As regular readers will know, it’s Spin City in women’s international cricket, these days more so than ever, and the top 6 players in our Women’s International Championship bowling rankings are all spinners.

Australia’s Jess Jonassen was the leading wicket-taker in the Championship, with 31 wickets, though she was a little bit more expensive than some: her best figures – a 5-fer against New Zealand – came at the expense of 50 runs off 9 overs that day.

At No.2 Anisa Mohammed – the first bowler ever (male or female) to take 100 wickets in T20 internationals – has been crucial to the West Indies’ cause in ODIs too, as they scrapped their way to the final direct World Cup qualification spot.

At No. 3, Rajeshwari Gayakwad is perhaps the surprise entry in the top 10 – an orthodox left-armer, she first really announced herself against England at Scarbados back in 2014, when she took 4-42, including the scalps of Sarah Taylor and Nat Sciver. She has been remarkably consistent throughout the Championship, taking 2 wickets here and 3 there, finishing with 2 more 4-fers in the series versus the West Indies.

England’s leading bowler across the Championship, at No.4, has been now-captain Heather Knight, but it is interesting to look at the graph of her bowling, match by match, over the course of the competition:

It shows that she has been bowling less and less – especially since she took over the captaincy. My experience watching Knight captain at Berkshire for many years suggests that she tends to bowl herself when she feels they are in trouble, which they rarely have been with the ball at least over the past year or so.

Ranking = Wickets / Economy

Australia’s 3-0 series victory versus South Africa this week brings to a close the largest international cricket tournament ever staged – 84 matches* played over 2½ years – offering the perfect opportunity to pull-together some pretty definitive rankings for batsmen, bowlers and all-rounders.

There will be little surprise as to who tops the batting rankings – Wisden’s 2014 women’s award winner, Meg Lanning, who scored 5 centuries and another 5 fifties in the championship, amassing well over 1000 runs in total.

The good news for the opposition though is that if you get Lanning out… in walks Ellyse Perry, ranked at No. 3 on our list! Martin Davies from WCB commented to us the other day that Perry is becoming more and more a batsman who bowls a bit, and there is little doubt that she would merit selection in anyone’s World XI, even if she didn’t bowl at all.

Only one batsman finished the tournament with a Strike Rate over 100 – Nat Sciver – the highest-ranked England player at No. 7. Though a few tail-enders also achieved a Strike Rate of 100+ on a handful of innings, Sciver did it across 16 innings, scoring 533 runs in total, including 6 fifties.

Also worth a mention are Chamari Atapattu and Javeria Khan, ranked at 14 and 15 respectively – it is one thing to score your runs against Pakistan and Sri Lanka (76% of Tammy Beaumont’s runs came against those two bottom-placed sides) but arguably more impressive to score them for those sides against the higher-ranked teams. (For the record, just 27% of Atapattu’s runs came against Pakistan, and only 27% (sic.) of Javeria’s runs were scored v Sri Lanka.)

Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate

* In theory at least – though of course a few of those matches weren’t actually played! The next largest was the 1997 ICC Trophy – 82 matches, excluding warm-ups – thanks to Peter Griffiths of cricketarchive.com for the info on this!

Having completed a 4-0 series whitewash against Sri Lanka last week, England have reached the end of their busiest year ever, and the time seems to have come to reflect on the preceding 12 months. The latest press release from the ECB tells us that during 2016, England have played 26 matches across all formats of the game, and won 21 of them – giving them a win percentage of 81%.

Now of course that is pretty impressive. (For the record, in 2015 their win percentage was 50% – 6 games won, 6 games lost across all formats.) But it’s also pretty obvious that a team’s win percentage doesn’t tell the whole story of their year.

For England, given that nearly half of their victories (10 games in total – about 48%) have come against teams we would have expected them to easily beat anyway (Sri Lanka and Pakistan), it’s perhaps more pertinent to look at the lost games – and particularly at the manner in which they were lost.

Of the 5 games in which England were defeated in 2016, 3 of them were lost when chasing. More significantly, all 3 of these losses were matches which, at the half-way stage in their chase, England looked on course to win easily:

1. The WWT20 semi-final. England chasing 132, and at the 10-over mark were 67-1, coasting along. They subsequently collapsed to finish on 127-7, missing out on a spot in the final by 5 runs.

2. The second ODI in the Caribbean at the Trelawny Stadium. England were chasing 148, were 56-3 after 24 overs – and collapsed to 110 all out.

3. The fourth ODI at Sabina Park. Target 224. England reached 95 before losing their first wicket. They were all out for 181.

I’ll mention one other match here which England did ultimately win: the final ODI in Sri Lanka. Nonetheless, it’s pertinent that at one point England were 58-6 in this game, following a rather embarrassing middle-order collapse. They ended up reliant on Nat Sciver and Dani Hazell to bat out of their skins in order to take them to respectable total. Against almost any other team in world cricket, being 58-6 at any point would have been fatal.

When Mark Robinson sacked his best batsman, back in May, his justification was that the rest of the team were “hiding behind” Charlotte Edwards. The argument seemed to go as follows: when Edwards gets out, the rest of the team no longer believe that they have the capacity to win the game. That’s when the collapse happens. Get rid of her, and other players will step up; get rid of her, and the problem disappears.

I never quite bought this argument. And the evidence above seems to suggest that I was right. Old weaknesses die hard, and the tendency for England to collapse in a heap doesn’t seem to have vanished quite yet.

I don’t want to put a downer on what has been a pretty positive 6 months for England – with the rise of Alex Hartley; the exciting debut of Sophie Ecclestone; the return of Fran Wilson from the wilderness; and a new captain in Heather Knight who seems to be relishing the responsibility. But ignoring a problem, pretending it no longer exists, isn’t going to make it go away. It certainly isn’t going to win you a World Cup.

The last time the Women’s World Cup was played in England, back in 1993, England had a coach – Ruth Prideaux – who knew that so much of cricket is mental. She had her players chanting “we will win”, at a time when sports psychology wasn’t even a thing. It paid off. England beat Australia, got to the final, and won it. Afterwards, most of the players recognised that believing they could do it was one of the most crucial factors in that victory.

Do England have the players at their disposal who can win a World Cup? Yes, I’d say they do. But whether they’ve got it in them mentally is another question entirely. So many of their losses in recent years haven’t been to do with talent, but with not being able to withstand the mental pressure that comes when you know you should be able to make the runs, but you just aren’t quite sure if you can do it. That’s when the collapse happens.

Unfortunately for England fans, you won’t get much greater psychological pressure over the course of a career than playing in a home World Cup. It’s going to be a stern test. If I was Mark Robinson, I know what I’d be focusing on this winter – and let’s just say it wouldn’t be cardio training.

The ICC’s Technical Committee has ruled that India are responsible for not playing their Women’s International Championship series with Pakistan – awarding Pakistan all 6 points, and mandating that India’s Net Run Rate be adjusted to award 0 runs from 50 overs in each of the 3 “missing” matches.

The series was supposed to have been played earlier this year, with Pakistan hosting; but the BCCI are currently unwilling to participate in bilateral series with Pakistan, in either the men’s or women’s games, due to the ongoing geopolitical situation between the two countries, and India are understood to have simply never replied to Pakistan’s invitation to play the matches in the UAE.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BCCI are reportedly not happy with the outcome, and according to the web site news18.com, are making threatening noises about the (men’s) Champions Trophy, also taking place in England next summer, with a BCCI spokesperson quoted as saying: “If ICC does not backtrack, the men’s team in solidarity with our women’s team won’t play in [the] Champions Trophy.”

Assuming that the decision is upheld, it confirms the final standings in the Women’s International Championship, with Australia, England, New Zealand and the West Indies going directly to the World Cup in England next year; whilst South Africa, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka will join Ireland and Scotland, plus Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea and Thailand, in a qualifying tournament in Sri Lanka next February to decide the other 4 teams who will compete in England.

England

• Having sealed their World Cup qualification with a win in the first game, England went on to complete a 4-0 ODI series win against Sri Lanka.
• Things looked dicey for England in the final ODI, as they collapsed to 58-6, before a century-stand between Nat Sciver and Dani Hazell dug them out of the hole. England then bowled their hosts out for 78, with Laura Marsh taking 4-21.

New Zealand

• The White Ferns completed a whitewash of their own against Pakistan, with a 5-0 series victory, which guaranteed their qualification for the World Cup.
• After her recent success in South Africa, Amy Satterthwaite took just 6 wickets in this series…
• But on the other hand she did finish it with a series batting average of 197! Satterthwaite scored 3 centuries, all at well over a run-a-ball, to finish the calendar year with a massive 977 international runs, having also chipped-in with 21 wickets.

India v West Indies + South Africa

• There was yet another whitewash in the India v West Indies series – 3-0 to India; but it looks like it will still be West Indies heading directly to the World Cup.
• Even if the ICC decide later this week that the points should be shared from India’s unplayed series versus Pakistan, leaving both India and West Indies on 21 points, West Indies will go through on games won, and India must play the qualifying tournament, along with South Africa, who forfeited their outside chance of direct qualification, losing the 1st ODI to Australia.

WNCL

• The final weekend of round-robin matches saw Queensland Fire and New South Wales Breakers qualify for December’s final.
• With the Southern Stars occupied against South Africa, it was up to the domestic squads to step up. For the Fire, Beth Mooney hit a century (146 off 144 balls) as they beat Vic Spirit to finish top of the table; whilst for the Breakers Sarah Aley took 3-33, as they bowled-out the ACT Meteors to win their shoot-out by 13 runs and grab the other final spot.

Ireland’s Kim Garth and Gabby Lewis, plus Scotland’s Kathryn Bryce, have been selected for this year’s WBBL Associate Rookie Program, which gives players from the “minor” nations the sponsored opportunity to be part of a professional cricket setup for a couple of weeks during the competition – benefiting from the same coaching and facilities as the “full time” players on the team.

Irish bowling all-rounder Garth was part of last year’s program – spending a month in Hobart under the wing of Hurricane’s coach Julia Price, and was full of praise for the scheme when she spoke to us last summer:

“[Hobart] was pretty intense – it was training four or five times a week plus gym work [and] I got a good opportunity to work quite closely with Julia Price, who is a brilliant coach, so I did a lot of one-on-one with her on my [batting] technique.”

Garth is headed to the Sydney Sixers this year; whilst her colleague – batting all-rounder Gabby Lewis – is off to Hobart.

Meanwhile Scotland’s Kathryn Bryce – an opening batsman, who has also opened the bowling on occasion – is set to be a Melbourne Star, alongside Meg Lanning!

The three join players from China, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea on the program.

With England suffering a bit of an injury crisis in Sri Lanka, Dani Hazell is the surprise choice as stand-in skipper, becoming the 22nd woman to captain England across all formats.

With Heather Knight (left hamstring) and Katherine Brunt(left thigh) ruled-out, coach Mark Robinson has turned to the Yorkshire off-spinner to lead the team.

It is an interesting choice – prior to this tour Hazell hadn’t played an ODI since South Africa back in February, missing the series against Pakistan and West Indies, though she played all 3 T20s in the summer; so this might be seen as partly a reward for loyalty over a period when she has had to spend a lot of time on the sidelines.

However, with 3 Super league captains – Georgia Elwiss, Nat Sciver and Lauren Winfield – in the team, might we not have expected one of them to be given the job? Perhaps, but by giving it to Hazell, Robinson effectively avoids a difficult choice which might have been seen to “anoint” a potential successor to Heather Knight in years to come, and left the other two thinking – why not me?

As we write, Hazell has taken her first captain’s wicket too – bowling opener Nipuni Hansika for 29 – you can follow the game here.

New Zealand v Pakistan

• After her success in South Africa, it has been another good week for Amy Satterthwaite, who hit two centuries in the 2nd and 3rd ODIs as the White Ferns took a 3-0 series lead against Pakistan.
• The first two ODIs were easy wins for the Kiwis, as Pakistan simply failed to score runs; but there were signs of things coming together a bit for the visitors in the 3rd ODI, as a century stand between Javeria Khan and Bismah Maroof provided the foundation for a total of 263-6.
• As things stand, New Zealand still need one more win to assure qualification for England 2017 – they have that opportunity on Thursday.

India v West Indies

• West Indies went into this series needing just one win to wrap-up their qualification; but thus far it has been India all the way, and they currently lead the series 2-0.
• In both ODIs, West Indies batted first, but failed to put enough runs on the board (131 in the 1st ODI, 153 in the 2nd) and India chased them down easily.
• West Indies have another chance to qualify again on Wednesday; but…
• There is still a slim hope for India of direct qualification – if they win well on Wednesday and the ICC’s committee decrees that they share the points from their “missing” series with Pakistan, they could directly qualify at West Indies’ expense. UPDATE: Games Won counts before NRR, and West Indies are well ahead on this.

Sri Lanka v England

• This has been a difficult one to follow, with only a barely-live scorecard and the ECB’s official Twitter feed providing information; but we know obviously that England have done the job they went to Sri Lanka to do – qualify for their own tournament with a win in the 2nd ODI – the 1st “Championship” match.
• Although England won the 2nd ODI by a huge margin (over 100 runs) they did get bowled out, albeit off the final ball of the 50 overs, but still clearly questions remain over the fragility of the batting, and it will be interesting to see if Emma Lamb gets a couple of games now that the pressure is off for the last 2 matches.

And Finally…

• There are questions over the participation of West Indies players in future KSL and WBBL tournaments, after the West Indies Cricket Board decided to impose a “release fee” of 20% of the player’s annual contract, before they are allowed to play. Will the host boards pay up? It could add significantly to the cost of employing West Indies stars, so we shall see…!!
• Lastly, if you haven’t already, pop over to the New Zealand Herald right now and read their big interview with Suzie Bates, in which she discusses frankly the state of the game there, in the light of an official report which suggested women’s cricket has become “endangered”.