By Caroline Chepkorir
The West Indies skipper Hayley Matthews has achieved a significant milestone in her cricket career when she took her 100th wicket in Women’s Twenty20 Internationals. She achieved this by dismissing Scottish opener Saskia Horley 11 off nine balls at the Dubai International Stadium.
In women’s T20I cricket, Matthews is the second player from the West Indies to reach 100 wickets. Anisa Mohammed is the first, having amassed 125 wickets in her career. In her 98th game, Matthews also set a new record for the fastest woman to 1000 runs in the T20I format.
In 2014, at the age of 16, Hayley Matthews made an appearance in T20I for the West Indies against New Zealand. Despite her appearance, she didn’t bowl in the match. In the next match against Australia, she claimed her first ever wicket when she caught Australia captain Meg Lanning, and she ended the match with figures of 3/26.
Recently, Hayley Matthews stated that the squad has evaluated the mistakes it made in the first game against South Africa and plans to address those issues when they play Scotland in the second match of the Women’s ICC T20 World Cup.
“We had some thorough discussions yesterday evening after the match, and obviously, it’s one of those games that you want to be able to put behind you, so we try to have those discussions as early as possible. We all knew we didn’t get enough runs on the board and kind of just tried to break down why that was. Then in the bowling department, obviously not getting to take wickets as well, but we had thorough discussions about how we could build better partnerships and also find ways to increase our strike rate,” Matthews said in a pre-match press conference.
In 2020, Matthew made her first significant bowling breakthrough when she claimed her 50th T20I wicket during the England tour of the West Indies. She went on to take another 50 wickets. Mathews also achieved a significant milestone on the Pakistan tour in April 2024 when, at an amazing strike rate of 5.86, she claimed her 100th ODI wicket.
