Sophie Devine: We have been really specific and clear with how we want to play in the UAE

This is one of the captains’ columns that we are providing for free editorial use along with other preview pieces ahead of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2024. As in past women’s global events, you will also find match reports, features, photographs, media conference videos and their transcripts, stats packs and a complete media guide in the ICC Online Media Zone to help with coverage of the tournament. For access, please write to media@icc-cricket.com.

The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup has been a great vehicle in getting the public behind the women’s game and the upcoming tournament is another great opportunity to showcase our sport.

The development of the women’s game has certainly been driven by the T20 format and any opportunity to represent your country at a World Cup is special.

Winning the trophy is certainly our goal. We want to be competitive in all the games that we play and have the ability to adapt to the conditions.

With a change in venue, it’s important for us that we make the best of those conditions. We’ve certainly been working hard in the last six to eight weeks since getting back from the UK on honing our skills.

We have been specific and clear with how we want to play and what we think is going to work in those conditions. We reflected and reviewed how we’d played and what we’d worked on previously and have had a real eye on what the conditions are like.

There’s been a real focus on spin bowling, which I’m sure everyone is going to focus on, but for us it’s about strike rate and scoring shot percentages. With the bat, we’re wanting to be really busy at the crease, we know that the conditions might be tough, so every run is going to be valuable. On the flip side, with the ball we want to be as accurate as possible. Staying on stumps and making opposition players play the most difficult shots; this has been a key focus for us.

We played there a while back in 2017, a series against Pakistan in Sharjah, so it’s going back a fair while. There hasn’t been too much cricket in the UAE so it will be a real challenge for all the teams around how they adapt, but we are excited to play there.

Obviously, the weather and the heat are going to be a real factor, but that was always going to be the case whether we were in Bangladesh or UAE.

One of my favourite past T20 World Cup moments was also in the subcontinent, in India in 2016 when we beat the Aussies. We had a fair bit of travel to get to the place we were playing but we just got on with it and had them in some early trouble before managing to get away with a pretty awesome win against a side that was flying pretty high. That’s certainly up there for me.

We will play Australia in the pool stage again this time around in what is a challenging pool. When you’ve got India and Australia, as well as Sri Lanka, it’s going to be a pretty tough pool to progress through, but we certainly love our chances coming up against those sorts of teams.

In one-off games and in World Cup cricket, everyone starts on zero, so we are really looking forward to the opportunity to play against world-class teams that will all be vying to be there come the end of the World Cup.

ENDS

Note to Editors: This is one of the captains’ columns that we are providing for free editorial use along with other preview pieces ahead of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2024. As in past women’s global events, you will also find match reports, features, photographs, media conference videos and their transcripts, stats packs and a complete media guide in the ICC Online Media Zone to help with coverage of the tournament. For access, please write to media@icc-cricket.com.