Expanded horizons and nearer contests beckon Womens ODI World Cup

 The girls performed a cricket World Cup two years earlier than the lads did. That was in England in 1973.

England, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, in addition to an International XI and Young England, took half. The host received the inaugural version, beating Australia by 92 runs within the last.

But, not many bothered.

The world’s first recorded girls’s cricket match might have been performed in 1745 in Surrey between two villages of that county, Bramley and Hambledon, however for hundreds of years, the ladies in cricket had been invisible and never getting an excessive amount of consideration.

England’s World Cup heroine of 1973 needed to develop and promote potatoes in order that she might play cricket. The gamers needed to drive to their day jobs after the sport, and certainly one of them was so exhausted, she fell asleep on the wheel. There had been events when their Indian sisters travelled on bullock carts to play matches.

Today’s feminine cricketer is flying excessive. And she has earned her air-ticket the exhausting approach.

And the world’s elite girls cricketers have flown right down to India: for the thirteenth version of the ODI World Cup, which guarantees to be probably the most adopted girls’s cricket occasion in historical past. It additionally guarantees to be the closest.

Harmanpreet Kaur’s 171 not out for India in opposition to Australia within the semifinal of the 2017 World Cup, the BCCI taking girls’s cricket underneath its wings, and the WPL have all modified the sport nearly past recognition.

It might change into even greater due to this World Cup, which opens with the match between the 2 hosts, India and Sri Lanka, right here on the Barsapara Stadium on Tuesday.

India is among the favourites, and Australia’s captain Alyssa Healy by no means misses a possibility to make it some extent.

Whether she likes it or not, the Aussies are the overwhelming favourites. They are the defending champions and are an extremely robust all-round aspect, that includes the extra skilled gamers like Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Ashleigh Gardner and Megan Schutt and the youthful ones comparable to Annabel Sutherland and Phoebe Litchfield.

But, there’s something in what Healy mentioned: the Women in Blue have the gamers — together with a Smriti Mandhana in crimson scorching type — the house circumstances, and the momentum to win a first-ever World Cup. If they handle to do this, it will be one other large enhance to the sport within the nation.

Former champion England, regardless of the sequence losses to Australia and India, has sufficient high quality to be a contender. South Africa and New Zealand also needs to be eyeing a spot within the final 4. Sri Lanka can’t be taken flippantly, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh can be eager to spring a shock or two.

And keep in mind, this World Cup presents extra prize-money than the 2023 males’s ODI World Cup.