American Cricket Federation President, Jamie Harrison, has a go at USACA in his CricketEurope column: “The fiasco that unfolded this weekend at Lauderhill was the direct result of choices and systemic failures that have long come to typify the actions of the ICC-recognized body in the United States.” A great read that sums it all up nicely.
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If you are looking for information on the actual cricket that took place down in Florida this past weekend – such as it was – DreamCricket has you covered in “USACA National T20 Championship is a damp squib“: “After the first two days of rain-affected play on Thursday and Friday, the USACA National T20 Championship quickly went from “a chance to shine” to ‘let’s get at least one day of sunshine.’ After only three games were completed by Friday, a decision was made to move six games to Saturday and reduce the overs to 10-overs per side. ” 10 overs. How very American.
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Nezam Hafiz – who died in the 09/11 attacks – was recently inducted into the US Cricket Hall of Fame. From CricketCountry: “In the USA, he started playing in the Commonwealth Cricket League, which happens to be the biggest cricket league in the US. Hafiz was then selected for the USA team that toured England where he excelled with the bat by scoring three half-centuries. He subsequently became the vice-captain for USA’s tour of Canada.”
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According to BoxScoreNews, congrats to the Ireland Women are in order: “Ireland Women clinched the European T20 Championships with two games to spare following a thumping nine wicket win over The Netherlands at Rugby today.”
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This means a clean sweep for Cricket Ireland this summer: “Ireland’s complete domination of European competition has seen tournament victories for the Women and Under 15 boys, which followed wins for both the Under 17 and 19 boys in the ICC Europe Challenge Series. In addition, the Under 17 girls beat Scotland in a three game T20 competition earlier this summer.” (Also via BoxScoreNews.)
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Spanish cricket news via The Leader: “Thursday the 25th July was a big day for the Spanish team. It was the final day of T20 and the team knew that they were second in the table behind their opponents today, SGS, the team that blew them away with the bat the day before. Reading the rules carefully the team knew that if they won today they would be on level points with the Dutch, however it is then decided by results against one another which would have the Spanish team crowned champions!” Not every day you see an exclamation point in a news article.
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A couple programming notes: the Scotland vs. New Zealand A ODIs are being streamed live on dailyrecord.co.uk, and the ECB’s YouTube channel will have the England Women vs. India Women ODIs.
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Finally, today, Women’s Cricket is slowly but surely become a professional game. Better late than never, but a shame it took the national boards this long to pay their cricketers a living wage. Here’s hoping the rest of the Test nations fall in line. Today’s contract story is from South Africa and the Daily Maverick: “In just a few weeks, the South African women’s team will make history. For the first time ever, a mostly professional squad will travel to the UK for their first tour as pro-cricketers. Earlier in the year, Cricket South Africa – thanks to some help from Momentum – announced that they would be expanding their list of centrally contracted women from six to 14. … For the laymen, this means that the women who needed to work while also trying to play international cricket can now focus just on playing cricket.”
Limited Overs 