Photo Credit: Professional Cricketers’ Association
Top performers in 2021 competing for £10,000 total prize money.
The PCA Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy Most Valuable Player Rankings will return this weekend, with a £2,500 cash prize on offer for the top performer from this year’s competition.
The brand-new PCA MVP algorithm, developed by the Association in conjunction with CricViz and the players, will keep track of the top performers throughout this year’s competition, which begins on 29 May and ends with the final on 25 September.
Following that fixture, the player who has accumulated the most MVP points will be rewarded with a £2,500 prize – over double the 2020 amount which was the first ever individual cash prize awarded within women’s domestic cricket in England and Wales.
MVP points accumulated during this year’s RHFT will count towards the first ever cross-format Overall MVP for women’s domestic cricket, which will also take into account points earned during the domestic T20 and The Hundred.
The winner of the T20 competition will also claim a £2,500 reward which also sees the women’s game aligned with men’s with competition MVP prize money. The Overall MVP will take home £5,000, meaning £10,000 is at stake when the season starts on Saturday.
The 2021 RHFT MVP will follow in the footsteps of Georgia Adams, who earned 110.2 MVP points at an average of 15.75 points-per-game as she captained Southern Vipers to victory without losing a single game in the 2020 edition.
Adams finished 22 points clear of Lightning’s Kathryn Bryce (88.3 MVP points) in second place, whilst Western Storm’s Georgia Hennessy (80.5) occupied the final podium position.
The new women’s domestic structure, which has seen 41 full-time professional contracts handed out across the eight regional centres, provides a platform for players to make a name for themselves below international level.
With the England Women squad available for the first three rounds of fixtures due to their upcoming series against India, the 2021 RHFT MVP will once again give the opportunity for emerging talent to flourish and push for international consideration.
The MVP was designed by the PCA in conjunction with the players to identify the top performers in the game.
Relaunched in 2021 with assistance from cricket’s leading analytics experts CricViz, the white-ball algorithm takes into account expected performance on every ball of every fixture to give the most accurate picture of the best performers in the game.
View the 2020 Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy MVP Rankings.
Find out more about the all-new MVP.
Name of Author: Professional Cricketers Association
The Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA), founded in 1967 by former England fast bowler Fred Rumsey as the Cricketers’ Association, represents past and present first-class cricketers in England and Wales. In the 1970s, the PCA established a standard employment contract and minimum wage for professional cricketers. It also helped create a pension scheme in 1995 and launched the magazine All Out Cricket and the ACE UK Educational Programme in 2002.
