Kathryn Bryce: ‘Hopefully it’s a good reset for Cricket Scotland’

The silence told the story… not so much that it was there but where it was coming from.

“The way that Megan started off the second innings was absolutely incredible, so when I went out there to bat, it was literally just trying to finish off the game and I was just saying, ‘don’t think about what’s coming, don’t think about it, just score the runs’. So when we got those winning runs at the end, it was just, I think the relief and just hard to switch off from that emotion of trying to ignore what was coming and realising what we’d actually achieved.”

Scotland had beaten Ireland in their most recent T20I to draw a two-match series in Desert Springs, Spain, in October and won the first of three ODIs between the teams immediately before that.

“We were fifth in the rankings,” Bryce says. “The way that we’ve played over the last year or so, we’ve managed to beat Ireland a couple of times and they’ve beaten us as well so we knew it was going to be a really close-fought game, but we had the ability to really compete with them.”

When it comes to efforts around making the game more inclusive, the adage about needing to see it to be it often arises. Now that they are about to step onto the world stage for the first time, this Scotland team have a chance to live that out.

“A lot of people say it’s the access for people to be able to watch the game and see their teams out there playing,” Bryce says. “So I think for the girls in Scotland be able to watch a World Cup, which is the most televised event for the women’s game, and actually see a team from Scotland there and performing, and seeing people from where they’re from competing in that competition, is going to be really important.

“It’s starting to become more popular in schools and getting out to a lot more state schools as well, which is really important. I think that growth is really there and there’s a big push as well to make women’s clubs more accessible and enjoyable, for people to want to go to and then also stay when they get there.

“Hopefully it’s a good sort of reset for Cricket Scotland, to build and be able to rebuild a lot of those branches. I think for the women’s team to be there and leading the way on that, showing and developing, that’ll be a big kick-starter for cricket in the country.”

Bryce also hopes her team’s World Cup appearance attracts complete newcomers to cricket, which she says still relies heavily on players having a family connection to the sport.

That was the case for Bryce and younger sister Sarah, Scotland’s wicketkeeper who was batting at the other end as Kathryn struck the winning runs against Ireland. But while their father played the game, and their mother had grown up supporting Lancashire while living in England’s Lake District, there were other role models who had a big influence.

Right there in the backyard, they could see it… now they get to be it.