SA women’s cricket coach calls for more 50-over matches to continue developing the female game

As a “disappointing” season for South Australian women’s top level cricket comes to an end, head coach Andrea McCauley details a big change she thinks is needed for success.

• Adelaide snares World Cup semi-final
• Devine history for Strikers
• Price is right for WBBL

SOUTH Australian women’s cricket head coach Andrea McCauley has called on Cricket Australia to expand the female 50-over competition to ensure the future development of talented juniors.

The SA Scorpions finished their 2018/19 Women’s National Cricket League season on Sunday at the bottom of the ladder despite a much-needed win over the ACT Meteors, and McCauley said it was time for the competition to be expanded.

At present, the WNCL sees each of the seven Australia-wide teams play each other once, with the competition halted in December and January for the Women’s Big Bash competition.

McCauley said six WNCL games were not enough to develop juniors and ideally she’d like to see each side play each other twice.

“The girls do a lot of training for just six games, so they need to increase it for the development of the players; they need that longer format of the game,” she said.

“I would like to see two rounds of 50-over cricket.“

And with the WBBL moving to a stand-alone tournament in October, there was scope for a reworking of the WNCL schedule.

“If (Cricket Australia) wants to fight AFLW, I think they need to put 50-over cricket in that window when the AFLW is on, so the girls have enough cricket to train for, otherwise they’ll go and play AFLW,” McCauley said.

“(AFLW) haven’t got enough games either, but I can see they will expand themselves much quicker than cricket has. I’d like to see two rounds of 50-over cricket in that February/March window.”

McCauley said the 14-round WBBL was the perfect length, and didn’t want to see that altered. and said that over four seasons of the WBBL, women’s T20 cricket had been elevated to a high standard that was an entertaining product.

State women’s coach Andrea McCauley says female cricketers need the chance to play more cricket. PHOTO: MATT TURNER

“The standard of that comp is improving every year and that’s really exciting,” she said.

“But my fear is that if we don’t keep developing these younger players through the 50-over format, that as elite players like Ellyse Perry and Alyssa Healy step down, what talent are we bringing through to still make sure that we have a good product.

“We have to have a strong competition underneath the Big Bash to prepare the next generation of players.”

McCauley — who is head coach of both the SA Scorpions in the WNCL and the Adelaide Strikers in the WBBL — described the summer of cricket for both teams as “disappointing”, with neither side progressing into finals.

The Scorpions finished bottom with two wins from their six games and the Strikers failed to progress to a consecutive semi-finals series after finishing sixth with five wins and eight losses.

McCauley said there were positives to take away from the summer, including watching growth in her young players — batter Bridget Patterson in particular shone in the WNCL, hitting two centuries and leg spinner Amanda-Jade Wellington took 4/35 from 10 overs in Sunday’s 47-run victory over the Meteors.

“There have been some individual performances that have suggested the program is still progressing,” she said.

“It’s just the consistency of the Scorpions team has been disappointing, but there are still good signs that we will have a good team for years to come. All the other (state) coaches talk to me about the talent we have in our group and we certainly have.”

She said from the Strikers perspective, it was disappointing not to make the finals considering she had assembled what she called the best team they had fielded yet.

“I felt like our consistency of performance wasn’t there and we underperformed as a group,” McCauley said.

“I thought we had a fantastic bowling line-up but we just couldn’t get the job done every day. “The batting again, I didn’t think was too bad overall, but we just relied on (NZ imports) Sophie Devine and Suzie Bates too much.

“That’s the next step for our local players: to take ownership of winning games.”