When I first heard how the WBBL season was going to be structured this year, I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical. I was worried there wasn’t going to be the kind of effort going into creating a great atmosphere to generate the crowds for festival weekends. But the competition has delivered in every way possible and I couldn’t be happier to be proven wrong.
The way they’ve organised and structured the weekends to have plenty of fun for families with jumping castles and food trucks has been great. They’ve done the full shebang and it’s exactly what was needed. I think everyone involved has done a fantastic job in showing the brand of cricket the WBBL represents.
While I know we’ve still got finals to go this weekend, I think it’s fair to say the first standalone season of the WBBL has been a big success. We’ve had the most 150-plus scores in the history of the competition. Batters are the hitting the ball further, bowlers are getting faster, everyone’s getting more athletic in the field.
Having our own space away from the men has helped. I think having both competitions run side by side was great at the start and having a ‘one club’ philosophy really helped us come into the competition with all these people already supporting us.
But with the WBBL going from strength to strength; it has been a great time to stand on our own feet and especially to say goodbye to the double headers with the men’s teams. We were always pushing to cut down the time between games because families don’t want to spend nine hours at the cricket – that’s why they’re coming to a T20 in the first place! There’s not as much energy and enthusiasm if people are waiting around all day.
Having the focus all on us this season has been amazing, everyone is cheering and there’s entertainment left, right and centre. When we were playing double headers, we’d often get people who would come early to get a good seat for the men’s game, but they weren’t really interested in us. Now we have big, excited crowds who have come just to see us and it’s a great atmosphere in which to play cricket.
One thing I’d really like to see for next season is more media exposure and advertising. I only saw a few ads for the WBBL before it started, and I feel that there could be a bit more done to get media coverage of games. It’s not an easy ask – women’s sport in general is lacking media exposure and that’s not easy to change. But I think if we want our goal to be cementing cricket as Australia’s favourite sport, we can be doing more to make it happen with the promotion of the game.
Before the season I started I did worry a bit about the timing and whether it was too early to be expecting people to get excited about cricket. But it’s actually been really good – with not a lot of other cricket happening in Australia for most of the WBBL season, people have flocked to watch us. We’ve had great crowds and people watching on the live stream – so it shows that people want to watch cricket at this time of year and with a bit more promotion we can keep building on that.
It’s obviously been a big season for us at Adelaide Strikers and I’m really looking forward to playing in the finals this weekend. To be honest, I’m not mad that we’re not hosting it in Adelaide because Brisbane is probably my second favourite place to play. We always get great crowds at Allan Border Field; it’s a really nice place to play cricket, so we’re feeling relaxed and confident going in.
We’re very lucky to have such a great culture in our group. We have a laugh and genuinely enjoy each other’s company and I think that’s really hard to achieve. The WBBL is a short tournament, but it’s so intense and we spend almost every day together, so the love is really important and I think we’ve got that.
Our focus for the weekend is just going to be on staying calm. The only time we’ve been in a semi-final before, we got thrashed, so this time we want make sure we go in calm and knowing that we deserve to be there.
We’ve pretty much played in every scenario possible this season. We’ve had super overs, we’ve thrashed teams and we’ve been thrashed. We don’t know what the finals will bring, but I’m sure there’s going to be some great, exciting cricket that will really live up to the festival atmosphere of our first standalone season.
