By Bob Fromer
Tuesday 11 July – The milestone 2-0 win over Australia posted earlier today by the GB Women’s Team as Group A of the WBSC Women’s World Cup got under way next to the sea in Balbriggan, Ireland, is above all a major step towards ensuring that GB will still 
be playing meaningful games on Saturday.
Details of the game can be found in this report on the BSF website.
There are six teams in this first of three World Cup Group Stage tournaments to be played in Europe this month – the other two tournaments will be in Spain and Italy -- and the way they’re structured, four of the six teams will be able to take part in a modified Page Playoff on the final day, with all four having a chance to claim one of the two places available from each group in next year’s Women’s World Cup Finals in Italy.
Coming into this tournament and surveying the five teams to be played – USA, Chinese Taipei, Australia, Ireland and Botswana – GB would have been thinking that they could probably get to the Page Playoff by beating Ireland on Thursday and Botswana on Friday, and anything else would be a bonus.
But today’s win over Australia will not only give GB confidence but also more wriggle room, and will allow them to set their sights higher, since a win tomorrow over World #3 Chinese Taipei could mean that Great Britain can finish first or second in the round-robin standings. For teams finishing in those positions, a Page Playoff is a double-elimination affair, whereas teams that come into it in third or fourth place have only one chance to progress.
Calm and controlled
All those calculations lie ahead, but for now, the GB Women’s Team and their supporters in Ireland, the UK, and around the world will be savouring a win over Australia that was in no way a fluke, since GB were convincingly the better team.
Georgina Corrick outpitched two veteran stars of Australian softball, Ellen Roberts and Kaia Parnaby, giving up just three hits while GB had seven, earning her the accolade of WBSC "Player of the Day".
Georgina used all her pitches and every quadrant of the strike zone, and changed her pitching patterns throughout the game, keeping Australian hitters off balance. Early in the game, the rise ball seemed to be Georgina’s pitch of choice when she needed a result; later, it was a nasty drop change-up that tailed down and away to right-handed hitters. Her seven strikeouts all came in the first four innings; after that, Georgina got the Australian batters to mostly beat the ball into the ground.
GB fielding was calm and assured, with every play made, while the Australians, while they had no recorded errors in the scorebook, double-clutched on throws on two occasions. One let a GB batter-runner reach first base, but the other allowed GB left fielder Tia Warsop to score on the front end of a double steal. This play seemed to take the Australians by surprise, and they didn’t react well, allowing the GB Women to score a second run that gave Georgina Corrick some margin for error – though it wasn’t needed. Speed in parts of their line-up is a key weapon for this GB Team, and they used it well today, with four infield hits.
With one exception, GB fielders had only routine plays to make on fly balls and grounders, but they looked smooth in making them all. The one exception came in the bottom of the fifth inning when Australian leadoff hitter Tamieka Whitefield hit a sharp ground ball into the hole between first and second. GB second base player Katie Burge fielded the ball on the run and flipped it backhand to Rebecca Faulkner at first base, the only way Katie could get it there in time. It was an outstanding play.
Morgan Salmon looked assured on the four ground balls hit to her at third base, and Sydney Brown gobbled up balls hit to shortstop.
Commentator surprise
Commentary on the game on the WBSC GameTime platform was interesting. The commentators were a New Zealander and a Canadian, and they started out with a somewhat condescending attitude towards “an emerging softball nation”. As the game proceeded through three scoreless innings, with four Australian batters striking out to one for GB, they reckoned it was just a matter of time before the might of Australia, with their talent and their international experience and knowhow, would rise up to smite the plucky underdogs.
A short while later, there was the bemused observation that “Great Britain are looking like the Aussies and the Aussies are looking like Great Britain”. What they were having trouble processing was that the GB Women were playing better softball.
After the game, GB centre fielder Kendyl Scott said, "We're coming out to win. We're gonna be scrappy and our mentality is to win. We're not the underdogs -- we're one of the best countries in the world."
Today's result was not entirely a surprise to those who know international softball. Go back 10 years or more, and Australia was regularly #3 or #4 in the world, jostling with Canada for one of those positions behind Team USA and/or Japan. But the Australians haven’t been that high for a while, and Great Britain, currently at #16 in the world rankings, is in an artificially low position based on our pre- and post-Covid performances. This is because the rankings are based, not just on results by Senior Women’s Teams, but on results by all the age group teams in each country’s programme. So the real gap between Australia and GB coming into this match was not as large as the rankings or the commentators suggested, and the way the game went bore that out.
Looking ahead
The task now for the GB Women will be to enjoy the result against Australia and then forget about it, since there is potentially a tougher opponent coming up tomorrow at 10.00 am in World #3 Chinese Taipei, who lost to the World Champion United States today by the respectable score of 5-0.
GB had never beaten Australia before today in a small number of previous encounters, but they do have a win over Chinese Taipei, a 1-0 victory in the 2012 Women’s World Championship in Whitehorse, Canada, when GB’s Stacie Townsend threw a no-hitter.
More recently, in the 2018 Women’s World Cup in Japan, the teams played an entirely different kind of game, with Taipei coming back from a four-run deficit to outlast GB by 13-11.
Whatever the nature of the game tomorrow, GB has shown in the past that we can play with Taipei.
But the GB coaching staff will now need to decide how to approach this game, given that Georgina Corrick threw 135 pitches today and will need to be at her best at the end of the week. The lure of beating Taipei is a potential second place in the round-robin group, but the game against Ireland on Wednesday evening can’t be taken for granted, as the Irish will be desperate to satisfy what should be a large and partisan crowd. It will be interesting to see how the GB staff play the rest of the week from the position that the win over Australia has given them.
Bits and pieces
The Venue. The Irish have managed to put together a venue to fulfil their bid to host one of the three World Cup Group Stage tournaments, but any resemblance to a traditional softball field is purely coincidental.
The windswept astroturf field, that is open on one side to the sea (albeit behind a railway line), is covered with line markings from other sports, which may not be confusing for the players, but certainly looks confusing to spectators. Apart from the pitching circle and the home plate area, which are dirt with mats, the rest of the field is unbroken astroturf, with nothing in the way of basepaths and no warning track in the outfield. Orientation on that field is no easy task.
Fencing in front of the dugouts and the spectators in Heras fencing, more often used on building sites or for crowd control.
But the astroturf field certainly gives true bounces – always a boon for players -- even if it also tends to slow the ball down. Both teams adjusted well to this today.
The Home Plate Umpire. From the point of view of a somewhat biased onlooker, it seemed that Georgina Corrick had to overcome not just the Australians in today’s game, but occasionally the home plate umpire, Mami Bodnarchuk from Canada. There were two or three times when Georgina and the rest of the team started off the field, convinced she had just thrown strike three, only for no arm to be raised behind the plate, and a few other pitches looked similarly good but weren’t called. However, Georgina remained calm and got on with it, and there were no adverse outcomes. And trying to judge pitches while watching a game via webstream is an uncertain science. The home plate umpire will be a lot closer and in a much better position!
The weather. The weather forecast for Balbriggan for the next two days from the Irish Met Office is for clouds, but little chance of rain. However, heavy rain is forecast for Friday, when the GB Women are meant to play Botswana and then the USA, and rain is also forecast for the decisive day on Saturday. We can only live in hope.
State of the Tournament. As noted above, the USA beat Chinese Taipei 5-0 this afternoon, and this evening Ireland beat Botswana 7-0 in five innings, with Irish pitcher Kailey I'Connor throwing a one-hitter.
After the first day of play in Group A, the standings are as follows:
Great Britain (1-0)
Ireland (1-0)
USA (1-0)
Australia (0-1)
Botswana (0-1)
Chinese Taipei (0-1)