Isobel Joyce (Ireland)

Why women’s cricket is going backwards in Ireland

Another series … well I suppose you can hardly call one Twenty20 and a one-day international a series, but for lack of a better word, another coach – this time it is stand-in coach South African Albert Van der Merwe. Our previous stop-gap coach, Matt Dwyer, has other commitments so he couldn’t stay with us after the West Indies games.

Since those matches, there has been a lot of club cricket being played, and we seem to be getting into the swing of things just when the summer is winding down. I would be lying if I said that the preparation for the South Africa games was ideal, but the girls have been training hard, and are taking an optimistic approach to the upcoming tour.

It feels like Irish women’s cricket is coming to the end of an era, and I have to say, I don’t know where we go from here. When all other Irish cricket is thriving, did everybody somehow forget about us? I was reading some postings on an Irish cricket website recently and some of the comments (in reply to a posting about how little the Irish women’s team gets in support) were along the lines that the men are the ones who have been successful, so that is where Cricket Ireland will obviously concentrate its efforts.

This was not a reflection on Cricket Ireland’s views of the women’s game, or on how they prioritise; it was the opinion of a few regular male club players and how they think cricket in Ireland should be prioritised.

In one way, who can blame people for making comments like this after our lacklustre performances this year? But this is amateur sport, and that means it is not supposed to be about who is winning what, it is supposed to be about promoting the game and participation in sport. When most of the other women writing blogs on Girls Aloud are praising the leaps forward that the women’s game is taking, I would say that we in Ireland are going backwards.

All of this just detracts from what we are trying to do though, and that is to compete with the teams that are one and two places ahead of us. The teams we should be trying to beat are Pakistan, West Indies and South Africa.

We are a little bit wiser going into these games than we were when we played South Africa in the ICC Trophy. We didn’t know much about their bowling attack then, and we didn’t stick to our game plan.

When it comes down to it though, all I want to do is go out there and play my best cricket, and hope that the other girls on the team will do the same. That is the attitude that we are going into these games with; everything else like support, funding and tours will just have to wait.