\u201cThere have been a couple of conversations with Lottie [Edwards] around the future of this team and it just feels like the right time for me to make this decision for myself and for my family as well,\u201d she said in an emotional press conference at Lord\u2019s on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Beaumont retires as England\u2019s leading ODI centurion, with 12 hundreds to her name. She was player of the tournament in 2017, the last time England lifted a World Cup, and scored a memorable Test double-century<\/a> during the 2023 Ashes Test. She will continue to play domestic cricket for the Blaze, but after being omitted from England\u2019s squad for the T20 World Cup, the writing seems to have been on the wall for her international career.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you get the wrong side of 30 and people talk about it whenever you have a slump in form you start to think about it more than you want to,\u201d Beaumont said. \u201cIt\u2019s been a long time coming. At the back end of the 50-over World Cup I started to think about what ending I might want. Obviously being left out of the 50-over stuff earlier in the year was a bit of a blow. It\u2019s the right time for me to move on, and see what\u2019s out there away from international cricket.\u201d<\/p>\n Some feared that this one-off Test might fall flat, given that it is taking place just five days after England lost the T20 World Cup final at the same ground; Beaumont\u2019s announcement will certainly give the occasion added poignancy. All the same, Wednesday was an odd day for the England squad, who reassembled for a red-ball net session with Lord\u2019s still full of signage urging them to \u201cCatch the Spirit\u201d \u2013 the slogan of a tournament which did not quite end with the fairytale they wanted<\/a>.<\/p>\n England\u2019s Tammy Beaumont in action. Photograph: Andrew Boyers\/Action Images\/Reuters<\/p>\n \u201cI really feel for them,\u201d Beaumont said. \u201cSome of them either haven\u2019t gone home or have had one night in their own bed and then they\u2019re back here doing literally the opposite end of cricket that you can do. They\u2019re going to have to settle into long spells, get used to leaving the ball again. They\u2019re turning up with a brilliant attitude. The rest of us have got to try to moderate that and get involved and gel together pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n India, meanwhile, have enjoyed the luxury of an extra week of red-ball practice after being knocked out of the World Cup without reaching the semi-finals. Such is their confidence that their scheduled training session at Lord\u2019s on Thursday did not go ahead.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to The Spin<\/p>\n Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers’ thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week\u2019s action<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Women\u2019s Tests are so few and far between that it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from previous encounters between these teams; their most recent Test took place in December 2023 and India won by a mammoth 347 runs<\/a>, but the conditions at Lord\u2019s will be a world away from those in Navi Mumbai. The two teams last played a Test on English soil in summer 2021 at Bristol, when a rearguard effort from off-spinner Sneh Rana helped India pull off a miraculous draw<\/a>; England\u2019s last multi-day game was their Ashes disaster at the G 18 months ago.<\/p>\n The real importance of this match is its historical significance: 50 years on from the first women\u2019s match at Lord\u2019s, and three years on from the independent commission for equity in cricket calling out the lack of a women\u2019s Test at Lord\u2019s as \u201ctruly appalling\u201d, the last bastion of cricketing misogyny will finally be breached. Ticket sales are reportedly excellent; should it go to four days, the match could even break the overall attendance record for a women\u2019s Test, currently 35,365 set at the MCG in January\/February 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very emotional moment,\u201d said India\u2019s Jemimah Rodrigues, who is expected to bat at No 4. \u201cYou dream of playing cricket for India, then you dream of playing Test cricket for India. And to do it where it all started at the home of cricket, nothing can get bigger than that. It\u2019s a dream for millions, but I\u2019m getting to live it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England\u2019s historic first Test at Lord\u2019s, which begins on Friday against India, will be the swansong for at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-789164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/500.jpg\")
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