Girls of Summer by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

Poles Apart

‘I remember our coach telling us he wanted us to score 200 in an ODI. A few of us were like, “My God, how are we going to do that?”’ – Lydia Greenway

NAT Sciver had always wanted to represent her country. In a sense, she had been doing it all her life. The daughter of a Foreign Office diplomat, she had been born in Tokyo, lived in various European countries and thrown herself into sport wherever she had been. It was how, at an age when many of her England teammates were battling the boys on the cricket field, she’d found herself as a twelve-year-old surrounded by those twice her age in a Polish women’s football league.

‘My mum [Julia] was working in the British embassies in different countries so it was not a cricketing background, although my dad did play so we always had a bat out in the garden,’ she explained. ‘I started out playing tennis, alongside football, when we were living in Holland. In Poland, I wanted to join a women’s football team because the boys were growing a bit more and getting stronger and I was still a tiny little thing. It was a bit scary. They were all older than me, in their twenties, and not many spoke English. One or two could get by having an English conversation and I could almost get by having a very basic Polish conversation about football. My teammates were really welcoming, though, and tried really hard to communicate. If I got any stick from the other team, well, I didn’t really know because they did it in Polish.’

Nat’s background saw her playing several other sports, including tennis and hockey, before finally sticking with cricket after returning to England as a fourteen-year-old. Originally enjoying the fact that the sport offered the opportunity to hit as far and hard as possible – in contrast to the geometric restrictions of tennis – she is a cricketing product of her diverse sporting background. Reaching twenty-three years old during the course of the Ashes series, she was no longer that ‘tiny little thing’, tall and powerful looking at the crease, loosely tied long brown hair bursting from the back of her helmet. The boundary looks a few yards closer when she is in full flow and, aided by practising some baseball-style striking techniques, she is generally acknowledged as one of the biggest hitters in the women’s game. ‘When I was young you were taught that it was forward defensive and a strong top hand, which was not really my game. Coming more from racquet sports my bottom hand does come through a little bit more than it should. It’s definitely made me a different player – but I don’t know yet whether it’s made me a better player!’

While twelve-year-old Nat was taking tentative steps in a different sport in a very different country, Lydia Greenway, her match-winning partner in the opening Ashes contest, was already twelve months into an international career that had reached its thirteenth year by the 2015 season.

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