RYAN BA­CHOO

The West In­dies Women got their tour of Aus­tralia off to a win­ning start with a 4-wick­et vic­to­ry over a New South Wales (NSW) Women's team at Wil­son Park.

Bat­ting first, Kar­ish­ma Ramharack had the NSW ladies spun tight­ly in her off-spin web along with skip­per Hay­ley Matthews. NSW Women post­ed 105/9 from their 20 overs, skip­per Sam­my-Jo John­son was their top-scor­er with 28 fol­lowed by Han­nah Dar­ling­ton with 24. Ramharack fin­ished with fig­ures of 3-0-12-3 and Matthews 2-0-7-2.

She­maine Camp­belle led the West In­dies Women's run-chase with the bat, as she post­ed 33 from 34 de­liv­er­ies which in­clud­ed five bound­aries. Skip­per Matthews was next best with 24 off 27. Aaliyah Al­leyne 19 not out and Zai­da James 15 not out took the vis­i­tors home to vic­to­ry in 17.5 overs.

Head Coach Shane Deitz was pleased with the team's first out­ing since ar­riv­ing in Aus­tralia four days ago. He said "It's good to get the first win on tour. I think we've got a lot of ar­eas we need to im­prove on… es­pe­cial­ly get­ting used to bat­ting on these wick­ets with some ex­tra pace and bounce. Over­all, I think we played gen­er­al­ly good all-round and it's go­ing to put us in a good po­si­tion to play on Sun­day.

The ODI se­ries against Aus­tralia is West In­dies’ fourth fix­ture in the ICC Women’s Cham­pi­onship 2022-2025 af­ter play­ing New Zealand, Eng­land and Ire­land. Each match pro­vides West In­dies with op­por­tu­ni­ty to win valu­able points to climb the Cham­pi­onship ta­ble where they cur­rent­ly lie 9th out of ten teams.

Fol­low­ing the Aus­tralia Se­ries, West In­dies Women will have four fur­ther three-match ODI se­ries to play over the next two years.

At the end of the cy­cle, the top five teams in the ICC Women’s Cham­pi­onship and will book a berth for the ICC Women’s Crick­et World Cup in 2025 as well as hosts In­dia.

The re­main­ing teams will have to go through the ICC Women's Crick­et World Cup Qual­i­fi­er.