Kate Cross Retires After 21 Years, 102 Caps and 140 International Wickets
The England and Lancashire seam bowler will finish at the end of the 2026 season, having made her county debut at 13 and taken 239 wickets for the Red Rose.
Kate Cross will retire from professional cricket at the end of the 2026 season, ending a career that began when she made her senior county debut for Lancashire at 13 years old.
The numbers
Cross, 34, has played 102 times for England across all three formats since her debut in October 2013, taking 140 international wickets. For Lancashire, across the club's professional and non-professional sides, she has taken 239.
Her career spans 21 years from that first appearance as a schoolgirl who had learned the game at Heywood.
The milestone that says the most
In 2025 she became only the eighth player to take 100 one-day international wickets for England, and she reached the mark on her 100th one-day appearance. She is the second-fastest English woman to get there.
Reaching a hundred wickets in exactly a hundred matches is the kind of symmetry that means nothing statistically and quite a lot otherwise. It describes a bowler who was picked almost every time she was fit, in a format where England have not been short of seam options.
A career either side of a change
Cross began playing for England in 2013, before the professional contracts, before the Hundred existed, and before women's international cricket was routinely broadcast. She finishes in a game that looks very little like the one she entered.
That is worth stating because careers of this length in women's cricket are still uncommon. The players who bridge an amateur era and a professional one tend to have made a decision, at some point, to keep going through a period when there was no obvious reason to. Twenty-one years from a county debut at 13 is that decision repeated a great many times.
She has spoken about the 2025 season, in which Lancashire won two trophies, as one of the highlights of the career, and about the distance travelled from junior cricket at Heywood to a Lancashire shirt and then an England one.
What we are not printing
Her 140 international wickets are not broken down by format in anything we could read at source, so we are not offering a split. Where we cannot verify a number we would rather leave a gap than fill it.
Our own records of women's Twenty20 international cricket, and what they cover, are set out in our women's T20 piece.