SOM­ER­SET, Eng­land – Fol­low­ing a for­get­table tour of the UK where they failed to win a sin­gle game in ei­ther the ODI or T20 se­ries against Eng­land Women, West In­dies Women’s head coach Shane Deitz says 2026 will be a defin­ing year for the team.

The re­gion­al team was blanked 3-0 in both se­ries by the high­er-ranked Eng­land Women and will now face South Africa Women in a sim­i­lar three-match ODI and T20 se­ries, be­gin­ning on Wednes­day in the Caribbean.

How­ev­er, speak­ing in a post-match in­ter­view af­ter West In­dies Women lost the third T20I on Sat­ur­day by nine wick­ets, Deitz said the next eight months will be crit­i­cal as they pre­pare for a packed sched­ule next year.

“Re­al­ly, our sea­son so to speak be­gins in Feb­ru­ary next year. 2026 is a mas­sive year for us; we have 15 ODIs and we’ll ob­vi­ous­ly go through the next World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion, and we have a Test match and a World Cup, so we’ll try to re­build the sit­u­a­tion and then we have eight months to re­al­ly work hard.

“What we do in the next eight months off the play­ing field is go­ing to be the key thing for our per­for­mance next year,” Deitz main­tained.

“There are a lot of things we work on off the field, team cul­ture and then a lot of fit­ness and skill work will be re­quired, so we have a great op­por­tu­ni­ty now to play a few games against South Africa and then have a re­al­ly good off-field pro­gramme for sev­en to eight months and then come back in 2026 and take on the rest of the world. That’s the plan and we’re re­al­ly ex­cit­ed about it.”

Deitz said dur­ing that pe­ri­od he was hop­ing to help some of the younger play­ers de­vel­op their skills on a one-on-one ba­sis.

“I re­al­ly want to spend some time with the play­ers. I’m the head coach but I rarely get much time to work with play­ers one-on-one, so that’s what we’re go­ing to have to try and do.

“The lo­gis­tics in the Caribbean is re­al­ly dif­fi­cult, so we’ve just got to get every­one to­geth­er so I can re­al­ly work on one-on-one skillsets,” Deitz said.

“It’s a skill-based game, crick­et, and the team with the best skills gen­er­al­ly wins, so our skills, par­tic­u­lar­ly the younger ones, got to im­prove a lot to be world class. We need world class play­ers to beat a world class team…”

Mean­while, the head coach said he was not dis­heart­ened by the team’s per­for­mance against Eng­land.

He said the team was miss­ing key play­ers and was rel­a­tive­ly young com­pared to Eng­land Women.

“I think it was a great op­por­tu­ni­ty, a learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for a lot of new play­ers that we are in­tro­duc­ing.

“We had a chance to bring some play­ers in and that’s what we’re re­al­ly look­ing for,” Deitz said.

CMC