To celebrate decades of dedication, bloody-mindedness and no little courage, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2014 picked its five greatest female cricketers.
By Tanya Aldred
For 16 years, off a run that was trimmed from 17 steps to 13, Cathryn Fitzpatrick scared people. Her blond mop bothering the air, she bowled spitting outswingers. No woman has taken more international wickets; no woman bowled faster. From just 5ft 6in of solid muscle came 5oz bullets at 75mph. The highest one-day international wicket-taker in the world, with 180, she also managed 60 in just 13 Tests. She helped Australia to two World Cups, and spearheaded one of the greatest female teams of all time.
CATHRYN LORRAINE FITZPATRICK was born in Dandenong, Melbourne on March 4, 1968. The youngest of three, she grew up kicking around with her brother Gary’s friends, messing about with tape on a tennis ball, learning how to control a seam. She was 11 when she played her first competitive game – there were no girls’ teams, so it was in an open-age tournament. On Saturday mornings, she would pull on her culottes, go to the local milk bar and wait for a lift to the nearest match. She was a whirlwind, “a fast bowler of no use to anyone”, she says, but utterly smitten. Her brother grew less keen on facing her in the front yard, but she and her grandfather, Cliff Hill, would constantly talk cricket. By the time she was 16, she realised people were shying away from her in the nets.
She played junior cricket for Victoria, but it was not until she was almost 23 that she made her debut for Australia. It was uneventful, and she was dropped for a couple of years. The man who located her inner sonar was women’s coach John Harmer. He wanted the fastest bowlers, and so he wanted Fitzpatrick. He made her action safer and more repeatable. Out went the tangle of arms and legs, in came a smoothness, a more consistent release point, and greater tactical awareness. She became a supreme technician, delivering metronomic crimson crotchets, at a beat, on command. She loved it when the ball was thrown to her in pressure situations. It often was.
Her strategic nous grew, and she built up her fitness, muscle by muscle, with a succession of physical jobs. She ran behind the garbage truck for six years, wrestling with bins, and later delivered letters for Australia Post, first on a bicycle, then on a scooter. These early-morning jobs gave her extra training time in the afternoon. The supreme machine needed constant oiling.
As the clock ticked, her pace dropped a little, but not her guile. And when she at last retired, at 39, after a 16-year international career, she was still one of the fittest in the team. She had spent two years as the scholarship coach at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence, ruffling a few feathers, and in June 2007 was appointed coach of the Victorian women’s team. She led them to three Twenty20 titles and, when she took over as head coach of the national side in 2012, she helped guide them to 50- and 20-over World Cup triumphs.
She enjoys the different challenges: “Girls want to know why, more than boys.” Her self-effacing manner and quietness belie an inner strength – which the team feed off. She ensures they know about their heritage and the battles won. She still bowls sometimes in the nets, off-breaks that don’t do anything, and gives plenty of needle.
But the body isn’t quite as reliable as it was – sore shoulders where she once hefted bins and parcels, a couple of knee operations, a disc bulge in her back. “I’m 45, and in the morning I bend down to pick up the cat and I can’t stand.”
There never was, until late in her career, any recompense. She had to pay to tour, a double whammy since this meant unpaid leave. She felt less like a pioneer and “more like a whinger – we were always advocating change, striving to be the best we could. But it meant we changed the game.”
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