Women's Cricket

[Perm]

I have a teacher who plays cricket for the State Otago Sparks, the female Otago cricket team. Now I don't usually follow female cricket but I thought I would have a look and see how she was doing, one thing I noticed was that the only competition they played was a 50 overs competition that did not have List A status which I suppose is understandable. Now one of the girls that plays for the Sparks, Sarah Tsukigawa has also been playing for the New Zealand women so I looked up to see how she was doing and the game they played just recently against the Australian women. It said that this game was classified as an Official Women's ODI which is still perfectly understandable. I looked up to see what her stats were like and she didn't have any List A stats, just ODI.

Now my question is, why aren't the List A and First Class competitions that women play classified as special women's List A or First Class games? If they were classified like that, then cricinfo would be able to do stats for the female cricket players which I feel would be a good thing.

[Richard]

Well it'd obviously need to be a different set of stats from the men's game because they're two different game-forms but I have to say I don't quite understand why there's no 2nd-tier-down status-set for Women's Cricket.

[Samuel_Vimes]

I'd imagine the reason would be because women's cricket was organised by itself for so long - the ICC/MCC/TCCB/WIMR didn't want anything to do with it. And the IWCC had enough to do with actually getting women to play cricket, let alone employ statisticians to sort out what counts and what doesn't.

However, the ICC did classify women's cricket last year. It goes as follows: first tier: women's Test, women's ODI, women's T20I. Highest level of domestic cricket: "Competitive Women's Cricket" and encompasses everything from the four-day game to the Twenty20, which is obviously a bit dim.

(Oh, and Sarah Tsukigawa's "List A" stats, if such status were to be given retrospectively to women's OD'ers in New Zealnad, would be 79 games, 987 runs @ 16.45, 53 wickets @ 27.47)