Women's cricket
Encyclopedia
Team sport
A team sport includes any sport which involves players working together towards a shared objective. A team sport is an activity in which a group of individuals, on the same team, work together to accomplish an ultimate goal which is usually to win. This can be done in a number of ways such as...
of cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...
that is played by women
Woman
A woman , pl: women is a female human. The term woman is usually reserved for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent...
.
History
The first recorded match of women's cricket was reported in The Reading Mercury on 26 July 1745, a match contested "between eleven maids of Bramley and eleven maids of Hambledon, all dressed in white." The first known women's cricket club was formed in 1887 in YorkshireYorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
, named the White Heather Club. Three years later a team known as the Original English Lady Cricketers toured England, reportedly making substantial profits before their manager absconded with the money. In Australia, a women's cricket league was set up in 1894, while in South Africa, Port Elizabeth had a women's cricket team, the Pioneers Cricket Club.
In 1958 the International Women's Cricket Council
International Women's Cricket Council
The International Women's Cricket Council was formed in 1958 by the women's cricket associations of Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa to organise international matches between the four nations....
(IWCC) was formed to co-ordinate women's cricket around the world, taking over from the English Women's Cricket Association
Women's Cricket Association
The Women's Cricket Association was responsible for the running of women's cricket in England between 1926 and 1998. It was formed by a group of enthusiasts following a cricket holiday in Malvern...
, which had been doing the same job in a de facto role since its creation 32 years earlier. In 2005, the IWCC was merged with the International Cricket Council
International Cricket Council
The International Cricket Council is the international governing body of cricket. It was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 by representatives from England, Australia and South Africa, renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965, and took up its current name in 1989.The...
(ICC) to form one unified body to help manage and develop cricket.
Women's international cricket
Women's cricket has been played internationally since the inaugural women's Test matchWomen's Test cricket
Women's Test cricket is the longest format of women's cricket and is the gender equivalent to men's Test cricket. Matches comprise four-innings and are held over a maximum of four days between two of the leading cricketing nations...
between England women and Australia women in December 1934. The following year, New Zealand women joined them, and in 2007 Netherlands women became the tenth women's Test nation when they made their debut against South Africa women. Since 1973, women's One Day Internationals (ODIs) have also been contested, and these quickly became the focus of women's international cricket. In the years since the inception of women's ODIs more than eight times more of this format has been played than women's Test cricket. The Women's Cricket World Cup
Women's Cricket World Cup
The ICC Women's Cricket World Cup is a Women's one-day international cricket competition. The first tournament was held in England in 1973, two years before the first men's ICC Cricket World Cup....
has been held nine times, with Australia, England and New Zealand sharing the titles. In 2004, a shorter format still was introduced, with the introduction of women's Twenty20 cricket
Women's Twenty20 cricket
Women's Twenty20 cricket is the newly emerging use of the Twenty20 match format in women's cricket. While both women's cricket and Twenty20 have themselves enjoyed recent success, women's Twenty20 has only been an international cricket game format since 2004...
. Initially, women's Twenty20 cricket was played little at international level, with only four matches played by the end of 2006. However, the following three years saw a rapid growth, with six matches been played in 2007, ten in 2008 and thirty in 2009, which also saw the first ICC Women's World Twenty20.
External links
- Cricinfo Women
- ICC Women's Cricket
- A History of Women's cricket
- Nance Clements's banner: A curious memento from Australian women's cricket history, National Museum of AustraliaNational Museum of AustraliaThe National Museum of Australia was formally established by the National Museum of Australia Act 1980. The National Museum preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation....
- Sequence of images showing bowling action of Australian Test bowler Mollie Flaherty (1937-49), National Museum of AustraliaNational Museum of AustraliaThe National Museum of Australia was formally established by the National Museum of Australia Act 1980. The National Museum preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation....
- Women's cricket culottes worn during the 1930s and 1940s in matches played by the University of Sydney Women's Cricket Club, National Museum of AustraliaNational Museum of AustraliaThe National Museum of Australia was formally established by the National Museum of Australia Act 1980. The National Museum preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation....