De­spite not re­ceiv­ing the nec­es­sary sup­port from the state to bid for ICC Women T20 World Cup match­es in No­vem­ber 2018, the re­gion's most or­gan­ised women crick­et struc­ture will fea­ture for the first time a T20 league un­der lights for both the pre­mier­ship and cham­pi­onship di­vi­sions.

This year the an­nu­al 50 overs and 30 overs com­pe­ti­tions bowled off yes­ter­day at venues through­out the coun­try. The T20 league will be played on Wednes­day night start­ing at 6:30pm. The mid-week T20 com­pe­ti­tion of­fers sev­er­al ben­e­fits:

*It pro­vides an op­por­tu­ni­ty for play­ers to present them­selves for se­lec­tion for the 2nd edi­tion of the T20 Fran­chise com­pe­ti­tion in May. There will be a min­i­mum of 10 games and a max­i­mum of 13.

*It will al­so pro­vide good prepa­ra­tion for play­ers vy­ing for se­lec­tion for both the na­tion­al se­nior team to par­tic­i­pate in the re­gion­al tour­na­ment sched­ule for June and the Un­der 19 play­ers who be play­ing in the an­nu­al In­vi­ta­tion com­pe­ti­tion against teams from the re­gion.

*Pro­vide clubs an op­por­tu­ni­ty to at­tract var­i­ous forms of sup­port from busi­ness­es.

*Women clubs who strug­gle for grounds with men teams can forge a work­ing re­la­tion with male teams to use their fa­cil­i­ties. Some of the venues will in­clude UWI SPEC, Munroe Road, Pierre Road, En­deav­our, Squadron and In­shan Ali Park, Preysal.

*It will pro­vide an op­por­tu­ni­ty for mem­bers of com­mu­ni­ties where match­es are played to sup­port the women's game.

*It will test the fit­ness lev­els of the play­ers as play­ers will have their re­spec­tive 50 and 30 overs match­es on Sun­day and then their mid-week T20 match­es.

*All the leagues will be com­plet­ed by mid-April so those play­ers who have to sit var­i­ous ex­am­i­na­tions will not be af­fect­ed.

Wednes­day 24th Jan­u­ary start­ing at 6:30pm

Pre­mier­ship

Hi­bis­cus Ladies vs Play­ers at Squadron

Tech­nocrats vs Preysal Phoenix at Pierre Road

Moo­sai Sports vs Crick­et Lovers at Munroe Road

Cham­pi­onship

UWI vs Achiev­ers at UWI SPEC

Crick­et Di­vas vs JFK at En­deav­our

The crick­et­ing com­mu­ni­ty and new sup­port­ers are en­cour­aged to em­brace the women's game. The T&T women crick­eters have been stand­ing tall in the re­gion com­pared to their male coun­ter­parts. It's a good op­por­tu­ni­ty for pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary girls and women in gen­er­al to get in­volved in club crick­et. Their in­volve­ment does not have to be di­rect­ly in the play­ing of crick­et, it can al­so take the form of scor­ers, ad­min­is­tra­tion, be­com­ing um­pires and coach­es.

"I don't feel it is nec­es­sary to know ex­act­ly what I am. The main in­ter­est in life and work is to be­come some­one else that you were not in the be­gin­ning." Michel Fou­cault

Anand Ram­per­sad (PhD)

pas­tiche6@gmail.com