Here come the girls!

Everyone for cricket? The girls are taking on the boys at independent schools’ first XIs across the country, and beating them at their ‘own’ game…

Back in the days when Old Cliftonian Sir Henry Newbolt celebrated the empirebuilding qualities of cricket in his most famous poem, Vitaï Lampada, he would have been referring to an all-male team. ow there is a chance that the last ‘man’ in might just be a girl.

Well before the 2009 World Cupwinning heroics of the England women’s cricket team, girls were making their presence felt on the pitch. This wasn’t just in pukka, old-style ‘ladies’ sides, either, which several girls public schools, including Roedean, still run, but as members of school cricket sides, playing alongside boys.

Many believe that while boys’ cricket is at a problematic stage, a victim of the short summer term – as little as eight eeks
long – and the full public exam schedule dominating the last three years of senior school, the girls’ fledgling sport is on a high. The new wave of co-ed schools has helped to usher in wider female participation, even though this is mainly in all-girls’ sides, playing against comparable local teams. Useful, too, has been the publicity generated by the few girls who have opted to take on schoolboy counterparts.

In 1993, Clare Connor, a talented Brighton College batswoman, hit the headlines as the first girl to play regularly in a public school first XI. She went on to captain the England women’s side and is now head of women’s cricket at the England and Wales Cricket Board. Meanwhile, Brighton’s far-sighted policy of selecting the best, regardless of sex, is paying dividends for the current national side: three of the World Cup squad, Laura Marsh, Holly Colvin and Sarah Taylor, came to the school on Clare Connor cricket scholarships, with Colvin and Taylor playing for the college’s
First XI alongside county players...