Lancashire Women

Manchester's summers have long revolved around the ground on Talbot Road, and Lancashire's women have carried the same red rose onto that turf as the county's men since long before women's cricket had any formal structure to speak of. They play under the Red Roses badge, in the same colours, out of Emirates Old Trafford, a ground that holds 19,000 for domestic fixtures and swells past 26,000 when England call it up for internationals.

For much of the twentieth century the side did not stand alone: before 1998 it fielded a combined team with Cheshire, and only that year did Lancashire enter the Women's County Championship in its own right. In Twenty20 cricket the county now plays under a separate banner, Lancashire Thunder, alongside the regional franchise North West Thunder, which keeps the county in step with how the short format is now organised and marketed.

No fixture carries the weight of the meeting with Yorkshire, the old Roses rivalry transplanted from the men's game, and no name currently does more for the county's cricket than Sophie Ecclestone, whose left-arm spin has taken her from Old Trafford into England's own attack. 2025 brought Lancashire's biggest season yet: they took both the Metro Bank One-Day Cup and the Vitality T20 Women's County Cup, a double that had not come their way before. Eight years earlier, in 2017, they had already paired the County Championship Division One title with the Twenty20 Cup.

The team's first recorded match, in 1930, was against the Women's Cricket Association, and Lancashire won it by 111 runs.