The World Cup that begins on Friday will be New Zealand’s first chance to play host to the women’s tournament in 22 years. The 2000 edition, held in the pre-professional era when the game was still governed by the volunteer-run, perpetually-strapped-for-cash International Women’s Cricket Council, looked quite different to anything the current set of players will be used to. Across four weeks in November and December 2000, the eight teams were put up in student accommodation at Lincoln University in Christchurch, lived together, trained together and ate meals together.
It would be fair to say that the women’s game has been on quite the journey since then: the International Cricket Council took over in 2005, and professionalisation has trickled in since 2014. While the format of the 2022 tournament is the same as 2000 – an eight-team round-robin culminating in semi-finals and a final – the logistics are very different.
This time, the eight teams (Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, West Indies and Bangladesh) will embark on an odyssey around New Zealand. The tournament will be played at six venues across six different cities on the North and South Islands, countless chartered flights, and the use of five-star hotels to accommodate the teams and support staff. The idea that Heather Knight and Meg Lanning might casually encounter one another over breakfast before taking to the field against each other later that day – as Clare Connor and Belinda Clark did in 2000 – seems unlikely, to say the least.
To see this as straightforward “progress” would be to disregard the environmental impact of all that internal travel (something we ignore at our peril, given the impact that the climate crisis is already having on cricket). The idea of persisting with a six-city World Cup in the middle of a global pandemic – Omicron is spreading like wildfire through the New Zealand population as we speak – also feels, frankly, irresponsible.
Wanting to share hosting rights across the country when the tournament was conceived in 2019 is one thing, but the ICC has now had two years to rethink the schedule. Why could it not have followed the model of the 2000 World Cup? Placing all teams in one bubble (as was done for the 2020-21 Women’s Big Bash League) would have minimised the danger of a Covid outbreak, even if it might have risked Knight and Lanning staring daggers at each other over the coffee pot.
Instead, the ICC’s “contingency plan” involves the extraordinary introduction – announced last week – of a new rule: in the event of a Covid eruption, teams will be permitted to field nine players, plus two “substitutes” from within their management team. The players have stopped short of being publicly critical – in a classic example of doublespeak, Lanning labelled the rule “interesting” – but should Australia fail to win the final in Christchurch on 3 April because only nine of their players can bat, she might well revert to a shorter, four-letter word. And she would be right. This is the premier tournament for the women’s game, not a Jumpers For Goalposts hit-out in the local park. What is the ICC thinking?
All told, the warmup period to the tournament has not exactly inspired confidence in cricket’s global governing body. The official captains’ photograph, released last week, smacked of a bodge-job: the stand on which the World Cup trophy rested was propped up on a brick, while the framing made Lanning looked like she should be entering a contest for the world’s tallest woman. Over the weekend, the ICC then created confusion by posting a scorecard that suggested South Africa had defeated India by four wickets in an official warmup game, before a different scorecard did the rounds on Twitter showing (correctly) a two-run win by India; the ICC’s reporting had to be hastily corrected. We may be living in a new professional era for women’s cricket but the ICC can still, it seems, bungle it with the best of them.
England fans will be hoping that none of this circus distracts the reigning champions from their goal of becoming back-to-back global champions. Even if they remain fit and well – and Heather Knight admitted in Friday’s press conference that a Covid-free World Cup was “probably unlikely” – that is going to take some doing.
The glories of Lord’s in July 2017 felt a long way distant during the one-day international leg of the recent Women’s Ashes series, when England were bowled out for 178, 129 and 163. The official word from the England camp is that a seven-day mandatory quarantine and a week in Queenstown have allowed them to “park” their Ashes defeat. “Those final two games were a bit of mental and physical fatigue from the side, and not a true representation of where we’re at and who we are,” Knight said last Friday. The coming weeks will show how much of that is mere bravado.
Who might steal England’s World Cup crown? It has to be said that for all the possibility of Covid uncertainty – as well as nine-player matches, there is also the prospect of rearranged games (the ICC said fixtures will be rescheduled if necessary) – there is a familiar feeling of inevitability surrounding the tournament: once again, Lanning’s Australia are firm favourites.
Then again, they were favourites 22 years ago as well; and things didn’t quite go to plan. Australia made the final but the 2000 World Cup ended in New Zealand being crowned champions, after a nail-biting four-run win. It’s the only time that they have lifted a global trophy. Their current captain, Sophie Devine, who remembers watching that match on TV as an 11-year-old, appears to have taken some motivation from her forebears. In a shock result on Tuesday, the warmup match between the two sides saw Australia thumped by nine wickets, New Zealand chasing down their 322-run target with ease. As for Devine? She hit a mere 161 not out. History might just be about to repeat itself.
• This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe and get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions.
