies to ensure it doesn’t become too big, which could significantly damage the game. The big advance over the past year was with diversity – not so much taking action, but breaking the silence. This is something I experienced and I had never spoken about racism in the way I did in July, when Michael Holding and I did a piece for Sky. I have to give a lot of credit to Mikey – I wouldn’t have done it without him. He has the strength of character, which he demonstrated throughout his career, and a depth of experience that gave me the support I needed to speak up. Sky deserve credit as well, for making the decision to use its platform to start that conversation. Once I had been enabled to speak, through Mikey and through a global movement that was building at the time, I sent messages of support to others, such as Azeem Rafiq, who were then able to open up. The hardest thing is to speak in isolation and fear exposure, but the events of 2020 allowed a number of voices to be heard. Lungi Ngidi spoke about his experience in South Africa, Ish Sodhi about his in New Zealand. It was a year for discussion, a chance to speak and to be listened to, and the ECB, like governing bodies across the world, was forced to pay attention. That led to some difficult conversations, and many of those continue, but you can’t improve without that. One thing we need in future is to move away from BAME as a reporting tool and talk about the more specific needs of individual communities. The Pakistani community has different needs to the Indian community, for example, but in cricket inequality of opportunity is not limited to skin colour. We don’t talk about the white working-class enough; in Surrey we have a massive Portuguese community who we need to get involved. Counties need to formulate clear plans for how they’re going to engage with their local communities. We are miles behind football, which has its own problems but does have access, reach and engagement. Everybody feels football is a game for them and we need to get cricket to a place where it starts to feel reflective of society. The ECB is setting up an independent commission to investigate inequality and discrimination, which is a smart move because it allows new voices to come in and challenge the game rather than just keeping the old echo chamber going. It will be a long and difficult journey, but cricket has such great potential if it can become more representative. The pandemic has made this task even more challenging, because people became less active. Lower socio-economic and more ethnically diverse communities have suffered in particular from the reduction in school and community sport that successive lockdowns forced upon us. At Surrey we saw real excitement and engagement in our community programmes even though they were stop-start, and we received £540,000 funding from Sport England, which will allow us to go further in the future, but 2020 was extremely challenging for community sport. I have read heartbreaking reports from Sport England about the impact this will have not just on physical fitness but on mental health and self-esteem. Cricket lost the summer after England’s World Cup win and the chance to follow through on that, but hopefully there will be increased visibility this year with the Hundred and all the stars it’s bringing in, and we can see genuine growth. If we market it right and let our communities know this is a game designed for them and accessible to them, people will turn up. There was a time when I wasn’t sure if the game was dying a slow death, but my faith has been renewed. When the pandemic is controlled and we are allowed to fully open our doors once again, we’re going to be ready.