Raf Nicholson

If I was writing a school report about the inaugural Women's Big Bash League, I know the two words that would appear at the top: "Exceeds expectations".

It would be fair to say that before the tournament kicked off on December 5, nobody quite knew what to expect. How would the public react? Would anyone even show up? Last time the women's Ashes was held in Australia, two years ago, crowd numbers were disappointing to say the least. It still makes me sad that when I reported on that incredible Test match in Perth in January 2014, almost no one was watching it from the stands. And that was an international game.

A women's state domestic T20 competition in Australia has been running since 2007-08. Levels of interest in the domestic women's game in Australia - just as elsewhere around the world - have remained minimal. Coming from that background, the explosion of attention that has surrounded the WBBL over the last six weeks is hard to believe.

Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, once wrote that: "The only real Olympic hero is the individual adult male." No women's sports, or team sports, he suggested, should ever be included in an Olympiad.

Fortunately, I have relatively few memories of the wasteland that was English men's cricket in the 1990s. The 1999 World Cup, in which England were knocked out on home soil without even getting past the first round, began a day after my 11th birthday; a few months later, England were ranked as the worst Test-playing nation in the world. It was a fitting end to a decade in which, as Andy Bull once described it in the Guardian, supporting English cricket "felt like a misfortune to be endured rather than an experience to be enjoyed". My formative years in cricket came after the worst was over.

There is no denying that 2014 has been a special year for women's cricket (read back through my Cordon columns if you're sceptical). Many events have conspired to make this a historic year. And one of those things - though few have chosen to dwell on it - is that three women's Test matches have been played over the past 12 months.

Three might not sound like very many. But the last time three women's Tests took place in the space of a calendar year was in 2005. That's a pretty long time ago.

In fact, between August 2007 and July 2014, the only women's Test cricket came in the form of the one-off Ashes matches. It is no wonder that women's Test cricket is widely acknowledged as dying. Gone are the days - in fact, the first 68 years of international women's cricket history - when a women's Test series of three (or more) Test matches was the norm. Now we are lucky to get three Tests between three different sets of opponents across 12 months.