Kate Cross considered retirement when she lost her England contract last year but has committed to another full season as a professional by signing a one-year deal at Lancashire.

England appear to have moved on from Cross under head coach Charlotte Edwards. She has not played an international match since July, was left out of their squad for the World Cup in India, and was not offered a central contract renewal for 2025-26.

Cross said last year that she was taken aback by the speed with which her international career reached an apparent end and cast doubt over her future, saying: “I’m also sat here questioning whether I want to play cricket again.”

Editor’s Picks

2 Related

But she has now committed to another full domestic season with Lancashire, having previously signed for the rebranded Sunrisers Leeds ahead of next month’s Hundred auction.

“[I’m] very pleased to be here for another year,” Cross told LancsTV. “It was an easy decision in some respects, but also the nature of how I lost my England contract, there was a bit of a question mark around whether I was going to play cricket this year.

“Once I’d made the decision [to play], in hindsight, it feels like a really easy decision to have made. But at the time, I was umming and ahhing about whether I was going to carry on playing cricket.”

She added: “One of the main reasons I’ve had the career that I’ve had was because of Lancashire. John Stanworth invited me to the academy way back when, when I was a teenager. It feels really nice to be able to come full circle and sign my first professional domestic contract with the club that has given me all the opportunities that I’ve had.”

Lancashire won both the T20 County Cup and the Metro Bank One-Day Cup last summer, and Cross said that she was motivated by the prospect of winning more silverware in 2026.

“Some of my favourite moments that I’ve had on a cricket pitch happened last year. Now, the pressure is to try and better last year, and that would mean trying to get the Blast trophy as well,” she said.

“As a group, we are really driven to take that challenge on, and we really want to try and get some more silverware next year because we all had such a great time winning those trophies.”