ACS Women's International Cricket Year Book 2026

5 NOTES ON THE HISTORY OFWOMEN'S DOMESTIC CRICKET The ICC first expressed an interest in 2021 in compiling historical lists of matches that would be considered first-class, List A or Twenty20 to mirror the situation in men's cricket. The ACS has now agreed the first-class list but is still in discussion to finalise the limited overs lists but the editor of this book anticipates that the lists he compiled for Cricket Archive in consultation with others will likely differ very little for the duration of the careers of players who appeared in 2025. The criteria for List A and Twenty20 cricket follows the men, i.e. Twenty20 includes The Women's Hundred, and List A includes only limited overs matches scheduled for between 35 and 60 overs, and generally exclude pre-season practice and festival matches. In 2025 the List A matches were all of 50 overs duration but different over-limits have applied in earlier years. Note that List Amatches reduced because of bad weather still count as List A even if the reduction in overs was to 20 or fewer. However for first-class status insisting on a match being at least three days duration (as per the men's 1947 definition) would significantly reduce an already relatively small number of matches, so two-day matches have been accepted throughout. In 2025 the only country which staged any domestic first- class cricket was India. There are a lot of matches which remain unranked, particularly in the early days of women's cricket, because the games were declaration cricket, two innings per side but only of one-day’s duration. The number of ranked games to the end of 2025 (excluding matches abandoned without a ball bowled) are first-class 1583, List A 12137 and Twenty20 8940. Unlike men's cricket, where scores of very few matches that might qualify as first-class, List A or Twenty20 are missing, for women there are matches where only summary scores are known, and more (even in the past ten years) where no details are available at all beyond knowing a tournament took place. Where a summary score exists known player performances are included in the career records but only when details for that player are known, so a player known to have bowled in a game but their batting details are not known will be credited with a match but no batting details even if their team was all out. The great majority of players in this Year Book do not have careers with any incomplete data. The match fixtures and scores that are available appear on the Cricket Archive website ( www. cricketarchive.com ). Please email womensinfo@acscricket.com with any comments or details of missing information which would be gratefully received. The ICC ruled that from July 2018 all women’s Twenty20 matches between two ICC members where the players were properly qualified would rank as Twenty20 Internationals so that ICC could implement a complete T20 ranking system for all member countries. These matches are therefore, as with the similar ICC ruling for men, all counted as ranking Twenty20 matches although it is acknowledged that the difference in strength of some teams has led to some mismatches. One consequence is that in T20 tournaments where Associate member sides compete with A teams from Full Member countries is that some matches are ranked and some are not. In 1958, the International Women’s Cricket Council (IWCC) was formed to co-ordinate women’s cricket around the world. Interested countries at the time were stated to be Australia, England, Netherlands, New Zealand and South Africa, although other countries were admitted later. In April 2005, the IWCC was merged with the International Cricket Council (ICC), and from that point individual Full Member countries were expected to make similar arrangements to merge all men’s and women’s cricket into one body. Some notes follow on the history of possible ranked domestic matches in each ICC Full Member country. Matches played by ranking local teams against tourists also qualify for inclusion on the lists.