Cricket fans witnessed an exciting match today, featuring thrilling performances and key moments. Here at Sportn Techs, we provide a brief overview of the highlights and essential updates from the game.
The new-look London Spirit are hugely increasing salaries paid to off-field cricket staff in a bid to boost the calibre of recruits when the turbocharged Hundred launches in August. With the competitions salary cap including only the playing squad, Spirit hope the backroom staff attracted will help the team flourish.
One source described the wages offered to coaches and analysts for the first five years of the competition, when their salaries were funded by the England & Wales Cricket Board, as embarrassing. But Spirit are hoping to benefit from the combination of a massive funding boost after the sale of 49% of the team for 145m to a consortium of entrepreneurs unofficially known as the Tech Titans in last years team auction and the pull of life in the English capital to hire staff of sufficient calibre to transform their previously miserable fortunes. It is understood that their spending on support staff will be trebled.
While the womens side won the tournament in 2024 and reached the eliminator last year, the men have finished last or second-last in four of its five seasons.
Well be resourcing our support staff in a way that far exceeds previous years, said Mo Bobat, London Spirits director of cricket. The onus is now on teams to pay their coaches and their science and medicine staff or their analysts whatever they want to pay them. Weve had a good level of backing from the board and weve been able to recruit and attract really good people because of that.
Our job is to get high-quality people in. Weve got excellent coaches, weve started to build really strong support staff teams and we want to try and make sure that our systems and processes allow success to become inevitable. That doesnt just happen overnight, but were trying to do that as quickly as we can.
Bobat is also director of cricket at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, who won the IPL for the first time in 2025, and has recruited several of their support staff, including their head coach, Andy Flower, as well as the team analyst, Freddie Wilde, and physio, James Pipe. The womens team will be coached by Jon Lewis, with Heather Knight taking on the role of general manager.
On Monday, Spirit announced eight directly signed players, including the South Africans Marizanne Kapp player of the match when she won the 2022 final with Oval Invincibles and Dewald Brevis, the Australian spinner Adam Zampa, Englishmen Jamie Overton and Liam Livingstone and the 19-year-old English seamer Mahika Gaur.
They also unveiled a new logo an austere effort compared with some of their rivals, composed of the letters L and S, with the L slanted in a nod to the slope at Lords and an official colour palette that focuses on blue, but also reflects MCC tradition by including bacon (a shade previously better known as red) and egg (yellow).
With local rivals Oval Invincibles rebranded as MI London it means the capitals two Hundred franchises will both wear blue and have London in their names. Ideally they might have been different colours, but its not something Ive spent too much time thinking about, Bobat said.
Theres plenty of teams that wear blue in the IPL and theres no shortage of rivalry there.
That’s the latest from today’s match. Stay tuned to Sportn Techs for more cricket news, live scores, and expert analysis from leagues and tournaments worldwide.
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