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Women’s cricket
Women’s cricket
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THESE GIRLS CAN The exponential growth of girls in cricket is unquestionably the proudest legacy of Chance to Shine’s first ten years.
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n common with most female players up to and including her generation, Charlotte Edwards’ introduction to cricket was an accident of birth. Had her father and uncle not played for her local club, Ramsey, she may never have picked up a bat. In the absence of any female role-models, her idol was the immistakeably masculine Graham Gooch. She captained the boys at school because she refused to be pigeonholed into netball. She persevered largely because it was obvious she had the talent. “Every match was an ordeal,” she recalls. Sniggering and snide comments were a daily occurrence – not least from the parents of the boys – and when, in 1996, Edwards made her England debut at the age of 16, the players were still expected to take the field in skirts, and to pay for their own team blazers. It would be another three years before women would even be allowed into the Long Room at Lord’s. “There was some great work being done by the volunteer-led Women’s Cricket Association,” says Clare Connor, Edwards’ predecessor as England captain and now the ECB’s head of Women’s Cricket. “But the ECB didn’t take over the women’s game until 1998.” Now, however, as Edwards embarks on her 20th year as an international
THE SISTER ACT IS SHINING THROUGH
cricketer, she stands at the summit of a sport transformed. “Lottie and I have to pinch ourselves sometimes,” says Connor. “The pace of change has been breathtaking.”
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hat pace of change is, without question, Chance to Shine’s proudest legacy to date. The encouragement of female participation in cricket had been one of the charity’s objectives from the outset, as demonstrated by the presence of both Connor and Edwards at the launch in Bethnal Green in May 2005. “We always wanted the girls involved but we didn’t know at the beginning how big it could be,” says Lord King of Lothbury, the charity’s president and co-founder. “In football, by the age of 7, the power and pace of boys mean you can’t really mix. In cricket, boys and girls can naturally play together until they are 12 or 13, and the latent demand among young women to play cricket is enormous.” What could never have been anticipated, however, was the almost evangelical zeal with which the players would take control of their destiny. With the advent, in 2008, of Chance to Shine’s first coaching contracts, a generation that had been drawn to the
sport by chance were suddenly handed the opportunity to become the role models they themselves had never had, and the benefits were exponential. “Led by Charlotte, they threw themselves into the roles with a real social conscience,” says Wasim Khan. “Right from the outset, they saw the bigger picture and recognised that what they were doing was critical to the development of the women’s game. “ The timing, as with so many aspects of the Chance to Shine story, was extraordinary. By 2009, not only was the charity reporting a massive groundswell in interest from girls who needed expert input, but the England women themselves were emerging as the country’s most successful national team across all sports. At Sydney in March, they captured the World Cup for the first time in 16 years but even that achievement was surpassed in the public imagination three months later when, on home soil and sharing the stage with the men’s event, they stormed to the World
“Lottie and I have to pinch ourselves sometimes,” says Clare Connor. “The pace of change has been breathtaking”
Twenty20 title at Lord’s. “That tournament gave us an amazing profile,” says Connor. “The players could talk to girls from the perspective of being world champions. It was a lovely story that captured the imagination.” In the semi-final of that campaign, Claire Taylor and Beth Morgan maintained an asking-rate of ten an over throughout an unbeaten partnership of 122 to beat the old enemy, Australia. and pull off what, to this day, is recalled as one of the finest run-chases in the entire history of Twenty20 cricket, men’s or women’s.
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Erin and Lucy StauntonTurner, twin sisters from Omskirk Primary School in Lancashire, are making a name for themselves both at a school level but also while playing for Lancashire. This success has earned both Lucy, a top-order batter and right-arm off-spinner, and Erin, a left-arm seamer and middle-order batter, a place in the England Women’s U15 squad. “Being part of the England set-up and being able to train at the National Cricket Performance Centre has been a great experience and so much fun,” says Erin. “If we hadn’t have had all the coaching from Chance to Shine at school, I don’t think we’d be where we are now.”