#REStart

 

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 coach Shaz. The team registered their first and solo T20I win in this tournament against Austria on 31 July 2019. Following this, in late September, Sweden who were trying to start women cricket, visited us in Oslo and Vestli and Falken teams played against them in a pair cricket tournament that was won by Falken girls. This suit was repeated in the winter again with Finland joining in with three players and their Development Director, Maija Scamans. We played a weekend indoor tournament with 4 teams which the Swedish team won. Thus, women cricket had started to re-exist in Norway but without any organized domestic structure. To restart a domestic league, a 5-match series was setup in 2020 between Falken and Vestli. That year, the year I started coaching, cricket was interrupted by the pandemic several times. Despite that Falken and Vestli teams committed to travel to Trondheim from Oslo to play a 4 team T10 tournament there with Spektra and Moholt clubs. That tournament saw nearly 50 women players come together for the first time in Norway. However, that was momentary as the clubs in Trondheim did not continue to play locally. Vestli and Falken again locked horns in 2021 in a 3-match series in Oslo. In 2021, Fjord club also committed to start a women team and together the three teams played a women series for the first time after 2016. This looked like a good start. For the 2022 league Spektra registered a women team and even Sandnes club from Stavanger area showed some promise but both the teams pulled out leaving the three teams in Oslo to play a women series. In 2022 the bilateral series between Vestli and Falken was withdrawn due to lack of interest to play the same team again and again. While the domestic structure was going through building and rebuilding phase, the Norway national team visited Sweden twice, for a bilateral series in 2021 and for a three country Nordic tournament in 2022. In this context my constant nagging of Gry and Maija since the 2020 indoor Nordic tournament, to start an annual Nordic women tournament, had paid off. Hats off to the iron ladies of Nordic cricket for setting up a Nordic cooperation program for development of cricket in this region. We next travelled to Spain for a 5-country tournament in November 2022, our first on turf wicket. We performed poorly barring one or two games in these three tournaments to say the least. Every reason of our poor performance kept coming back to the need of more women playing cricket domestically in Norway.

We badly needed another #restart. In January 2023, the women committee was renamed to committee for gender balance and here comes our new leader, Raksha Jangir who actually was the first to start using the term #restart in practically all our discussions. In the very first meeting of the committee, we asked for open training for girls and women through out the year and got a very positive response from NCF. We started the outdoor open ground offer on Fridays at Stubberudmyra on 12^th May 2023 and celebrated it as an International Mother’s Day special. We had a decent turnout on 12^th May but there were no surprises. These were people, I and Raksha had invited that day. We circulated our flyers as much as we could and then waited for the next open ground on 19^th May. To our pleasant surprise 7 new girls showed up that day seeing our social media posts. In total there were around 20 participants and the ground was buzzing with excitement and energy that coach Stanley Senevirano brought with him. Finally, we were up and running. In the next two weeks, in addition to the basics of cricket, I and Darshana Abeyrathna introduced the concepts of line and length and running between the wickets. In the first month I and Raksha were supported by a core group of coaches who luckily have stayed with us through this program. This includes Bijeyata Kumari, Mahendra Kumarasamy, Siva Meejuru, Sumit Chougule and Darshana Abeyrathna. In June we were visited by Norway’s national coach Zeeshan Siddiqui and Norway’s premium strike bowler Vinay Ravi. These sessions were crucial in getting the girls upskilled rather quickly. However, unfortunately not many clubs had shown up at the ground to recruit these new girls into their teams.

As a part of the #restart project, we also activated the two girls’ team in Stavanger, Viking and Sandnes. When I and Bijeyata visited Stavanger in April to deliver the ICC level 1 coaching course, we held an information meeting for all the girls and their parents. Following that Raksha and I collaborated with the two clubs and set-up the very first U series for girls in Norway. In addition, we had scheduled a T10 tournament on 17-18 June in Oslo. The timing of the tournament luckily worked out for the recruitment of the new girls who showed up at the open ground. Fjord and MASK clubs had registered teams for the T10 tournament but were lacking players and almost all the girls who showed up at the open ground got recruited, officially registered into the clubs and got cricclubs scoring profiles. This meant that they were not just the girls who wanted to try cricket but were officially registered players. The tournament had in total five teams including two from Vestli and one from Falken. It turned out to be well organized tournament with nearly 40 players participating from 4 different clubs. At this point the Norwegian summer holidays was two weeks away. How will the holidays affect the turnout at open trainings? Will the new players be able to develop into cricketers? How long that will take? Will we be able to keep their interest in cricket? How can we use the remaining weeks of open ground offer to answer these questions in affirmative. I was wondering about these questions when I got a request from a young player to come and help her with cricket training on a Tuesday evening. After Fridays will Tuesdays have a role in #restart?