If men’s cricket in America has often seemed to be in a state of arrested development, its undoubted potential thwarted by issues of scale, funding and amateurism, spare a thought for their female counterparts. In terms of status, organisation and mere presence, the women’s game lags some way behind even their hapless menfolk. Indeed up until recently it could realistically be described as barely existing at all, beyond a loose cluster of pioneer figures that have, with gritted teeth and sheer determination kept the flame flickering in their own local areas.

These pioneers haven’t waited for USACA or the ICC to do the right thing and make a financial commitment to developing the women’s game. They have just got on with it, often in the face of indifference, poverty and the time constraints of everyday family life (not to mention the odd bit of old fashioned misogyny). On this odyssey we have been looking for that intangible yet unmistakable ’spirit of cricket’. If anybody can be said to be imbued with it, it’s the ordinary women who have kept the game alive in the States over the last few decades.

They have received little or no support from the men purporting to govern cricket in the US. As far as USACA were concerned they were not a priority. Indeed it wasn’t until the ICC mandated that associate nations had to have a women’s programme in place by 2015 that the body appointed someone to oversee this process. And it was a man, John Aaron, the grandee of the Atlantis club in the New York region, who, as Secretary, had effectively been Gladstone Dainty’s number two for three years from 2008. “There weren’t that many advocates on the board for women’s cricket,” he explained to us when we spoke to him in 2011. “Yes, there were board members who felt we want to have women’s cricket, but since the resources are so limited and the personnel is so limited, the focus clearly has been on men’s cricket. I have, along with some others, tried to advocate for women’s cricket and in fact it is the President’s wish right now to have a woman on the USACA board, if only to advocate and to represent on behalf of women’s cricket. That’s quite rightly so - that’s the way it should be.”

Aaron, to be fair, is an ally of the women’s game, and did his best with the meagre resources at his disposal. Back in 2011 there weren’t just no women’s leagues in the US, there were barely any teams. Aaron estimated that there were enough women playing the game to make up two teams in the New York region, three in California and one in the New Jersey/Maryland/Baltimore seaboard. Six teams in the WHOLE COUNTRY.

All of which makes the national team’s achievement in reaching the Women’s World Cup Qualifiers in Bangladesh that year all the more extraordinary. Nadia Gruny was an opening batter in that team and looks back fondly on that time, describing as ‘the best experience the national team has had to date.’

Nadia’s story is similar to many of that team. Originally from Tobago, she came to the US to study, arriving at South Carolina State University, interestingly, on a soccer scholarship. She went on to study for a Masters in Sports Business Management and was only reintroduced to the sport when, as part of the course, she found herself at doing an internship at a men’s club in Georgia. Up until that point she’d had no idea there was any possibility of trying her hand at the sport in her adopted country.