We caught up with White Ferns skipper Suzie Bates just hours before she flew back to New Zealand at the end of a golden English summer.

If you were going to pick a Player of the Season in domestic cricket in England this summer, it would be difficult to look beyond Suzie Bates. Stafanie Taylor might just have pipped her to the Player of the Tournament award in the Kia Super League, but across the whole of the domestic scene Bates has been an unstoppable force – scoring 678 runs, at an average of 42, and taking 30 wickets, at an average of 11. No one else’s all-round domestic numbers come close, and it is no coincidence that Bates flies back to New Zealand with a unique “treble” of trophies in her bag – the County Championship and the T20 Cup with Kent, and the Super League with the Southern Vipers.

This success was, of course, no surprise to the committee at Wisden, who earlier in the year had bestowed their accolade of Leading Woman Cricketer in the World upon the New Zealand captain:

“That was a bit of a shock,” she reflects modestly. “I remember being in Perth at the time – I was there with Charlotte Edwards and the Scorchers – and I said ‘Oh – Wisden are calling me!’ I went into my room and I remember it made me look back on the season – I knew I’d scored a few runs and taken a few wickets but to be recognised like that was pretty special. You don’t go through the season striving for those awards but when they come around you take your time to sit back and reflect.”

With Bates at the helm, and at the peak of her powers, New Zealand travelled to the Women’s World T20 in India in March, happy to carry the mantle of favourites:

“I thought that was our best chance at a World Cup since I’ve been leading the side – we had such good momentum leading into the tournament – we’d beaten Australia in a Twenty20 series, and there was just a really good feel in the group that we were the favourites and we were confident that we had the team to win.”

It wasn’t to be, however, as they fell short by 6 runs in an agonising semi-final defeat to the eventual champions, the West Indies:

“It was just a bit of a shame – a couple of things didn’t quite go our way, and we were on the opposite side of a pretty good West Indies team that hit their straps at the right time.”

“I can live with it, because I thought we went about our cricket how we wanted to, and Twenty20 can be a bit fickle; but if you want to win those tournaments you’ve got to turn up in the big games.”

Following the WWT20, the decision to come to England for the summer was an easy one:

“I just love playing cricket!” Bates says.

And the outcome has been phenomenal, despite a rocky opening weekend in the T20 Cup, when Kent lost both their matches against Lancashire and Berkshire:

“With Lottie [Edwards], Lydia [Greenway] and Tash [Farrant] we joked about getting all 3 trophies – the Twenty20 didn’t look all that bright from the start but we managed to come from the back; then the Vipers campaign – I loved every minute of that; and finally to win the 50 over comp as well makes coming over worthwhile!”

It wasn’t all about having fun though – with a World Cup coming up in England next year, it has been important preparation, getting used to the grounds and the pitches:

“For all the Kiwi girls – some have played in county and some in the Super League – playing and training at the grounds we might play at in 2017 is only going to be of benefit.”

And Bates thinks it might give them a key edge next year:

“A lot of the Australians didn’t come over and hopefully that puts us at a little bit of an advantage. At the World Cup, everyone is going to prepare the best way they think for their team, but I think we’ve had some good time out in the middle here leading up to it.”

That World Cup is obviously New Zealand’s key focus as they enter a domestic summer down south, and the recent announcement of extended contracts – more money for more players – is welcomed:

“We were perhaps a little bit behind England and Australia,” Bates admits. “But we are starting to build to where they are, and I think New Zealand Cricket realise the importance of investing now.”

Even so, tough decisions had to be taken, and clearly none more so than the dropping of Sara McGlashan, after 14 years and over 200 caps:

“It is a bit difficult – you want to look long term but we have a World Cup immediately around the corner and to lose experience like Sara McGlashan…”

Bates tails-off diplomatically, before continuing:

“I know they are looking forward to the future, but with Lottie and Lydia and Macca [McGlashan] in that Vipers team, it proves that in big tournaments you want that experience.”

Nevertheless, confidence remains high for 2017, that New Zealand can make up for the disappointment of the WW20 in 2016, by winning the World Cup in England:

“Can we win it? I think we can! England at home are always going to be tough, and to beat Australia at any World Cup you are going to have to play your best game; but our experienced players have played a lot of cricket and we’ve got a core group that have been in those big matches – if we play our cards right, fingers crossed, we can go all the way!”

Southern Vipers Head Coach Nick Denning is a familiar and popular face around the women’s cricket scene. A former Berkshire player – a bowler who also played a handful of List A games for Essex in the early 00s – Denning had been the Berkshire Women’s coach for a number of years before taking the reins at the Vipers for the inaugural Kia Super League this season.

In some ways it was a brave appointment – although the Vipers are theoretically a partnership between Hampshire, Sussex, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, Hampshire are very much the “senior service”, and with no experience at the top level of women’s cricket, the safer option might have been to select “one of the chaps” from the men’s game. That they didn’t was to their credit… and ultimately to their advantage, as Denning led the team to the top of the group table and subsequently on to lift the trophy on Finals Day.

Speaking to Denning after that triumph, we began by asking what the key differences were from coaching a county side:

“Professionalism!” he replies emphatically. “At Berkshire we got a £2,000 grant from the ECB and then we had to find the rest of the money – a bit from Berkshire and the rest from sponsorship – to run a £13,000 program. So when you go to a program that is as good as fully funded, it just makes a huge difference.”

Denning ticks off the items one by one:

“We get our Strength and Conditioning coach; we get our physio; we get all these specialist coaches; and we get great facilities at the Ageas Bowl.”

The Super League is of course not fully professional, but for Denning the important thing is to treat it as such:

“While this competition is semi-professional, the setup has to be professional – you have got to be all-in and do it properly.”

The same applies to the players:

“We said: Look, we are here to develop you – we are not here to be a 3-week thing – we are here to help you kick your cricket onto another level.”

In selecting the overseas players to augment his side, Denning looked for those who shared these values:

“With Suzie Bates and Sara McGlashan we knew we needed batters, but we also needed good people – we needed people who were going to buy into what we were doing – be good around the changing room and help the youngsters. Morna Nielsen [who came in as a late replacement for Megan Schutt] was also somebody we’d been talking about when we were selecting the squad – she was our next-in – and they’ve all been really, really good professionals. They have been fantastic around the changing room, but they’ve also come in and developed their games – they’ve learnt – they’ve asked questions to get better.”

The established internationals have been crucial obviously, but unlike some of the other franchises, the Vipers haven’t been afraid to throw in some of their youngest players, and actually let them play (rather than “just” field) such as 17-year-old Katie George:

“Katie has played four games and she has had two very good games and two games where she has possibly shown her inexperience, but she is seventeen so I’m not going to hold that against her – she will be a very, very good cricketer.”

Vipers’ glove-butler Carla Rudd is another younger player who has impressed in Super League. After being dropped from the England Academy program last year, Rudd was appointed girls’ coach at Felsted School, which has given her the opportunity to work with their boys’ coach – former England Test batsman Jason Gallian – in particular on her batting.

“Carla has always been a good ‘keeper, but she knows that if she is going to start pushing for an England place, it is her batting that needs to improve and she has been working really hard all winter with Jason.”

Someone else who Denning singles out for working really hard is Berkshire quick bowler Daisy Gardner, who ended up missing the entire competition through injury, despite the best efforts of the medical staff at the Ageas:

“It is just bad luck, and that happens with injuries in cricket; but she is still part of our squad and she has been as professional as anyone – if some of the other players had Daisy’s drive and her attitude they could be absolute world-beaters!”

Of course the Super League has been entertaining and has brought unprecedented attention to the domestic women’s game; but the ECB’s key aims also include “bridging the gap” between county and international cricket, and Denning is perhaps better-placed than anyone to assess whether this has been achieved. However, when asked he is cautious to emphasise that “bridging the gap” is a longer-term objective:

“I don’t think you can really tell until the county competition next year,” he says. “If the girls that were pulled in – not the Academy players or the internationals, but the girls that have been talent-ID’d from county cricket – go back to play county cricket and put some of the stuff they’ve learnt into that – then yes, we are bridging the gap.”

Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate * Wickets / Economy

In the battle of the international captains, it is West Indies’ Stafanie Taylor who comes out ahead of New Zealand’s Suzie Bates at the top of our All-Rounder Rankings. Taylor has scored more runs than Bates, at a higher Strike Rate, and has taken more wickets, though the New Zealander has a better economy rate.

With Heather Knight coming in at 3 on the leaderboard, maybe it is time for the nay-sayers to accept that she really is a genuine all-rounder, not just a batsman who has gotten a bit lucky with the ball since an injury forced her to trade her medium-pacers for off-spin a couple of years ago.

Also worth a mention are Katherine Brunt – a player whose ability to consistently crack off a few runs quickly makes her a real asset in Twenty20; and Arran Brindle – the only non-current-international on the list, who hasn’t quite “come out of retirement” to play in the KSL (she has continued to play (men’s) league cricket since her England retirement) but who has reminded us all why she is much-missed around these parts!

One final point… Loughborough Lightning clearly did some astute business in selecting their overseas stars – all three of them make the all-rounders list, and we suspect this isn’t a coincidence – perhaps showing the value in having a head coach who has been part of the England “Performance” setup for a number of years, and therefore knows the form-book better than anyone else?

Ranking = Wickets / Economy

Whilst our Batting Rankings were dominated by the overseas stars, there are a few more home-grown players in our KSL Bowling Rankings, and they don’t come much more home grown at the top of the list than Berkshire’s Linsey Smith, who is the only player in the Top 10 not to have played international cricket. Smith has also played one fewer match than all the rest of the leaderboard, having only come into the tournament as a late replacement, making her achievement all the more impressive.

(Smith is not only the joint-highest wicket taker in the group stages, but she also has the best economy figure overall – only two other bowlers (both also Vipers – Morna Nielsen and Katie George) have economy rates under 5.)

West Indies’ all-rounder Hayley Matthews has had a nightmare KSL with the bat, averaging just 4 from 5 innings; but she has made up for it with the ball, coming in at number 3 in our rankings, with 8 wickets at 5.44; just pipping England’s Alex Hartley, who took 8 wickets at 5.50, showing once again that she really does have what it takes to compete at the very highest levels of the game, and hopefully sealing her selection for England’s overseas tours this autumn.

Ranking = Runs * Strike Rate

It is no surprise to see our batting rankings dominated by the big international stars, including the captains of West Indies, New Zealand, England and South Africa.

Stafanie Taylor leads the field, though she actually started the competition slowly with scores of 14 and 9 against the Thunder and the Lightning; before following that up with two huge half-centuries (74* and 78*) against the Stars and the Vipers, and a 45 versus the Diamonds.

The only non-international player to make the Top 10 is Lancashire Thunder’s Emma Lamb. Her highest score in the KSL was “just” 34, but she has made the list because she was very consistent – she had just one score below 25 in the whole competition, and even that was a “double figures” – a 10 v the Diamonds.

Fast-bowling all-rounder Kim Garth was always destined to play international cricket – both her mother (Anne-Marie) and her father (Jonathan) represented Ireland in their time, and Kim made her debut in 2010, aged just 14. Now 20 years old, she has played 53 internationals. Having scored 761 runs with the bat, at an average of 22, and taken 48 wickets with the ball, at an average of 24, she is an increasingly important cog in the Irish machine.

Following the World T20 qualifiers at the tail-end of last year, she was selected for the WBBL’s Associate Rookie program, where she spent six weeks in Hobart with the Hurricanes and their legendary coach Julia Price, who she credits with recent improvements in her batting:

“[Hobart] was pretty intense – it was training four or five times a week plus gym work [and] I got a good opportunity to work quite closely with Julia Price, who is a brilliant coach, so I did a lot of one-on-one with her on my [batting] technique.”

Garth admits that things “didn’t go so well” at the World T20 in India which followed – Ireland disappointed, failing to win a game, and only coming remotely close against Sri Lanka, where they fell 14 short chasing 129.

But this season has seen a change of tack for Ireland – they pulled out of the English Women’s County Championship and opted instead to focus their budget on two full international series, against South Africa, which finished last week, and Bangladesh later in the summer.

It is an opportunity Garth has seized – despite suffering from a side-strain which inhibited her bowling, she has been Ireland’s leading wicket-taker against South Africa, with 11 wickets; and their second-highest run-scorer, with 181 runs, including her highest international score – 72* in the 1st ODI. And Ireland impressed as a team against much higher-ranked opposition sharing the T20 series 1-1 and winning the final match of 4 in the ODI series.

(Yes, South Africa were weakened by the absence of leading players at KSL; but they still had Mignon du Preez, Trisha Chetty, Sune Luus, and Chloe Tryon… not to mention their new teenage batting sensation, Laura Wolvaardt, who made her first international hundred at Malahide.)

“Having the opportunity to play these ‘top nation’ teams in 6 games is absolutely fantastic,” says Garth. “You can see each game that we are improving and it does a huge amount for our cricket – we are definitely on the step forward.”

Having played almost exclusively Twenty20 cricket for the past couple of years, leading up to the World T20, coach Aaron Hamilton is now redirecting Ireland’s focus towards the 50-over game, looking to qualify for the World Cup in England next year.

“It is tough going from the Twenty20 mindset to 50-over, but we are making good progress,” says Garth.

Just 4 teams from February’s qualifiers will head to England next summer, so it won’t be easy; but can they do it?

“Absolutely!” replies Garth with confidence. “We will have to beat teams like Pakistan and Sri Lanka which I think we are 100% capable of doing. We’ve got a very young team but we are a hard working team and we are progressing, so hopefully we’ll get it right by the time February comes around.”

Throughout the Kia Super League, we’ll be featuring short interviews with players, coaches & other interesting people we find around and about at the grounds. With just Finals Day still to go, who has been the most economical bowler in KSL so far? None other than Berkshire’s (and now Vipers) own Linsey Smith. She answers our quickfire questions below…

If not Southern Vipers, who would you like to win?

I’d have to say Loughborough. Obviously I’m up there at university, so they’re probably my next closest team.

Who would you like to see playing in KSL that isn’t?

Sarah Taylor is a massive player and it would be good to have her back playing. Also Claire Taylor – I grew up playing alongside her [at Berkshire] and she was a big influence on my game.

Favourite KSL player?

That’s a tricky one! Probably Nat Sciver. Bowls and bats, and hits a long ball as well.

Justin Bieber or One Direction?

Justin Bieber.

Which sportswoman/women do you admire outside cricket?

Jess Ennis is a great athlete. She does a lot of events which shows her strength and stamina.

Favourite cricket ground?

It’s got to be the Ageas Bowl – it’s the only big ground I’ve played at!

Favourite thing on the menu in Nandos?

Lemon and herb chicken thighs.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Hopefully still playing! Getting to the highest level of cricket that I can get to. I do a bit of coaching as well so a coach/player role would be nice.

Where do you see women’s cricket in 10 years?

This competition has shown how fast it’s growing. The crowds that we’re getting in are amazing for just the first year. So hopefully in 10 years time we’ll fill stadiums like this [the Ageas Bowl].

Guest writer Richard Clark tells the story of two dramatically different seasons for Worcestershire Under 13s…

As any parent will tell you, watching your children progress and learn in sport can be frustrating and rewarding in – give or take – equal measure, so I don’t make any great claims for the following tale to be in any way “special”. It’s nothing more than a personal look back on two years in the evolution of a County Under 13 team. And I suspect it will resonate with many parents up and down the country.

This is the tale of Worcestershire Under 13s – my daughter’s mob – and it’s a tale of two distinctly different summers. Such, I suspect, is often the nature of girls’ county cricket, with the two-year cycle meaning teams are often at different stages in their evolution. Half the team changes every season, and with it, for good or bad, the whole character, let alone ability level, of a team can fluctuate wildly.

To say that for the Under 13 girls of Worcestershire 2015 was not especially kind would be something of an understatement. Defeat followed flattening defeat, with the first three games disappearing out of sight to the tune of eight wickets, eight wickets and seven wickets respectively. As is probably inevitable where youngsters are concerned, spirits sagged, enthusiasm waned and confidence drained away.

Perhaps a chance to bowl first might have brought about a change in fortune? It didn’t. At Hagley, Devon racked up the small matter of 243 for 3, in reply to which we accumulated 20 – with nine runs from six scoring shots off the bat. In the following match, Herefordshire rolled us over for 35. They then beat us again a week later. Six defeats from six.

None of this is to denigrate the efforts of the girls. It’s just that, particularly with youngsters, once confidence and belief has gone there is little that can be done. Some of those games were lost before the coin went up. They wanted to win. They just never believed they could.

When Dorset came calling in August, posting 94, a seventh defeat loomed large. 95 to win may not seem like much, but it was more than we had scored in any innings to that point. But then a funny thing happened – our girls batted sensibly, maturely, calmly, and picked off the runs. There was no block, prod, panic, swipe, clatter, as had been the case all too often previously; just a well-paced knocking off of the runs with eight overs to spare. It was so completely out of the blue that I’m not sure I believe it even now. This wasn’t so much pennies dropping as hitting the jackpot in Vegas.

And there, just as a ray of light appeared at the end of a very long tunnel, the season ended, any thought of “momentum” dashed. But still, whatever happened next, we’d always have Droitwich…

Part two of our tale actually begins shortly before part one ends, if that makes any sense. With morale in tatters, and the squad often unable to muster 11 players, a number of promising under 11s had been drafted in towards the end of the season. Whether by accident or design it proved to be a boon, lifting spirits a little, and probably, with hindsight, playing no small part in that solitary victory. It was a little glimpse of what was to come.

The instant winter training began – and I mean the instant – the difference hit you between the eyes. Training was fun, the new girls clicked with those remaining from the previous season immediately. Again this is not a criticism of those who had moved on – more a reflection of the fact that some groups just work, whilst others don’t. It’s not a cricketing thing, or even a sporting thing, it’s life. But in a sports team it can make a huge difference.

But of course, they still had to go and play cricket – the acid test. All the team spirit and fun in the world can only get you so far if you keep being bowled out for 20s and 30s.

The first game at home to Dorset was akin to an epiphany. Our first individual half century, our first fifty partnership, and a score of 184 (after being 82-6 at one stage). Almost double anything achieved the previous season. Backed up by a solid bowling display, it added up to a 124-run win. A good start.

And yet… The next game, against Cornwall, saw a wobble. From 39-2 we stuttered to 68 all out and lost by 8 wickets. The hope – or fear – was that one of these results was a blip. The trouble was, we didn’t know which one.

Wiltshire away didn’t really provide an answer either way, but it did produce the best match of the season – a low scoring thriller. The home side were dismissed for 74 (including our first five-fer), but it looked as though we’d cooked our goose at 55-8. Our half-centurion from the Dorset game wasn’t having that, though, inching her way to 16 not out as nos. 10 and 11 held firm at the other end. A win, by one wicket maybe, but a win nonetheless, and one we would not have pulled off the previous season.

A brief pause here – this thing about pennies dropping. Every game has seen one player or another “put her hand up”. Of the squad of fifteen, the majority have, at some stage, played an important part in setting up, turning round, or finishing off a match. It may only be small things, but they add up over time. It’s as though you can see the cogs whirring, the building blocks going up one-by-one to turn these girls into decent cricketers – and by that I don’t just mean batters and bowlers, but thinking cricketers. Nobody would have had it in them to score 16 not out and haul us through that match last season. In the context of that game, that situation, it was one of the finest innings I have ever seen.

The “World Tour of Dorset and Cornwall” was always going to be a highlight. Dorset were beaten again, but Cornwall held on by 12 runs at Helston to achieve a double, even though we had our third “Michelle” in three games, all from different bowlers. If I wanted to make excuses, maybe the intensity and excesses of the tour lifestyle proved too much for our girls. On the other hand, it was tremendous fun, and sometimes that’s worth more than any win or loss.

Since then there have been resounding wins against Herefordshire and Wiltshire. Against Herefordshire we upped our collective highest score to 208-6, and our individual best to 75, as well as raising our first 100 partnership. It also saw one of our openers undefeated for the second game running – 70 overs all told. Again, all of these things unthinkable a year ago – pennies dropping all the time.

Another example – my own daughter. I dislike reliance on stats but after taking 2 for 103 off 18 overs last season, it’s fair to say she’s slightly happier with 16 for 54 off 31 overs (including two Under 15 games) this season. It’s no accident – she’s listened, learned and gained confidence.

In the Wiltshire game our sixth different player of the season passed 30 in an innings. Again, we recovered from 80-5 to score 167 and win by over 100 runs. With only Herefordshire to come we have five wins out of seven. Oh, and the bulk of the squad earned five wins out of five during their three days at the Malvern Festival.

I said at the start that this was no “special” tale, and it isn’t. I have no experience of Under 13 girls’ cricket in other parts of the country, but I suspect our Division isn’t perhaps the strongest – and I don’t mean that disparagingly. It’s entirely possible that one or two counties are in the position we were last season, and that they will come good next year. Maybe we are a strong (ish) fish in a weak (ish) pond. If you like, that is the moral of the story – progress will come in all shapes and sizes, and at various different rates, but come it will.

How do you persuade 600 people to pay up to £8 to come and watch a domestic women’s cricket match, at an out-of-the-way ground, in a small, non-cricketing Midlands town? Rob Knott – Sports PR Officer for Loughborough Lightning – spoke to CRICKETher about making the Super League a super success, even without the backing of a traditional First Class setup.

Loughborough is of course the place where the Super League was first announced, just over a year ago, and Knott tells us that the university were quick to see the opportunity:

“We as a university took a serious look at it. The fact that we know we are renowned for sport and that we have some of the best facilities in the country for cricket, made a good reason to bid for it. As part of the bid, myself and the marketing team looked closely at ‘How could we attract an audience to come and watch cricket here?’ and we looked at some of the things we’ve done in the past with the other franchises that we’ve worked on.”

The most successful of those franchises is the Loughborough Lightning Superleague netball team:

“Probably the biggest thing for us is trying to create a bit of a buzz through social media, and with Loughborough Lightning netball we’ve managed to do that quite successfully and grow our database and interest in the sport. The netball team has been running for 11 years and we’ve slowly built that up, year on year. We are now selling over 1,000 tickets for every match; and we were successful in remaining as a Netball Super League franchise for the 2017 season going into the next cycle.”

But women’s sport at Loughborough has always been more than netball, and the cricket team builds on that:

“We host two international athletics events on campus every year, where we’ve had the likes of Jessica Ennis-Hill competing, and also we are one of 7 franchises in the National Badminton League, so we were always quite confident because although women’s cricket would be a new opportunity for us, we’d had some good success in previous ventures”

There is an old adage in product marketing: If you can’t fix it; feature it! And that seems to be what Loughborough are trying to do with the cricket:

“We are not a Test match venue – we don’t have the infrastructure that some of the other teams have – so we are trying to create a similar experience that you’d have at an out-ground for county cricket. So we’ve got gazebos in purple and pink, and we’ve got [pink!] deck chairs – we are working hard to create a carnival atmosphere.”

Interestingly, Loughborough have decided on a ticket price-point a little higher than the other teams. The Vipers, for example, charged adults just £3 at the Ageas Bowl last week, but at Loughborough it is £8 for adults and £5 for kids:

“We didn’t want to devalue women’s sport – we think this is a fantastic product and a fantastic opportunity for women’s sport to be showcased, so we wanted to price it at a certain level that didn’t undervalue it. It is more expensive than the other counties, but for me it is still good value for money.”

Loughborough have also gone down a non-traditional route by not producing a scorecard, but instead offering a beautiful souvenir poster, with space on the reverse for autographs:

“This is a great opportunity for children and young people to get really close up to some of the biggest names in the world and get their autographs – they are very accessible, so that is encouraged – and we want to make sure that some of the fantastic players we have on the team become their heroines in the future, by putting the posters up on their wall.”

Lightning A3 Souvenir Poster

Loughborough have clearly tried very hard to understand how kids tick in the 21st century, and Knott even has his own case study – a 10-year-old “sports-mad” son:

“He loves all sports. For him watching women’s sports fixtures is no different to watching men’s football, and he has posters of Loughborough Lightning women’s netball team and cricket team alongside his football heroes from Leicester City.”

Getting (and keeping) a good crowd in for the cricket, in a town with no cricketing heritage, was therefore partly about doing something a little bit different, but it was also partly about doing the “hard yards” and literally getting out and pounding the streets:

“We did some very old school, traditional marketing – we produced flyers and just went out into the town – going around bars and restaurants and community centres, just trying to get the message out to the local community.”

And while there is no official First Class county behind Loughborough Lightning, the local county clubs nevertheless offered important support:

“Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire have all pushed out 10% discount offers to their members; and we’ve run articles through their channels and promoted through their social media.”

For all the hard work the marketing team at Loughborough had put in though, the real test would be “bums on deck-chairs”? They had built it; but would they come? That was the question! On Wednesday, a full house of 600 people turned up to give us the answer!

A Full House at Loughborough

Girls in the Crowd Celebrate a Six

Photos © https://www.facebook.com/LightningKSL/

Throughout the Kia Super League, we’ll be featuring short interviews with players, coaches & other interesting people we find around and about at the grounds. Yesterday’s top-scorer and Loughborough Lightning all-rounder Sophie Devine, who made 52 against Diamonds and became the first six-hitter in the competition, is the first up to answer our quick-fire questions…

If not Loughborough, who would you like to win?

I don’t even know! I’d probably say the Vipers because they’re pretty much half of New Zealand anyway…

Justin Bieber or One Direction?

Neither! No comment! Are we going to talk about serious music? Someone that can actually sing?!

Who would you like to see playing in KSL that isn’t?

We were talking about Karen Rolton [former Aussie superstar batsman who’s just been elected to the ICC Hall of Fame] the other day…she could whack a ball on these boundaries!

Which sportswoman/women do you admire outside cricket?

New Zealand are pretty lucky, we’ve got so many strong sporting females. It’s incredible. Valerie Adams [Olympic shot putter], Sarah Walker [BMX racer], Lisa Carrington [flatwater canoer]. They’re absolute machines, and back home they’re more well-known than some of the blokes that are going to the Olympics. They’re awesome to watch from afar and see what they’re doing conquering the world. You’ve got to remember that New Zealand’s a little wee small country, so to see them smashing everyone else, especially England, is always nice.

Favourite cricket ground?

Definitely in England it’s got to be Lords. Probably back home the Basin Reserve’s right up there.

Favourite thing on the menu in Nandos?

I haven’t been to Nandos in 10 years! I’m an athlete, I don’t eat at Nandos, only salads!

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I’ll probably try and still be playing. People will be trying to give me the elbow to get lost, but hopefully I’ll be involved in cricket in some shape or form, whether it’s coaching or managing. I just love this game too much to do anything outside it!

Where do you see women’s cricket in 10 years?

Seeing some of the New Zealand girls playing overseas and making a career of it is really exciting. We speak a lot about wanting to be a household name within New Zealand, and it’s probably the same anywhere. if you know that you’re doing well and you’re succeeding then people are going to want to watch, and people are going to want to follow you, so that’s something that I know we’re really big on – making sure that we become one of those household names in sport.