At last...a Pro women's cricket team!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/26171943

Wow! This is great news. Good old jolly England.

Significant investment, bonuses and wage rises! This is what we want to see!

Cricket as a sport has once again shown itself to be a the forefront of development, with leading edge ideas in equality and egalitarianism . For a sport with such a stiff and stuffy image, it is really quite progressive!

As I have said before, cricket is a unifying sport and has the potential to bring people of different races, religions (and genders!) together and rise above all the petty bigotry, tradition and normativity that plague the world. Other sports like football are still mired in racism, homophobia and have barely even started any gender equality activity.

This is a superb decision by the ECB. All credit to them. We have now set the standard to all other cricketing nations.

All the best to our women's team, they thoroughly deserve this new investment and hopefully we will continue to see good young players come up through the grassroots system. We'll see that this should raise standards in the sport and allow the players to focus on their game when they don't need a day job any longer!

What a brilliant performance we have seen from the team this last year, recently retaining the Ashes after winning them in the summer. This is all in stark contrast of course to the men's side, who have been very disappointing all year round and were humiliated in the whole Australian series. Now there is turmoil in the dressing room, players and management alike all up and leaving. I can only hope for a period of consolidation in 2014 where we focus on developing a good new side for the future.

Becoming Pro is no small thing. Congratulations in particular must go to Clare Taylor and Charlotte Edwards, they have been awesome. Charlotte is the Sachin Tendulkar of the women's game, an exceptional record and a great woman. She is my Heroine!!

As I've said to the naysayers before, I don't deny that it may turn out that women's cricket will never reach the levels of the mens' game, nor attract that much interest and so not warrant the same investment in their cold, objective, market-forces driven world. My argument has never been that women's cricket offers a superior experience to men's. 

But even if all nay saying expectations come true, that does NOT mean that this was the wrong thing to do. It is only fair to give women an equal chance. It is always worth trying - and this is something I'm confident will be well worth giving a go.