England, West Indies women to support Black Lives Matter during T20I series
Sep 18, 2020
London [UK], September 18 : England skipper Heather Knight has confirmed that the hosts and West Indies will support 'Black Lives Matter' during their upcoming T20I series.
Knight has been in touch with her Caribbean counterpart, Stafanie Taylor, and the pair plan to further discuss how best to mark the movement during the five-game contest starting on Monday.
"We've had a chat as players and we definitely want to do something to honour the movement and give our support to it and keep the conversation happening," ESPNcricinfo quoted Knight as saying.
"We haven't had a chance to catch up yet, it's quite hard because we're in two separate bubbles in one big bubble so I'll speak to Stafanie over the next few days to work out exactly what that looks like for both teams. But for us as players, we want to do something and we're working to support it," she added.
The teams also will also wear the Black Lives Matter logo on their shirts, just as the England and West Indies men's teams did during their Test series in July. Both teams and their support staff also took a knee before play throughout that series, as did England and Ireland during their three ODIs, ESPNcricinfo reported.
But England, Pakistan and Australia opted not to perform the gesture in their subsequent series, drawing criticism in recent days from former West Indies great turned commentator Michael Holding.
Knight feels the series will serve as a great opportunity for England and as they will play for the first time after the washed-out T20 World Cup semifinal against India. India progressed to the final after topping their group and England had to face the World Cup exit.
"We've got a real opportunity to show what we can do in these five games. I think so many people are happy to have sport and cricket back on the telly and hopefully, they'll tune in," Knight said.
"We're looking to really push forward now as a side. We started to see a bit of a shift towards the back end of the World Cup in terms of how we want to play as a team. Obviously the weather cut that short a little bit and we weren't able to really see where we could go but we've had a lot of planning time leading into the back end of the summer," she added.
England will host Windies for five-match shortest format series at County Ground, Derby starting from September 21.
