the Cricket Society<\/a>, an organisation that celebrates the best of cricket past, present and future through its awards, publications and regular meetings featuring the great and the good of the sport.<\/p>\nThis event, though, is unique. \u201cEngland Women\u2019s first match at Lord\u2019s was a pivotal moment,\u201d says the Cricket Society chair, Peter Hardy. \u201cEnid Bakewell, Chris Watmough and Lynne Thomas deserved to be household names in 1976, but they were not. On 9 July we will acknowledge their wonderful contribution to the growth of women\u2019s cricket, along with the other 19 players that day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laughter and tears are expected in equal measure, as the assembled players remember absent friends \u2013 including England\u2019s 1976 captain, Rachael Heyhoe Flint, who died in 2017 and will be represented by her son, Ben; and Jill Smart (nee Cruwys), who died in 1990. Many of the England players have not seen each other since a one-off dinner a decade ago in the Long Room at Lord\u2019s \u2013 poignantly, one of the last public events organised by Heyhoe Flint before her death a few months later. Australia\u2019s Karen Hill (nee Price) is flying 10,000 miles from Sydney to be present.<\/p>\nFemale spectators relish the breakthrough match. England beat Australia by eight wickets.<\/span> Photograph: Hilaria McCarthy\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cThat tour was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and gathering together 50 years later with others who shared it felt equally unique and important,\u201d Hill says. \u201cCricket has played a large part in my life and has been instrumental in shaping me as a person \u2013 most of my closest friendships have come through the game. The cricket field was a place where I felt I belonged and where I have probably been the most confident in my life.<\/p>\n
\u201cLife is also short. We have already lost a number of our peers from that era and, with the encouragement of friends and family, I decided this was an opportunity that simply should not be missed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sussex\u2019s Jan Southgate (nee Allen) is equally delighted that Hill will be in attendance: \u201cI\u2019ve got the scorecard here, and I\u2019m just loving this one: \u2018K Price, caught Hullah, bowled Allen.\u2019 Caught at mid-on.\u201d No doubt the scalp will be gleefully recounted on the day: these women may have been amateurs, but their competitive rivalry was never in question.<\/p>\n
The reunion will be a chance to compare memories of some of the stranger details of the day. Back in 1976, MCC \u2013 still decades away from admitting women to membership \u2013 was clearly as unsure as the players how to handle the entry of females into a previously wholly male space. \u201cI remember going into the back of the changing rooms to the toilets, and there were plant pots in the urinals,\u201d Lear says. \u201cRachael looked at it and said: \u2018Well they\u2019re not going to last!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey put a vase of flowers into the dressing room for us \u2013 I can\u2019t imagine they do that very often,\u201d Southgate says. \u201cAnd we had two women attendants.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut there were men stationed everywhere, in case we went into the wrong room in the pavilion. The whole day, we were so concerned. There was this big thing: \u2018We have got this opportunity to play at Lord\u2019s. We can\u2019t mess up.\u2019 Not the cricket, that was incidental. It was more the behaviour. We were very conscious to not do anything wrong. We knew that we were being watched so closely.<\/p>\nHeyhoe Flint leads England down the steps of the Lord\u2019s pavilion. They are coming from the left, having avoided the Long Room.<\/span> Photograph: Archive Photos\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cWe had to do our warm-up down at the Nursery End. And to get there, there\u2019s no way we were allowed out on to the pitch. We had to go right round the concourse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Famously, the England team did not exit through the Long Room when coming out to field, concerned this would be a breach of etiquette. Instead, Heyhoe Flint led her team out of the side door and round the back of the pavilion, leaving the assembled MCC members slightly baffled. Later, England celebrated their victory with a bottle of champagne in the dressing room, drunk from the only receptacles provided \u2013 teacups.<\/p>\n
It would be 11 years before MCC permitted another women\u2019s match at Lord\u2019s. \u201cWe said: \u2018Let\u2019s hope we can make this happen again,\u2019\u201d Southgate says. \u201cBut the big reason that was given about why we hadn\u2019t played prior to this, and then after that, was because there were so many games at Lord\u2019s. So they didn\u2019t need any more to add to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were just so pleased to be there that we didn\u2019t think: \u2018This is crazy, why aren\u2019t we being treated as the men would be?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Fifty years on, with England set to face India at Lord\u2019s in the first women\u2019s Test match there, starting on Friday, the experience of Nat Sciver-Brunt and Harmanpreet Kaur will thankfully be rather different to that of Heyhoe Flint & co. The game is set to break the UK women\u2019s Test match attendance record (23,207, set at Trent Bridge in 2023), and MCC is pulling out all the stops to put on a show. \u201cA Lord\u2019s Test is such a pivotal moment,\u201d says MCC\u2019s chief marketing officer, Katie Maier. \u201cOn day one, we want it to have that proper goose bump feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
To help make that happen, they are leaning in to the historic nature of the occasion. Sixty former England Women players have been invited to attend, and the pioneering role of the \u201976 team is finally being acknowledged: they will be ringing the five-minute bell, and be welcomed with a guard of honour. One senses Heyhoe Flint would approve.<\/p>\n
As to whether there will be plant pots in the urinals this time? Perhaps that\u2019s one to ask Sciver-Brunt at close of play on day one (watch this space).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday, in a room in central London about three miles from Lord\u2019s, a group of 10 women will gather together for a very special reunion. Fifty years ago, on 4 August 1976, they made history when they were among the first female cricketers to play a match at the so-called Home of Cricket: a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":252009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6803],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-252008","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}