Credit : Getty Images for the ECB
At the age of 22, this summer Natalie is expected to feature as an all-rounder in the England women’s team which takes on the old enemy Australia in the Ashes. Furthermore, she will be playing for a country as a professional cricketer. Yet she only took up the game when she finally came to live in England settling into the family home in Cobham shortly after her 14th birthday. “I looked at joining some of the women’s football clubs locally but none of them were really suitable. “My brother had always played a bit of cricket with my dad, who had studied at Jesus College, Cambridge where I was taken each year for an annual reunion cricket match. At nearby Stoke D’Abernon the cricket club had a Ladies section so I joined it as a junior and within a year I was promoted to the Ladies side.” Watching cricket on TV, Natalie adopted colourful England all-rounder Freddie Flintoff as her cricketing hero and soon she was proving that she too had prowess with both bat and ball. “Having played tennis and hockey, hitting a cricket ball came naturally,” she says. “But in the practice nets at the club as well as my batting sessions, I was also expected to bowl to my team-mates as well.” And when she talks about the medium pace she bowls for England she says modestly. “I move the ball off the seam but if I get it earlier enough in the innings I can swing it as well.”
“To have been part of the England side that won the Ashes in Australia last year was absolute ecstasy” Last year in a triangular tournament at the famous Bridgetown Oval in Barbados she became the first women to take a hattrick of wickets in the shortened form of Twenty20 cricket against New Zealand. Natalie’s rise through the women’s cricketing ranks from club level with Stoke D’Abernon to international status, is one endless story of progress. She was quickly invited to join Surrey’s Youth ranks at under-15 level playing alongside some girls who had been playing since Under 9s squad. Going to Epsom college to study for her “A” levels, she quickly earned a place in the boy’s first eleven. And cricket was very much on her mind when she chose to study for a degree in Sports and Exercise Science at Loughborough University. For more than two decades the campus had hosted the national academy of the England and Wales Cricket Board with some of the best coaches in the land on hand every day to give her advice. “That’s why I chose Loughborough,” she says. “Because I am allowed to go in every day and train under, and work with, the cricket performance manager Salliann Briggs. I do use it a lot.” This season is going to be a busy one for Natalie. In April she was part of an England academy squad which took on their Australian equivalents in four 50 over matches and two Twenty20 games on a month long trip to Dubai. In between her club commitments – while based in Loughborough she is playing for Sheffield – and county appearances for Surrey, there is
the forthcoming major challenge of trying to defend the Ashes at home against Australia. The Ashes for women does not consists of a five or six Test match series in the way that the men’s teams compete every two years home and away. Instead they just play one test, three 50-over one day internationals and three Twenty20 games, with points for victory in each match going onto a league table which dictates who wins the Ashes. “To have been part of the England side that won the Ashes in Australia last year was just absolute ecstasy, and I am so looking forward to hopefully be involved again, because the cricket is just so competitive.” In May last year, the England and Wales Cricket Board put its top players on professional contracts for the first time. But that has not stopped Natalie from pursuing her sports science degree and hoping for a career in that area. And, since the degree course involves sports sociology and psychology, she admits she might be tempted to practice some of the techniques she has learned in the England dressing room if a team mate needs help. The Ashes start with a 50 over game at Taunton on July 21 with more one day cricket at Taunton, Bristol and Worcester before the Test match gets underway in Canterbury on August 11. But the outcome of the biggest rivalry in ladies cricket will not be decided until the end of the third Twenty20 match played at Cardiff on August 31.
Surrey Occasions
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