Australia’s international women are unlikely to participate in much of the domestic WNCL competition in 2026-27 as the women’s international schedule continues to get more compressed during the southern hemisphere summer.

Cricket Australia (CA) released the women’s domestic fixtures for the upcoming season on Wednesday, but there will be limited opportunities for Australia’s best players to play in what is widely regarded as the best 50-over domestic competition in the world.

Last season, a number of Australian stars, including Ellyse Perry, Annabel Sutherland, Sophie Molineux, Alana King and Tahlia McGrath, played multiple WNCL matches around their international commitments but there were others, including Beth Mooney, Ash Gardner, Georgia Voll and Phoebe Litchfield, who did not feature for their states.

This season, there are likely to be even fewer with just two WNCL matches scheduled before Bangladesh’s women and New Zealand’s women tour for white-ball internationals in October that will overlap with the start of the WBBL. There are a group of matches scheduled between December 14 and December 22 but then Australia’s best will head to India for the WPL in January before convening for the first women’s Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka in early February. They then return for a three-match ODI series against New Zealand in Australia at the start of March, followed by a scheduled tour of South Africa that is yet to be finalised.

The final round of the WNCL coincides with the third ODI against New Zealand in March and the final itself will be played on March 20. Australia’s best were unavailable for last summer’s WNCL final due to a tour of the Caribbean.

Adding to the complexity, Australia A women have a multi-format tour of India that overlaps with the opening round of the WNCL, which starts on September 29.

CA’s head of scheduling Peter Roach said the women’s schedule is starting to resemble the men’s, making it very difficult for the best Australian players to feature in domestic games. “We see that first [round] as being an opportunity,” Roach said. “We won’t have the same international players playing the A tour as we do the international series, so that’ll be certainly one. The others are challenged.

“Whilst technically there’s maybe a day here and there, you look around round five and WPL finals, if their teams didn’t make the finals there’s an opportunity, but then they launch into a world event. As the years go by, it’s becoming a little bit more like the men, where finding opportunities for them to compete in domestic cricket, where it used to be the norm and used to be unusual for them not to be playing, now it’s probably the opposite that teams expect Australia’s best XI team not to be playing.”