West Indies Women’s tour to England…
The West Indies Women will, on September 21, contest the first of five T20 International matches against England as the tour to England officially commences. In her virtual press conference, Captain Stafanie Taylor said the West Indies Women are in high spirits ahead of that series opener.
Taylor has posited that, having been in the bio-secure bubble for an extended period, the Caribbean ladies feel at home in England, and are excited to return to cricket competition.
In practice matches, only a few batters got scores. Taylor is unfazed, but has called for the batters to spend quality time in the middle when the series bowls off. The West Indies Women will take the knee and wear the Black Lives Matter logo to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. This tournament would see resumption of the women’s game for the first time since onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All matches in this T20I series will be played at the County Ground in Derby, and the 18-member squad captained by Taylor would feature 14 of the 15 players who had participated in the ICC Women’s World T20 tournament, with the addition of Shabika Gajnabi, Natasha McClean, Karishma Ramharack and uncapped left-arm spinner Kaysia Schultz.
The Windies ladies, having won five of the ten matches they contested against their England counterparts over the last 11 years, have a record of 50% success when playing T20 cricket in England. They, however, have never played a competitive T20 at Derby.
Moreover, they have lost their last two T20 meetings against England, which included a fairly comprehensive 46-run defeat in the recent World T20 t5ourney played in Australia.
Taylor will be looking to build on her impressive form brought from the WWT20 tourney, when she was the Windies’ leading run-scorer with 84 runs, while being dismissed only once. During that tournament, she had a false shot percentage of just 14.4%.
In this series, she aims to continue batting for long periods of time, allowing herself to lay the foundation around which the rest of the team can build.
Since commencement of women’s T20 international matches in 2016, Taylor has faced on average of 40.3 balls per dismissal, partly due to her low false shot percentage of 18.2. Only Meg Lanning has faced more deliveries per dismissal, and has a lower percentage of false shots in that time period.
Veteran Deandra Dottin has a fantastic record with the ball against England in T20 cricket, and will be hoping to add to her current wicket tally of 9 throughout the series. Another intriguing matchup in this series is between leg-spinner Affy Fletcher and English batter Tammy Beaumont. In T20 cricket, Fletcher has bowled only seven balls to Beaumont, but has dismissed her on three occasions, and has conceded just three runs in the process.
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