AUSTRALIA duly completed a five-nil series victory over an outclassed England side yesterday after Lisa Keightley became the first woman to make a century at Lord's.
Keightley's historic 113 not out will make the townsfolk of Mudgee very proud, and it wrapped up Australia's dominance with a green and yellow ribbon.
England will now have to build a team around Charlotte Edwards, the gifted 18-year-old from Huntingdon. John Major, the town's MP, would have had more than a crumb of satisfaction as he watched her taking on the world's best bowling attack in the milky sunshine yesterday.
Five of England's side had played in the 1993 World Cup winning team at Lord's, including Karen Smithies, their OBE captain, but this time humiliation awaited at headquarters as Belinda Clark and Keightley, her New South Wales colleague, put on 171 classy runs in 36 overs for the first wicket.
The surprising statistic about the women's game is that Australia are by far the dominant force in numbers, with about 23,000 players compared with 3,600 in England and Wales.
The gap, according to Sharon Bayton, is connected to ``cultural issues'' that needed to be overcome, and as chairman of the Women's Cricket Association, she welcomed the extra resources available from the merger with the England Cricket Board on Sept 1.
Bayton said: ``What we want in this country is for the kids to think that playing cricket is 'cool' and carries street cred and that you're not going to be looked upon as a bit odd.''
An ECB survey showed, in effect, that the women's game had been slow to switch from skirts to trousers, and the shortage of women's teams only 82 are affiliated - has saddled parents in some counties with unacceptably long journeys for girls' cricket.
The key, according to Tim Lamb, the ECB's chief executive, is the progress of Alec Stewart's England side. He said: ``Young people are more attracted by the men's game, probably because the women's isn't established. We want to emphasise sex appeal in cricket - creating heroes.'' And he then disclosed that his daughter Sophie, a Hertfordshire under-15 player, had a pin-up of Nick Knight.
England's loss of momentum after their 1993 triumph must go down as one of the most painful lessons in sport. Bayton took over as the WCA chairman after the World Cup to find the success at Lord's was a veneer that hid deep-rooted problems.
She said: ``The problem was that we had 11 to 13 very successful cricketers, but not a huge lot below that - no domestic structure, no junior development strategy and no international fixtures. We had a world-beating side with no one to play.''