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.
