The ladies performed a cricket World Cup two years earlier than the lads did. That was in England in 1973.
England, Australia, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, moreover an Worldwide XI and Younger England, took half. The host received the inaugural version, beating Australia by 92 runs within the last.
However, 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 have been invisible and didn’t get sufficient consideration.
England’s World Cup heroine of 1973 needed to develop and promote potatoes in order that she may play cricket. The gamers needed to drive to their day jobs after the sport, and one in all them was so exhausted, she fell asleep on the wheel. There have been events when their Indian sisters travelled on bullock carts to play matches.
Right now’s feminine cricketer is flying excessive. And he or she has earned her air ticket the arduous means.
And the world’s elite girls cricketers have flown right down to India for the thirteenth version of the World Cup, which guarantees to be essentially 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 beneath its wings, and the WPL have all modified the sport virtually past recognition.
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It may turn into even larger 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 likely one of the favourites, and Australia’s captain Alyssa Healy by no means misses a possibility to make a degree. Whether or not she likes it or not, the Aussies are the overwhelming favourites. They’re the defending champions and are an extremely sturdy 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.
However, there’s something in what Healy stated: the Ladies in Blue have the gamers — together with a Smriti Mandhana in red-hot type — the house situations, and the momentum to win a first-ever World Cup. In the event that they handle to try 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 evenly, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh can be eager to spring a shock or two.
And keep in mind, this World Cup gives extra prize cash than the 2023 males’s World Cup.
Printed on Sep 29, 2025