All-rounders Iris Zwilling, Hamizah to compete for ICC Women's Player of the Month Award
Sep 07, 2023
Dubai [UAE], September 7 : All-rounders Iris Zwilling, Ainna Hamizah Hashim and pacer Arlene Kelly have been shortlisted for the ICC Women's Player of the Month Award for August 2023.
Zwilling, a 21-year-old Dutch all-rounder, performed well in August, scoring 178 runs with a strike rate of more than 100 and taking three wickets in six T20Is.
Zwilling struck half-centuries against Ireland and Jersey from the top of the order. She made her debut in T20Is in 2019 and has now featured 41 matches in the shortest format of the game, scoring more than 300 runs and taking 38 wickets.
She hadn't scored a half-century in her T20I career until August this year and went on to get two in the space of seven days and followed it up with a 38 in the second T20I against Jersey.
The 23-year-old Malaysian all-rounder Ainna had a good month with the bat as well, starring as the leading run-scorer in the Malaysia Women’s Quadrangular T20 series.
Ainna topped the charts in the four-team tournament where Malaysia finished third.
She scored 91 runs across four innings, remaining unbeaten in three of those matches. In the third-place play-off against Kuwait, Ainna won the Player of the Match award for her kncok of 46*, a career-best in T20Is.
She also started the ICC Women’s T20 WC Asia Region Qualifier in good form with the ball, taking 2/14 in the opening game against Nepal in Kuala Lumpur.
Arlene Kelly has been vital in Ireland's 3-0 sweep of Netherlands, taking 10 wickets in the three-match series, including a five-wicket haul. Kelly took 5/12 in the first T20I to win the Player of the Match award, helping restrict Netherlands to 92/9.
She went on to take 3/11 and 2/20 in the following games to top the wickets chart in the series with an average of 4.30 in the three-match series. This is the fourth-best bowling average in a bilateral series where a bowler has taken 10 or more wickets.
