“I haven’t really thought about it, to be honest.” - Heather Knight, with a face as straight as her bat, on Australia’s favourites status.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
PUT 150 of the best cricketers under a bedouin canopy on a beautiful beach as the sun sets over the ocean on a perfect summer’s day. Surround them with free food and drink and good vibes only. Tell them to be quiet while one dull speech delivered by some sorry suit morphs into another. Good luck with that.
The City of Cape Town — the local government — welcomed the women’s T20 World Cup to its sun-struck shores at a function on Saturday. Happily, the buzz made by the reuniting friends and frenemies in the 10 squads in attendance drowned out the podium piffle.
It was the sound of anticipation and excitement, no doubt heard before each of the tournament’s seven editions since it was first played in June 2009. Australia have been to the final six times — the only exception was in 2009, when hosts England beat New Zealand — and won five of them. So some of that anticipation and excitement will have centred on avoiding the question being asked outside the player bubble: which of the other sides will be beaten by Australia in the final?
Hours before the evening function the captains gave a press conference in a hotel at Cape Town’s bustling waterfront, which is replete with restaurants serving ordinary food at extraordinary prices, Insta-ready views of Table Mountain, more shops than you might have thought there were things to sell, and, of course, tourists. Two of the latter wandered into the scene as nine of the captains waited for the other so that a group photograph could be taken.
“What is going on,” one of the tourists asked in a German accent. Briefly informed, they nodded with the baffled politeness of people who haven’t a clue what they’re looking at before wandering off to continue their safari of all things exotic.
Presently Heather Knight arrived in the kind of apologetic hurry that suggested she was aware she had kept everyone waiting while she was being interviewed elsewhere. At the presser a few minutes later, Knight was lobbed a gentle long hop of a variation on the theme of none of the non-Australian teams having a hope in hell of winning the trophy: was it annoying or motivating for her and her players that much of the pre-tournament talk was about who Meg Lanning’s side were going to face in the final?
Heather Clare Knight OBE is no-nonsense on legs. She turned down a place at Cambridge because she had set her sights on playing for England, and studying natural sciences at one of the world’s most prestigious universities wouldn’t allow enough time for cricket. She is the only woman to have scored an international century in all three formats. She has led England to two ODI World Cup finals and won one of them. She is not the type of person you ask how it feels to make up the numbers. She aimed at her questioner a look steely with barely latent rejection of the very idea.
“I haven’t really thought about it, to be honest,” Knight said. “Our job as a team is to play the group games that are put in front of us, and try and get out of the group. Everyone starts on the same page. We’re pretty clear how we want to go about things. But in a T20 World Cup you don’t have much chance to slip up. You have to go at it full force all the way.”
Doubtless Knight wouldn’t have taken seriously what happened on a sluggish pitch at Newlands on Monday, but it did expose the Australians as merely mortal. Although warm-up matches offer no indication of form or quality, the perennial champions must have been alarmed by their implosion to 79/8 before Georgia Wareham and Jess Jonassen shared 50 off 26 to push them to 129/8. Then they gifted India nine of their first 11 runs in wides. It ended well enough for Australia, what with only Ellyse Perry conceding more than a run-a-ball, Darcie Brown taking 4/17, and India failing dismally to come to terms with the conditions and being bowled out for 85.
While that was happening, Sophia Dunkley, Alice Capsey and Nat Sciver-Brunt were scoring half-centuries on a significantly better batting surface in Stellenbosch. England’s 246/7 looked out of South Africa’s reach, but they fell just 17 runs short. Chloe Tryon and Nadine de Klerk reached 50 — and shared 98 off 39 — and Lauren Bell, Charlie Dean and Sarah Glenn took three wickets each.
All the teams played warm-up games on Monday, and will do so again on Wednesday. The tournament proper starts with a match between South Africa and Sri Lanka at Newlands on Friday — the first of a dozen games in Cape Town, including both semi-finals and the February 26 final. Six matches will be played at Boland Park and five at St George’s Park. Only England, Ireland, Sri Lanka and South Africa will visit each venue during the group stage.
Home sides are invariably under extra pressure, but that has been heightened for the South Africans by CSA bungling the handling of Dané van Niekerk’s failed fitness test. Lessons should have been learnt in July when Lizelle Lee retired from international cricket rather than have to keep pace with the stringent test, which is less rigorously adhered to in other countries. They weren’t, and Van Niekerk, a proven leader and allrounder, had the dressing room door slammed in her face because her 2km time was 18 seconds too slow.
She will be missed, even though the T20 World Cup comes to a South Africa jammed to the gunwales with big cricket. Last month the country hosted the inaugural under-19 women’s World Cup. A T20 tri-series also involving India and West Indies ended on Thursday, the day after South Africa’s men’s team concluded an ODI rubber against England. The juggernaut SA20, which began last month before pausing for the ODIs, is hurtling to a no doubt spectacular climax at the Wanderers on Saturday. The men’s national team will play eight matches across the formats against the Windies in February and March, followed by two World Cup Super League ODIs against the Netherlands. And then there’s the WPL.
The tournament will not, of course, be played in South Africa. But Laura Goodall and Annerie Dercksen are the only members of the home side’s 15-player T20 World Cup squad whose names are not among the 17 South Africans in Monday’s auction. Lee and Van Niekerk are also up for sale in what will be a major distraction for players in the global event, especially with Ireland the only team who will not have to focus on a match before the auction.
Like the IPL has done for the men’s game, the WPL is likely to revolutionise women’s cricket for good rather than bad. That explains why 1,525 players registered for the WPL auction. That just 409 made the final cut tells us that arguments to the contrary will be made only by flanneled fools. Get out of the way of progress, or get run over.
How might a women’s T20 World Cup hold its own against that little lot? With difficulty. Significant lip service has been paid to the place of women in the game in the cause of embellishing the tournament, so the release on Tuesday of FICA’s Women’s Professional Cricket Global Employment Report 2022 provided a welcome reality check.
Among the “key employment concerns” were the finding that 86% of the players surveyed were subject to “job insecurity”, that 33% reported a “poor or very poor” relationship with their national boards, that 34% had felt discriminated against on gender grounds “with three-quarters believing they did not have adequate support provided afterwards”, and that 22% “have had issues getting paid under a cricket contract”.
Afghanistan is its own magnitude of awfulness where “the progress of women’s cricket … has been brought to an abrupt halt … following the Taliban offensive in August 2021”. The 25 central contracts for women have been cancelled since the murderous misogynists took power. On the plus side, the number of national contracts available to women globally has risen by more than 75% since 2020.
There is no shortage of questions swirling around women’s cricket in the next three weeks. Among them is this: who will Australia beat in the T20 World Cup final?
Cricbuzz
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