I know that it’s a generally stable democracy but that in the 1970s a military coup, covertly supported by the USA, installed General Pinochet as head of state and led to a regime of torture, incarceration without trial and clandestine murder. But until today I didn’t know they played cricket in Chile, and I even more didn’t know they had a national women’s team.
Cricket has always seemed to me to be an English-speaking game and unlikely to sit well with the Latin temperament, but obviously I am wrong and fossilised in my prejudice. Good to get that learned.
The Chilean women’s cricket team has just gone on tour to Argentina. Now I know roughly as much about Argentina as I do about Chile. It is more normally shaped and it borders the Atlantic rather than the Pacific, but it has a similar history. It too has suffered military coups and bouts of state-sponsored murder, and it too, I now learn, has taken to cricket.
Argentina has had a national women’s team since 2007. They play T20 cricket, the shortest form of the game in which each side bats for 20 overs. Three matches were scheduled against Chile, the first of which was played in Buenos Aires on Friday the 13th of this month. For the Chileans, the date lived up to its reputation.
Argentina batted first and in their 20 overs scored 427 runs. To put this into context, the highest score in any men’s international innings of 20 overs is 314, scored by Nepal against Mongolia (a game played, enchantingly, in Hangzhou). New Zealand’s highest-ever score is 254.
Only one Chilean bowler took a wicket. Her name was Jessica Miranda. Chile then went in to bat and were all out for 63. Of those, 29 came as extras (no balls, wides, byes and so on, runs unattributable to the person batting.) The next highest score was 27 by the same Jessica Miranda. No one else got more than 5.
The second game was played the next day. Again the Argentinians batted first but this time the drubbing was not quite so severe.
They scored 300 runs for the loss of six wickets. But any pleasure the Chileans may have taken from this improvement was dashed when they went into bat. They were all out for 19. Of those 19, 15 were extras. Just four runs were scored with the bat. Of those four, Jessica Miranda scored three.
Now it seems to me that women are generally more level-headed about sport than men are. Perhaps because they are less hard-wired for war, they are more inclined to see it as only a game and not mattering as much as all that.
Nevertheless, it would have been difficult for the Chilean women not to feel daunted when they arrived at the ground for the third game in three days. And even more daunted when they saw their own team list. For Jessica Miranda was not on it.
Understandably the Chileans fell apart. They were all out for 22 of which 21 were extras. Emilia Toro, batting at number 9, scored one run. Every other woman got a duck.
So what happened to Jessica Miranda? Having been the one player to play well, she surely cannot have been dropped. Is it possible that she was left out for disciplinary reasons?
Did she perhaps go out on the town in Buenos Aires on the Saturday night to celebrate having scored 75 per cent of her team’s runs that afternoon, a higher percentage than any player, male or female, has ever achieved?
And did she stay out a little late and break a team curfew? I do not know and I doubt that I shall ever know. But I shall always be grateful to her for having taken my mind off politics in general and Winston Peters in particular. That is, after all, one of the purposes of sport.
