By beating favourites Australia, West Indies have done stellar service for women's cricket
In the West Indies’ first game of the tournament in ICC Women’s World
T20, the Player-of the-Match was a Pakistani. It was that kind of game.
That is how they started.
They needed to defend 12 off the last
over to avoid an embarrassing opening loss. They called upon Deandra
Dottin. She delivered.
They found momentum in their second game
against Bangladesh but did not win by the margin they would have liked
to, to improve their net run rate.
They almost made net run rate
inconsequential by beating table-toppers England in their third game.
Again Dottin was called upon to bowl the last over. She got a wicket,
yet failed. Only just. Tears were shed in the West Indies dugout that
day. One more loss might have sent them home.
In a virtual quarter-final against India, against the hosts, against
the vociferous Mohali crowd, Dottin succeeded where she had failed
against England. She picked up two wickets in the last over and sealed
the game, and a fourth semi-final berth for her team.
In the semis, again she was called upon to bowl the last over, with 19 to defend. They won that game by six runs.
But
her most valuable last over would be in the final. This time, bowling
first, she had no target to defend. The brief was simple. Give away as
few runs as you can.
She almost bowled a wicket maiden, until the Australian batters scampered one off the last ball.
Australia might have thought that that over wouldn’t hurt them too much. They had put a mammoth 148 on the board.
As it was, they were wrong.
In
the 2014 World Twenty20 final, where Australia beat England for a
‘3-peat’ of World T20 titles, one glaring statistic stood out like a
tall poppy. England had failed to hit a single six in the entire
competition. Australia had hit 18. 18! Four of which came in the final.
The Southern Stars had smashed, smoked, muscled and mauled their way to
their third WT20 title.
The number 18 would be a talking point in this final as well.
Coming
into the 2016 final, Australia had hit just one six. No, their power
hitting had not suddenly disappeared. It was a reflection of the slow
pitches, more than anything else. Ellyse Perry tried to correct the
balance by hitting two more on the big day.
Hayley Matthews was 17
when the tournament began and 18 when it ended. She had been given the
new ball by her captain in the field, where the West Indies were a
shadow of the team they can be. It was a difficult decision to
understand as she would prove by her many full tosses. But she got a
wicket. It may have given her the belief she needed. Or maybe she just
had the confidence all along.
With the bat in hand, the latter
looked more accurate. She was unafraid to step out and hit Perry over
her head. She didn’t even bother stepping out to hit Megan Schutt,
Australia’s highest wicket-taker. Her body language seemed to say,
“Anything you can do, I can do better. And faster. And while still
younger.”
Australia hit three sixes in the tournament. The West Indies hit six.
Matthews hit three in the final itself, part of a match winning 66 off
45 balls.
She is only 18. And the West Indies had smashed, smoked, muscled and mauled their way to their first WT20 title.
Earlier
this year, Dottin was not in the West Indies. She was in Australia. On
international duty of another kind. She was one of four West Indies
players who played in the inaugural Women’s Big Bash League. While
Dottin didn’t fulfill her potential with the bat, she excelled with the
ball.
Hayley Matthews looked comfortable against the Australian opening bowlers. Like she had faced them before.
She had. She opened the batting for the Hobart Hurricanes, and faced them all Australian summer.
The
Sydney Thunder won the WBBL 01. Stafanie Taylor opened the batting for
them, and often the bowling. She had never won a global tournament with
the West Indies. Three months later, she had led the West Indies to a
seminal and historic win. Over Australia.
Connect the dots yourself.
The West Indies have taught the world some valuable lessons.
First:
You don’t need to have the best board in the world behind you to win a
world championship, or two. The issues the men have faced with the board
have been well documented. The WICB is far from the winner-producing
machine that is Cricket Australia, or the mass producer of precocity,
the BCCI. It is just another cricket board; cash strapped, power hungry
and often downright indifferent to what the fans want
Thankfully,
with the women’s team, they have done what needs to be done though:
consistent selection, promotion of young talent, and capable leaders.
Former Test cricketer Vasbert Drakes is their coach, and has built on
much of the work done by his predecessor, Sherwin Campbell.
Second:
Participation in international T20 leagues will raise your ability to
perform for your nation. Just look at the men’s side. They are a
collection of individuals, so called mercenaries, who are highly sought
after in worldwide T20 leagues, and have honed their skills in high
pressure games. It is similarly impossible to overlook the contribution
of the WBBL in the women’s team’s win. It serves like a student
exchange; you are likely to see the world, and yourself, differently
forever after.
Third: There is no substitute for belief. Most of
the West Indies players, male and female, were sporting white armbands
with the words, “Moving in Faith” on their wrists. The faith they are
talking about seems to be more than faith in the Almighty; it seems to
be a faith in their own and each other’s abilities. Abilities, which in
turn, have been honed by hours and hours in the nets and gym.
The
next ICC Women’s World T20 will be a standalone event. It will move out
of the shadow of the men’s game, and test its self-sufficiency in the
year 2018. There is much reason to be optimistic.
By making the
final itself, the West Indies made history. Before this, no other team
besides the usual culprits England, Australia and New Zealand had
featured in the women’s WT20 final. It could have been enough for the
West Indies. It wasn’t.
They had never beaten Australia in a T20I.
Their head to head record stood at 8-0. They would have been forgiven
had they been overawed by the occasion. Indeed, with the ball in hand,
it looked like that was precisely what happened. The Windies bowlers
were feeding the Aussie batters long hops and full tosses, sumptuous
invitations to score in their favourite square of the wicket areas. But
after Dottin’s almost miraculous last over, they seemed to have had
enough.
They batted like they had nothing to lose. That’s the
beauty of being underdogs. In the end they won by eight wickets. After
the first three overs, Australia were never in control. West Indies
smashed, smoked, muscled and mauled their way to a historic WT20 title.
You could almost say it was a very Australian innings. Except for the
dancing towards the end.
With a handful of runs left to get, the
player in the dugout stood shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm. It was like
a serpentine football wall. Except the wall was jiggling. It was like
watching a warm up routine in a dance class, except half the students
had batting pads on. The pads didn’t come off as they sprinted onto the
pitch to celebrate, joined by the men’s team soon after.
Leave
aside the impact in their own region; the West Indies gave women’s
cricket a much needed boost on Sunday. By breaking Australia’s record of
winning every world event final they have played in since 2000, they
moved the game into unfamiliar yet exciting territory. They set the
stage for the standalone edition of 2018, sure to be a success since the
new defending champions will be hosting it. The only regret is that we
are unlikely to see both men and women jiggling to a common tune as we
did this time. But that is a small sacrifice at the altar of the growth
of the game
