The women’s game has changed beyond recognition in ten years. Professional contracts, a domestic structure, full houses, genuine pace at the top of the international game.

What has not changed is what happens to a twelve-year-old girl at a lot of clubs when she says she wants to bowl fast.

She gets moved to spin.

Not maliciously. Usually with the best intentions, by volunteers giving up their evenings. But the sequence is familiar enough to be predictable: she is not as quick as the boys in her group, she is more accurate than them, the team needs overs that do not go for runs — and by fourteen she is an off-spinner who used to want to bowl fast.

What is actually going on

At eleven, twelve, thirteen, a girl in a mixed group frequently is slower than the boys. That part is real, and it is mostly a statement about physical maturity rather than about bowling.

The mistake is treating it as a verdict.

Pace at that age is largely a report on height, weight, limb length and how far through puberty a child is. It is a snapshot of a body that is nowhere near finished, and it is being used to make a decision about the next decade. The same error gets made with small boys who have not grown yet. It just gets made far more often, and far earlier, with girls.

Meanwhile, the thing that actually determines whether a bowler will be fast at twenty-two — whether the action sequences properly, base then hips then chest then arm — is rarely the criterion anyone applies. Nobody looks at the laces at back foot contact, or at whether there is real separation between hips and shoulders, or at whether the chest drives down the pitch through release. They look at the speed relative to the boys in the net and they draw a conclusion.

So a girl with a genuinely good action and no growth yet gets reassigned, and a boy with a poor action and an early growth spurt gets the fast bowling coaching. That is exactly backwards.

The mechanics are not different

Let us be plain about this, because it gets muddled.

The fast bowling action does not have a male version and a female version. The sequence is the same. The base has to firm, the hips have to drive, the chest has to follow, the arm comes last. Separation between the lower and upper half is where pace is stored regardless of who is bowling. One mile per hour at the hips is worth up to ten at the arm for everybody.

The faults are the same too. Crossing the feet over onto a tightrope instead of railway tracks. The back foot lifting early. The head falling away before front foot contact and the trunk collapsing sideways through release.

That last one deserves emphasis, because the injury it drives — lumbar stress injury from rotation combined with sideways trunk bend — happens to girls as well as boys, and girls’ actions get watched properly a good deal less often. An action nobody has assessed is an action nobody has screened.

Where there are real differences — the timing of growth, the shape of the pelvis, hormonal influences on connective tissue through adolescence — they belong in how you manage load and build physical capacity. They are not a reason to coach a different action, and they are certainly not a reason to hand a keen fast bowler a set of off-breaks.

The opportunity nobody is taking

There is a straightforwardly competitive argument here, and clubs are missing it.

Genuine pace is the scarcest resource in the women’s game. Every serious selector in the country is looking for it. And the pipeline is being narrowed at eleven and twelve by well-meaning coaches making a decision on the basis of a body that has not finished growing.

Keep her bowling fast. Coach the action properly. Let the growth arrive — because it will, and every inch of it converts into pace if the mechanics are there to receive it. A fifteen-year-old girl with four years of correct fast bowling coaching behind her and a body that has just matured is a very interesting cricketer, and there are not many of them, because most of them were moved to spin.

What we would say to a parent

If your daughter wants to bowl fast, she should be coached to bowl fast, on exactly the same mechanical criteria as anybody else.

And if you want to know whether her action is sound — whether the pace is going to convert when she grows, and whether there is anything in there that puts her back at risk — that is a question a phone camera answers. Film two deliveries from directly behind at stump height and two from side-on, and get someone who does this properly to look at what happens between front foot contact and release.

We coach boys and girls to the same standard, on the same framework. The action is what we assess.

Nobody should be reassigned at twelve on the basis of a speed gun.

Ian Pont is Director of Cricket at the National Fast Bowling Academy and has coached fast bowlers at international level.