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Training for the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup Qualifier which will be held in Ireland next year has already begun in earnest, and coach Jeremy Bray has identified one key area that could make all the difference.
Hosting the Twenty20 World Cup Qualifiers next July is a huge coup for women’s cricket in Ireland. The opportunity to attempt qualification on home turf is a very exciting one and training has already begun in earnest with one eye on that goal.
After a hectic summer in 2012 which saw the women’s team promoted to Division 2 of the County Championship, win the European Cup Twenty20 Cup and beat Bangladesh, ranked one place ahead of them at nine in the world, in a One-Day International, most of the squad has taken a well-earned break from cricket since September.

So the squad was fresh and ready to get started on a winter of important work which began with a specialist clinic on spin taken by men’s senior coach Phil Simmons on the first Sunday in 2013.

“When I first came to Ireland to coach the senior men’s team, I had to do the same thing with them when it comes to playing spin,” he assured his captive audience. “We’re all fine when it comes to the quicks and you can just use your hands to play with the pace, but throw the ball up and suddenly we don’t know what to do.”

Certainly playing spin well will be very important in July as more and more women’s teams see their spinners causing the most damage in both 20-over and 50-over cricket.

Women’s head coach Jeremy Bray sees batting against spin as a huge area of importance for his team’s hopes to qualify for their first global tournament since 2005. “That’s the way women’s cricket is at the moment, it’s dominated by spin. We just have to improve our performances against spin bowling,” he said after the afternoon’s indoor session in North County indoor training facility.

“I think it went well. A few people struggled, of course. You need to have a good technique to learn to hit the ball hard. The drills Simmo did were basic but they were the start of something good and I think everybody got some benefit out of it.

“It’s the area we have identified as what we have to improve on the most. With the ball we will be focusing on becoming more consistent and maybe then being able to bring in more variations.

“We also need to sharpen up in the field. We dropped too many catches last season and it’s something that we will just have to put the time into. Mooners (John Mooney, men’s international) is going to come down and work on a few things with the squad so that can only be a positive because he is an outstanding fielder,” he added.

With over six months until the tournament begins, there is plenty of time for building on the success of last summer and making changes that could make all the difference to a successful World Cup Qualification bid.


Isobel Joyce
Phil Simmons gives the women’s squad a few pointers on how to play spin
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