The Cricketer Magazine – June 2018

Women’s cricket

Thailand shock Sri Lanka as they gear up

for the Women’s World T20 Qualifier

Welcome to the

new world

Thailand’s humbling of Sri Lanka

underlines why the ICC’s long-awaited

T20 world rankings are especially

pertinent for women’s cricket,

writes James Coyne

Saturday July 7 will be the opening

day of the ICC Women’s World T20

Qualifier in the Netherlands. Of itself, not

groundbreaking. But, for the first time, all

the matches in a global qualifier will have

official international status. In fact, from

July, any T20 match between women’s

teams representing ICC member

countries will go down in the record

books as an official international.

Such obsession with the issue of status

might seem typical of a sport that slowly

developed out of a Victorian class system.

But it counts for much, given that just

a handful of Full Member officials have

called the shots at ICC level.

It means that, from next year, cricket

will finally have a comprehensive rankings

system for all men’s and women’s teams

• cricket’s first serious attempt to match
  football and rugby with a global ladder, so
  an armchair fan can seriously compare,
  say, Zimbabwe against Germany.
  There was mild surprise at the news
  that ICC officials had got their rankings
  proposal past the Full Member boards,
  who – it is fair to say – have not always
  acted in the wider interests of the global
  game. The rankings proposal could partly Alex

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Reports of

England’s

one‑day series

against South

Africa and the

T20 triangular

also involving

New Zealand

will be in the

August issue

of good players; ironically, Nattaya

Boochatham and Somnarin Tippoch

gained crucial experience as overseas

players in Sri lanka’s women’s domestic

tournament.

Tippoch’s team will surely not qualify

ahead of Bangladesh and Ireland next

month – though the Irish have been

taking some pummelings from New

Zealand. But the new T20 rankings will

wake a few people up, as Thailand will

be positioned ahead of Full Members

like Zimbabwe and Afghanistan. Indeed,

for cultural reasons, Afghanistan do not

have a functioning women’s team at all

since they played a series in Dushanbe,

Tajikistan in 2012. The Afghanistan

Cricket Board were promoted to Full

Membership of the ICC in spite of not

meeting the criteria on women’s cricket.

The ICC have justified their cutback

of the 50-over men’s World Cup on the

basis that T20 is the format that will

globalise the game. The ICC say they

hope their newly comprehensive T20I

world rankings will provide inspiration

for Associate nations to arrange more

fixtures against each other. If so, that

does represent a slight change of tack,

given that a few years ago they were

urging Associates to spend more on

development than high performance.

Kendix admits he is not starting with

a flood of reliable data. “One of the

challenges at the lower end is the lack

of inter-regional matches,” he told The

Cricketer. “For instance, if the women’s

teams of Brazil, Argentina and Chile only

ever play each other, how can they be

objectively rated alongside teams from

the rest of the world?

“If you look at Fifa – you’ll have a match

between two Pacific islands where maybe

181st plays 187th. But for a rankings

system to work you need some cross-

fertilisation. Otherwise, how do you say

that two closely matched teams are 20th

and 21st or 90th and 91st?

“So one of the things I may have to do at

the start is apply some expert judgement

from ICC regional development people.

“The big problem is that there is not

really enough data to have a really robust

system. But one of the arguments is that

if you set up a system, that in itself should

be an encouragement for teams to play

and improve their world ranking. So

maybe you accept a model a little bit flaky

be a response to the BCCI’s ongoing

reticence to join the Olympic movement.

(The ICC missed the deadline to get

cricket into the 2024 Paris Games.)

Virtually every Associate is in favour,

but the BCCI would have to work with

the Indian Olympic Association. But the

ICC’s comprehensive T20 structure does

at least move things along.

David Kendix, an actuary who devised

and maintains the ICC’s ranking system,

will be feeding in data from tournaments

around the world over the last five or so

years to inform his T20I rankings.

In among Kendix’s data will be results

from the Asian Cricket Council’s

Women’s T20 Asia Cup, played in

Kuala lumpur earlier this month. It was

shock enough when Bangladesh won

the tournament – beating six-times

champions India in the final. But arguably

a more seismic result was Thailand’s

humbling of Sri lanka. Wongpaka

liengprasert took 5 for 12 – two of them

stumped by Nannapat Koncharoenkai

• and followed up by hitting the winning
  run off the last ball.
  Thailand’s success is proof that, in many
  countries, it is easier for a women’s team
  to climb the global ladder than the men’s.
  It is barely 15 years since the first Thai
  woman seriously picked up a bat, but
  the game has developed quickly, to the
  extent that, at the last ACC audit, cricket
  was played by 11,000 juniors of either
  gender, in 21 provinces across Thailand.
  The Thai women’s team have a nucleus

Above AND

RIGHT

Thailand humbled

Sri Lanka in Kuala

Lumpur

90 | thecricketer.com