West Indies captain Hayley Matthews has made it clear she has no intention to prioritise other cricket opportunities in front of her international commitments. She also said more funding and greater resources needs to be given to West Indies women’s cricket if they are to grow and compete with the best teams in the world like Australia, India and England.
“I want to still play for West Indies, there’s no doubt about that,” she told media.
“I always feel like West Indies has given me the opportunity to represent myself, to be a part of franchise cricket. And it might be the most stressful thing and probably one of the harder jobs around, but it’s where the passion comes from.”
She also spoke about the need for more investment and hinted at the imbalance in the distribution of funding in global cricket after her team were beaten by Australia in the T20 World Cup semi-finals.
“The reason we were so successful back in 2012 to 2016 is because women’s cricket was based off pure talent at that time. The minute that investment comes into the picture, we’ve seen the gap widen a lot. Our girls have to fight a lot to even be competing and to be playing at this level.”
She added: “It makes it really hard for us to compete when we don’t have pathway programmes in place and then teams like Australia are pushing out Phoebe Litchfields from 15 years old every single year. I feel like it’s a bit unfair sometimes.”