England head coach Jon Lewis set for Lucknow WPL job

NICK FRIEND: Jonathan Batty will be head coach of the Delhi franchise; London Spirit head coach Ashley Noffke will be Lewis's bowling coach

England head coach Jon Lewis is set to lead the Lucknow franchise in the inaugural Women's Premier League.

It means that three of the five head coaches in the new competition will be English, with Surrey and Oval Invincibles head coach Jonathan Batty to lead Delhi Capitals in the Women's Premier League.

The former Surrey wicketkeeper has led Invincibles to consecutive titles in The Hundred and was seconded to the Women's Big Bash earlier this winter to work with Melbourne Stars.

Previously, he was head coach of South East Stars in the first year of the regional structure introduced to English women's domestic cricket in 2020, while he has also worked with England's wicketkeepers.

Charlotte Edwards has already been named as Mumbai's head coach.

The Cricketer understands that former India fielding coach Ramakrishnan Sridhar had been set for the Lucknow job before a late change opened the door for Lewis, who will be coaching at the T20 World Cup in his first women's tournament when the auction takes place.

^{Jonathan Batty coached Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash and will lead Delhi in the WPL (Graham Denholm/Getty Images)}

His bowling coach is understood to be Ashley Noffke, the former Australia fast bowler recently appointed to replace Trevor Griffin as London Spirit women's head coach.

England are expected to be well represented in the competition; Sophie Ecclestone, Danni Wyatt, Nat Sciver-Brunt and Katherine Sciver-Brunt have all entered at the maximum reserve. In all, 27 English players have made the cut to the final auction list.

Speaking to The Cricketer in January, Lewis said that he expected "over 50 per cent of our team – maybe 60 or 70 per cent – will go to the IPL".

On how he intended to manage their workloads – talking before his opportunity had arisen with Lucknow – he added: "That's part of my job – to work out what's right for each player and at what point. I see it as quite a crunch point coming for us as a nation, with the IPL coming in and the players earning in one month considerably more than they would earn in a year playing for England.

^{Ramakrishnan Sridhar had been lined up for the Lucknow job (Michael Bradley/AFP via Getty Images)}

"Now, when that starts to happen, the player then has big decisions to make if you go to them and say: 'You're not fit enough to go and do that.' And they then say: 'I'm going.'

"That's the managing of people. Something is going to have to shift, and the IPL isn't going to shift. That's power, that's where the money is in cricket. We see it in the men's game. You think about that with other countries as well, where they don't get paid anywhere near as much as what the English girls get paid.

"The landscape of women's cricket is going to change in the next two months."

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