CricEd

  In the current scoring system of Norway cricket, Cricclubs , the oldest women series that is recorded is from 2016. From talking to players from that time, I learnt that girls have played cricket in Norway since 2013 and a national team was first established in 2014 however that time the international games for Norway did not have a T20I status. After 2016, the two out of the three teams from that time, Veitvet and Friends, discontinued. Falken girls stayed on, however had no opposition to play against in 2017 and 2018. Late in 2018, Vestli cricket club started with a women team who played a few friendlies against Falken girls in the winter. This is when I started playing cricket in Norway as a part of the emerging Vestli lady leopards. During that time, with the help of Coach Joshua Young, Gry tried to # restart the national women team and by then Norway has also received a T20I status. In the summer of 2019, a squad of 12 travelled to France with Josh and newly hired head co...

  The journey so far with the boys ( read here ) has been extremely satisfactory but a corner of the coaching kitbag (read as heart) felt empty to both me and Bijeyata. When we started coaching the boys, deep-down we wanted to use the platform to facilitate young girls into playing cricket. In Norway, only a handful of young girls play cricket with no organized youth cricket activities for the girls. We wanted to change this. Occasionally, girls came to our training sessions, but they never continued despite a decent effort from our side as well as the boys.  It became apparent to us that girls need their own space to grow into this sport and it may be possible to have mixed gender teams only once the girls have found their feet. At the same time, we were asked by a few clubs to help them with their girls’ team as they felt they need women coaches to start girls team. But we were not sure if women coaches are a necessity to build girls’ teams. I did have a few chats with Gry B...

It was a rapid-fire but a fruitful season for the boys. Both our U13 teams have now played all their games barring one that is scheduled in August.  A team, led by Ismail Omar, played 9 games and won 7, lost 1 and got a walkover over Fossum. Haugerud U13, against whom we have lost three games in last three years proved to be our nemesis again. We lost the first game against them in the penultimate ball by 7 wickets. Haugerud's Husnain Masood had hit such huge sixes in that game that anyone's moral could have gone down. But a week later, the boys bounced back nicely. We made a plan to bowl slow yorker length balls to Masood and boys executed beautifully, getting him out in the second over. Following that the Haugerud team got all out giving us a modest total of 64 that the boys achieved in the 7th over without loosing any wickets.  The take away from this season would be the courage shown by Haider Ali and Pranaov Ranjith to open the bowling against Haugerud despite knowing how...

  2020 will remain a landmark year for people who lived through the first global pandemic in the 21st century. For me it will remain a year when I started with cricket coaching. That year in September when the first wave of Covid-19 was dying down, Bijeyata, my partner in crime, was asked by our cricket club, Vestli CK, to join hands for coaching the U13 boys’ team. She was looking for weekend jobs then and was happy to oblige. I started hanging out with her at the sessions and contributed when required. Speaking for both of us, it was a dive down the deeper end as we came with zero experience of cricket/sports coaching. However, both of us had our share of ‘teaching’ experience coming from homes with teaching as a staple profession. As fate would have planned it within a short time, the main coach of the U13 team had to leave and that is when Bijeyata and I had to take full control of the squad. While there was a decent six months of gap between us starting and taking over the ...

First NCF Women Series game in 2022 The teams were called Vikings and Eagles. Farial and Pooja (myself) were captains for Vikings and Eagles respectively. Vikings won the toss and decided to bat. Eagle’s went into the game, 1 bowler short as Raksha was injured. We planned to go with main bowlers (medium pace) for first 6 overs and then rotate between a spinner and new bowlers in the middle overs and bring back the medium pacers in the last 6 overs. The start went perfect as Hina bowled out Farial on the first ball the later faced. Then on Ramya and Bijeyata built a good partnership. We missed one catch at point (Farima), and two half chances (both Pooja), one by the bowler and one at short cover in the first 7 overs. Between 7 th to 14 th over, Pooja bowled at one end restricting the runs while we leaked several extras from the other end. Luckily, for us, both the batters did not change gears. We could restrict them by blocking there scoring areas with strong fielders. However, we fa...

In the second game, Drammen won the toss and put us to bat. In the first game balling lines were not very consistent, so we planned to score even of the wide balls by changing the batting stance. Haider and Pranaov opened the innings and Haider was the aggressive one. He hit two 6s in the first and third over. Pranaov was excellent between the wickets and called for every opportunity to steal a single. We were at 40 in just three overs. In the 4th over, Haider got caught but Pranaov took the mantle and hit a boundary next ball. Rushank was unlucky with the bat as tried to hit a loose ball but got caught at mid-off. After that Pranaov and Dylan kept scoring in singles and doubles and took the score to 77 for 2 by the eight over. We then introduced Ismail and Saad for batting. Saad got out soon but Ismail continued with Hashim and took us to 109/4 in 10 overs. Ismail scored 24 of 9 deliveries with 3 boundaries and 1 six and really capitalized on the base that Haider and Pranaov created i...