Clare Connor: How to thrive as a woman in a male environment
SA: Hello and welcome to The Gamechangers podcast where you will hear from trailblazing fearless women in Sport. I’m Sue Anstiss, a Founding Trustee of the Women’s Sport Trust Charity and the Founder and CEO of Promote PR, one of Britain’s leading sports PR agencies. In this episode you’ll hear from Clare Connor CBE, former England Cricket Captain and now much respected Managing Director for women’s cricket at the ECB. On Clare’s watch, the women’s team were awarded professional contracts. Increased sponsorships led to a new competitive structure and the England women won the World Cup, in front of packed stands at Lords. And it was at Lords, the home of cricket, that I sat down to talk with Clare. I began by asking her if she could remember the first time she saw women playing cricket.
CC: Oh not for ages, not until well into my teens actually. So all my, everything that was visible to me and everything that I watched on television and knew about was men and boys playing cricket. My own experiences very much started as a little girl playing in a team of boys at the age of seven or eight and that was my experience. That was my constant experience until into my mid-teens. So I grew up, I’ve got a younger brother but he’s 10 years younger than me, so I was essentially an only child for 10 years and all my early playing experiences and experiences of the game all around me, were of it being a game for men and boys. And I think that I discovered women’s cricket when I was in the Summer of 1993, so I was 16 nearly 17. That was when I think I first became aware that there was an England’s women’s team that played at grounds such as this at Lords Cricket Ground when they won the World Cup final here at Lords against New Zealand. A couple of years before then I had trialled for Sussex Girls and the Sussex Women’s team so I suppose that’s when I first started playing in girls and women’s teams but I had no idea, I had no clue of the structures or the pathways or what was possible until really I saw that England women’s win in 1993 in the World Cup.
SA: And what was it that drew you to cricket? Did you play other sports when you were at school?
CC: I did, yeah I played lots of ball sports so I played a lot of hockey and squash. I didn’t like netball very much, I didn’t like the standing still bits! So I played lots of cricket, hockey and squash. And what drew me to it? I’ve been asked that so many times and I don’t know if it was nature or nurture but I just do remember being very, very little and listening to my family tell me stories almost as soon as I was a toddler and I could run around, I was dragging a cricket bat that was far too big for me to do anything with but I was just really attached to it.
And I can remember from a really young age sitting on the doorstep and crying, if I wasn’t allowed to go to cricket with my dad at the weekend and not wanting o come back inside. And so I think it was somehow in me very, very young. And I had a close relationship with both my parents but particularly became very close with my dad through cricket and I suppose, like lots of lucky young children, or children who are lucky, I grew up really at our local cricket club which was sort of this idyllic location in the South Downs called Preston Nomads Cricket Club and I really did grow up there and had really lovely experiences there as a little girl.
Yeah I just loved the sport and it was something that I knew I always wanted to do. And I was quite good at squash and hockey but cricket was definitely my thing and it was even though I was a bit of a freak I suppose, being the only girl in boys teams for so long, it was where I felt comfortable and normal and oddly there’s a real contradiction there but it was where I felt at home and it was where I felt I could really express myself and thrive.
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SA: And you played for the boys team, the men’s team at Brighton College, so how were you received by them as players and also by parents and so on. Sometimes we hear the negative side of girls playing football and so on within boys’ teams? Did you ever experience that at all?
CC: No not really, I think my mum, I think it was difficult sometimes for my mum watching and being the mum of the only girl in the match and hearing some comments that I was odd. Who’s brought this girl up and gosh what were her parents like? My poor mum had to listen to that. And also when I got wickets, so when I had got the wickets off their sons, I think she heard some not very nice comments but I don’t think it bothered her too much. In terms of how the other players accepted me, I think when you grow up in one place, and you grow up in a cricket club and in a team in a school, on that circuit of club cricket and schools cricket, you essentially come up against the same people year after year and you’re playing essentially with the same group of team mates from the age of 7-17, or 8-17.
So, I think at first it was abnormal and unusual and it was a bit, I was the sort of novelty factor within our team but I think soon people became used to it and like anything, once you prove yourself and that you’re there on merit and that you’re not a PR stunt or whatever, then you are accepted. I think it was difficult when the boys, at Brighton College, I suppose when I got to sort of 15 or 16 – probably 14 or 15 – and the boys became sometimes a lot stronger and a lot more physical. That’s where I suppose I felt really tested. But I was accepted, considering it was so unusual.
I was completed accepted and when I look back on those times I don’t, even though when I look at it rationally, it was odd. I didn’t feel at all odd there no, and I suppose I’m so lucky because that won’t be a common experience, I’m sure, or a shared experience with other girls or boys in similar kind of gender imbalanced environments. But I think that probably the love and support of my family and this real unbelievable support of the cricket coaches that I had around me, just goes to show that is such a true-ism – that family and coaches and teachers are so important in young people’s lives for making them feel that they can spread their wings and really thrive at something - and yeah, absolutely do whatever they want to do.
SA: And you were just a teenager so your first One Day International in 1995, can you remember how that felt walking out representing your country?
CC: Yeah, it was all quite sudden really. Like I say, I went from essentially only discovering girls’ county cricket and girls’ club cricket to within probably three or four years making my England debut. And so with all the other stuff that was going on in my life as a teenager and doing GCSEs and A levels and playing loads of sport at school, and starting university – so I started university in 1995 and I had a gap year in ’94 and travelled to Zimbabwe and done some teaching there - and it was such an exciting time and I was vey proud. I missed, when I got picked, I was due to go on a family holiday to Spain which I had to miss because of being picked for England.
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I think the big moment was starting university in the whatever it would have been, the September ’95, going up to Manchester to read English. So I had just turned 19 and I got picked to go to India in the November/December, so it meant missing half of my first term of university and it was a long tour. It was a very unusual tour because it was 3 Test Matches and 5 One Day Internationals, which we know hasn’t been heard of since I don’t think, in terms of duration. And it was our first major series or competition since England had won that World Cup in ’93 that I wasn’t part of. It was the first time that an England women, as World Champions, went on a big tour.
So to be picked for that and for it to be in India was just overwhelming. I did my first six or seven weeks at university, made some friends, said goodbye to those friends – luckily some of them stayed my friends – and went off on that trip and it was at a time when women’s cricket in India, sometimes we had 20,000 people watching us, sometimes we had 20 people watching us. And we travelled all over India. It was such an amazing life experience as well as a cricket experience. I was trying to do a bit of studying whilst I was there.
SA: How did you balance that education with playing then?
CC: So I missed that first half of term and it was like that actually for the rest of uni and it was just a case, I suppose like anyone I suppose who has to balance, you have to be disciplined and you have to focus on what’s ahead of you, whether that was cricket at a certain time or studying. I had good support from Manchester University and I managed to make it work.
SA: The setup and support for the women’s game has massively evolved over those 25 years. So what do you feel are the key differences as a young English cricketer in the 90s versus the girls that are coming to play maybe for the first time now?
CC: Oh gosh, that’s a kind of book in itself I think, yeah! There is very little that’s the same. It’s a bat and a ball and it’s 22 yards and it’s essentially the same laws and the same contest between bat and ball but the cricket environment I grew up in, the women’s and girls’ cricket environment that I grew up in in the mid to late 90s, compared with now. I mean firstly I think the most important, or the biggest difference is the visibility of women in cricket and women’s cricket and women’s sport more generically. I think the profile, we’ve all seen what’s happened in the last decade, certainly since I think London 2012 with the profile and visibility of female athletes in individual sports and team sports really increasing, and everything that comes with that.
So support, coaching support, science and medicine support, financial support, commercial support, the support of your national governing body and a real drive that so many people are making such a massive contribution to for women and girls to feel as welcome in sport. My experiences were very non-typical. I say that, I mean lots of girls had to find their way into cricket through playing with boys and men, obviously back then. But I think where I was lucky was at every stage, I had unbelievable support and acceptance around me and I don’t think that will have been the common story over the last 20 to 30 years. But thankfully now, girls and women can see a place for them in sport and that’s on and off the pitch. We’ve got so much more still to do in terms of that kind of gender shift. Coaching and volunteering and officiating and the running of sport but certainly the last 10 years have been gamechanging haven’t they?
SA: They have indeed and do you think the players at the time felt they wanted to be or they should have been better supported?
CC: I’m asked all the time; Clare are you jealous of what the players have now? And I talk to other players from my generation and Charlotte Edwards would be one and she has transcended both the fully amateur and the fully professional eras, but I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean yes, I would have been curious to see what it would have been like to be a completely professional cricketer and for that to be my sole focus but I had 10 amazing years playing cricket for England. Combining it with teaching, I learned such a lot about myself in that time and how to manage myself and my goals and I travelled the world.
I had three or four tours to India which was Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. I didn’t ever think, oh someone should be doing more for me, pay me or put me in that part of the plane to fly to Australia, or why am I staying … ? Crikey, some of the accommodation we stayed in on that first tour of India was appalling. Some of us got so sick. It was mosquito ridden, there wasn’t running water sometimes, it was in no way fit by standards now to send an international team to but it’s part of the stories that you can tell, isn’t it? And those experiences shape you and provide you with certainly some resilience and bring you close to your teammates and make you feel, teach you that life doesn’t always go your way.
So no, I never once thought the game or anyone should be doing more for me but I do look at what there is available now to girls choosing sports. I think wow, there’s never been a better time to be starting out as a young athlete.
SA: And you were a captain at just 24. So what kind of leader were you?
CC: I think I was very different to how I would be now. There is no doubt about that! There is no doubt about that. I was thrust into the role, I’m not saying I didn’t want it, I really did want it but I’d a very, very turbulent time, midway through a tour. We’d been hammered in Australia 5-0; we were quite a fragmented group and we were to go on to New Zealand and play for another 3 weeks and I was made captain midway through. And I took the captaincy on from someone who was a legend of the women’s game, Karen Smithies who’d been captain for nearly 10 years, so there had been real consistency. She’d led England to that World Cup win in ’93.
So I had big shoes to fill and a big job to do because we weren’t in a great place. We weren’t playing well and we didn’t have any kind of harmony on or off the pitch really as a group so it was a baptism of fire for sure, but one which I certainly wanted to take on. I’d always been captain of teams; I’d captained my boys under-10s prep school team to an unbeaten season. I can remember the final game, beating St Christopher’s to secure an unbeaten season. Stays with you and I’d always captained Sussex. I captained Sussex for about a decade I think and so captaincy sat comfortably with me. But I was very inexperienced, I wasn’t inexperienced in captaincy but I was a young leader. I had some very strong personalities in that squad that I was to captain and as I say, it wasn’t a smooth period but I learned a huge amount.
What sort of captain was I? Certainly very heart on my sleeve. I was very open, perhaps too open at times. I got better at collaborating, I think probably because of the situation I found myself in and because I was young and confident, I was perhaps a bit too – not self-assured – maybe I thought I had all the answers. Or that I needed to have because I’d been given that responsibility so I need to have all the answers. And of course you don’t, that’s what you learn about leadership isn’t it? One thing I didn’t do enough of that I’d learned, if it was one lesson it would be to tolerate and respect the difference in people and not expect everyone to be like you. And as a young, confident leader, I think I thought that everyone should be like me, as in, I believe we should review the game straight after the match, even though everyone’s really emotional and if I believe that, then everyone should believe that. And if you don’t believe that then obviously you don’t care as much. I can remember thinking and feeling things like that and actually that’s nonsense. As you grow, you learn about the difference in personality types and responses.
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SA: Did you get any coaching or support on being a captain?
CC: Not really. Some informal bits and pieces, no sort of mentoring or any sort of structured support. I’ve learned that leadership is, yes you have to be able to take a decision in the moment and obviously in sport more so than in, say the corporate world or the world I’m in now, in terms of administration. The buck does stop with you and you have to make a call on the pitch and you have to back yourself and be confident. I could have collaborated a lot more and I could have listened a lot better.
SA: It’s all leadership principles isn’t it?
CC: Yeah, absolutely and you don’t know everything, can’t be expected to. Responsibility, having a position of responsibility doesn’t equal ‘you must know all the answers yourself’, you have to find ways of seeking them out and working out who you can confide in and understanding that everyone is different and that’s part of the beauty of it all and that’s what makes great teams. And that conformity doesn’t, it’s diversity isn’t it? It’s what we know, what we talk about all the time, that a diverse team is full of diverse voices and difference is a really healthy thing.
SA: So after a decade of playing for England and 6 years as captain and winning The Ashes, and so on, you chose to retire 2005. Was that a very difficult decision for you to make, at the time?
CC: It was a very, very difficult decision and I can remember sitting and crying a lot with my mum and dad as I wrestled with it. I’m getting emotional now. Oh no, that was it, I knew it was the right time. I knew that Charlotte Edwards was chomping at the bit, having been my Vice-Captain for 5 years or so. I knew that my body and my physical and my emotional wellbeing was a little precarious. I’d invested a huge amount of myself into being Captain of England. I had nothing really left to give. And I needed an operation on my ankle. That was less relevant probably and that would take me out for a little while. And I was so privileged that I was able to make that decision myself. No one made it for me because I think that’s one of the saddest things when you don’t have the chance to own your decision to depart from something that’s been as important to you as that.
And I was going out at a real high. We’d got The Ashes back from Australia after 42 years and I felt, I’d thought about it so hard, and I thought the team are so ready for a new voice but it was really difficult because all the logic – I had all of that logic – but I knew that letting it go would be very difficult because of the emotional investment. On the one-hand it was an easy, obvious, sensible, rational and the right time for all the logical and rational reasons but emotionally I had to get there and had to sweat it out and cry it out a bit with friends and family. But it was 100%, and I really am so lucky that I don’t have any regret about that decision. The timing was right, for me and the team and the team is the most important thing and Charlotte Edwards obviously flew as England Captain.
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SA: Do you think it would have been a harder decision had you been contracted players there and it had been more of a career might you have done another tour?
CC: Yeah, maybe. Maybe and I do feel that is all part of this transition. It’s been a few years now, but I’m seeing that with our players. Finance and earning a living complicates matters. And is another key ingredient in your decision making. Again, I didn’t have that complication or luxury or however you want to put it. I was also very lucky in I had a very good job to go to and I had always managed to combine the teaching with playing cricket for England. And I had dabbled in some media as well and done a bit of TV and a little bit of writing, so I had some options, and so I didn’t have the financial pressure of it being my job and a contract that I thought, oh I’ll just try and eek out a bit longer.
And I am very sensitive to that with our players now because some of them are on one-year central contracts. Some of them are on two-year central contracts. And I am sensitive when those renewal times come up and it’s a real concern. It’s now their job and their livelihood and they’ve got mortgages that depend upon it. So it is a very different, again a very different time.
SA: And did you ever envisage a role in cricket working in cricket when you left playing?
CC: No, I genuinely didn’t. I had done my advanced, what would now be Level 3 Coaching award, I did that probably in my mid to late 20s. So I had that and I enjoyed coaching but my other, the other love of my life, other than cricket, was teaching and teaching English and so I just had quite a clear view of things that when I stopped playing cricket for England then my future would be in teaching. And that’s how I retired and I set about retirement from international cricket, I was back in teaching, having had a sabbatical in my last two years.
I did have a small taste of being a full-time cricketer because I had a sabbatical from teaching for my last two years playing for England. But anyway I didn’t see myself going into cricket administration or sports administration. I really thought my future would stay in teaching. So I’d been back in teaching for about a year-and-a-half or 2 years and Hugh Morris who was the then Managing Director of England Cricket - I’d had a close working relationship with him as England Captain - and he contacted me about a role. It wasn’t anything like what my current role is now but essentially it’s evolved from there.
SA: Out of the blue?
CC: Completely out of the blue. I was visiting friends in Lincolnshire, I can remember it really clearly and he told me about Jill Mcconway who was the National Manager, Head of Women’s Cricket - I don’t remember her exact title - she was retiring and going to live back in New Zealand and they had decided to create a new role, slightly different role, with her retirement and he wanted to talk to me about it. And so we talked about it and we met and it was clear that it was going to have real focus on development and much more on the recreational game and I said to Hugh, that’s not where my skills will be. I don’t think I’m cut out for that and it doesn’t feel quite right.
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Anyway, to fast forward a few weeks, they decided to create two new roles. So one was essentially a National Participation Lead and one was what I took, which was the Head of the England Women’s Game and the Talent System, and building that from scratch and building the infrastructure around England and coaching and science and medicine and all of that provision and working with our National Cricket Centre up at Loughborough. And I can remember coming to my job. I came with my mum and I walked down from St Johns Wood tube station and my interview was at 2.30, or whatever it was, and we stopped at Café Rouge on the corner, which has gone now, replaced by The Ivy Café and we had a croque monsieur and I sat with my mum who had decided just to come with me for the trip and I said, I can’t do it mum. What am I doing? I wouldn’t even know where to start with a job like this.
And she said, you can stop that nonsense as soon as you like. You go for it and you put your best foot forward and see how you feel at the end of it. And if they offer it to you and you don’t want it, you don’t have to take it. You’ve got a lovely job in teaching. But yeah, Hugh Morris did a good job and again gosh I wouldn’t change a thing because it’s been an amazing 10 years here.
SA: And looking across those 10 years, what are the achievements that you are most proud of do you feel?
CC: I think a couple. So one would be right up there would be getting the central contracts approved for 20 or so women for this to be their sole focus and I think that enables you to make such a step change in performance and in working with that group of players. And alongside that moment was the first standalone commercial deal for women’s cricket with Kia. And they’ve been such lovely partners, so much more than a sponsor. They’ve been with us every step of the way since central contracts about 5 years ago and then with the Kia Super League. So they’ve been brilliant to work with and it has felt like a real partnership.
From an ECB and an ICC perspective, so with my ICC Women’s Chair hat on, would be getting the ICC Women’s Championship approved which has enabled the top 8 teams in the world to all have an equal share of international cricket rather than it being dominated by England, Australia, India or whatever and having a really meritocratic equal route through to World Cup qualification. So we started that in 2013/14, ahead of the 2017 Women’s World Cup here and which we’re now 60 or 70% of the way through in its second edition ahead of the 2021 World Cup in New Zealand. And I think that was a key moment for the women’s game globally, in terms of everyone being able to understand and the less well funded women’s nations being able to get extra funding to be able to develop.
And with that, the reason that’s been so important is that with that commitment to scheduling and commitment that all of the boards have had to make, those top 8 boards have had to make, has come obviously because of that commitment, has come more investment and more contracts for more women around the world. And I think we needed that to be able to say, right, this is the route to the World Cup and if we’re to make that as competitive as possible then we need as many players around the world to be as full-time as possible. And then I think the other big huge development was the Kia Super League. I can remember getting approval at the board.
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I can remember Rachel hey-ho Flint, obviously who’s not with us now and her support and challenge in board meetings, it took two or three board meetings to get the Kia Super League approved. And I think I’m proud of that because it’s changed the game. It came up with new ways of working and counties working together. For example, the Western Storm with Somerset and Gloucestershire working together. Or Hampshire and Sussex with the Southern Vipers and it created new collaborative ways of working for a greater good. And obviously as we know in sport, sometimes the politics of local interests can become so paralysing for other things that sometimes innovation gets stifled or relationships are difficult because of local interests.
And I think everyone approached the Kia Super League with a really unselfish, non-parochial mindset and something really good came out of that. I think that’s been a really interesting test case for cricket in how you don’t have to stick to county boundaries, you can do things differently and take the game on. And that’s linked, isn’t it, to the fact that essentially cricket has been a game, a men’s game, in the main? Set up for men with all the structures around it have been about men’s cricket and professional men’s cricket and I suppose my whole time here has been about finding ways to change that.
SA: How have you dealt with those challenges of being in such a male dominated sport?
CC: A really good question. I think I had an advantage because, and it shouldn’t be this way, but this is how sport works and maybe other industries. I had an advantage because I’d played at the highest level.
SA: I was going to ask if you hadn’t played and had come in as a woman … a cricket fan …
CC: Really hard to know. I think I can only know what I know and I think being a successful England Captain, you steal a march and you’ve got 20% extra respect or credibility. I don’t know this but I’m guessing I did. It felt that way anyway and it shouldn’t be that way because just because you’ve played and captained your country or your team at a high level doesn’t make you a good cricket administrator. But it does give you I suppose interesting and valuable insights and experiences and certainly I tried to put those to good use. It’s not easy. I think you learn a lot of about yourself like any job but I think it leads to quite a lot of analysis about your character and okay, how am I going to approach …?
I might feel so angry or so emotional about something and I’m not saying that can’t happen in other environments, regardless of gender, but it’s just been fascinating to reflect on how you do handle situations and I think one thing is certainly presenting to the board, when the board used to be virtually all male and sort of presiding over a very male sport, which thankfully has changed beyond recognition now and it’s set to change even more with our strategy over the next 5 years and the level of investment coming into the women’s and girls’ game from next year, but I think it’s understanding, recognising that you’ve got to be really well prepared. You find a way, I think to manage, I think sometimes showing, like anything, sometimes showing some emotion is good and sometimes it isn’t.
I think you learn about how to let that manifest and when to try and suppress it. I think you learn when you need to be patient and when something just isn’t acceptable. So there are times when patience and the long game is what you’re playing and there are sometimes when, no, this isn’t okay, and you can’t let something go.
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So it’s working out, I suppose how - militant is the wrong word – but how strong a position to take and I suppose those are all lessons that everyone learns in whatever field or environment you’re in. But I think when you’re in a world where there is such a disparity in gender and when you are trying to really change our sport to make it more inclusive so that every woman and girl can see herself in it, that doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s working out I suppose the pace at which you can move and influence. I was probably very slow to understand the politics and every-where’s got politics, hasn’t it?
So any advice to anyone listening would be try and understand the politics and what can you, what have you got to accept? What can you work with? What do you try and influence? Where does it become a waste of energy? I’ve been lucky. I don’t think I’ve had – I’ve had enemies but I’ve certainly had working at how to get round some opposition – what are the skills you should, you need to call upon? And I was asked a really interesting question not long ago about, do you work out when to use your femininity? And that’s an interesting one because your immediate reaction to that is, well, no I’ve never thought. But we all know that whether you’re male or female you have to be charming. Got to be different people in different places to a degree.
SA: I can’t really interview you and not talk about the World Cup and that amazing win, I was fortunate enough to be here that day for all that noise, an amazing atmosphere, wasn’t there? When you went into that championship, did you feel that England could win, or were likely to?
CC: Definitely not likely to. I think you always have to have a belief that you can I suppose get to the final. We’d gone through a lot of change, we’d only had a new captain for a year, Heather Knight, after a decade of Charlotte Edwards at the helm. So we had a new captain who hadn’t gone through anything like that before. That sort of profile or pressure. Our Head Coach who had come from professional men’s cricket had only been in the women’s game just over a year. We had lost some other senior players quite recently so we were sort of in flux, if you were to define how you need to be to go into a World Cup and describe it and how consistent or settled you need to be as a unit and with your leadership in place and the right blend of – you have to have some players who carried a few scars and you have to have some who were fearless and don’t understand what the hurt can feel like from defeat.
And I think we did in the end have that. I didn’t know it at the time but in the end I think it worked out that we did have the right mix. I thought it was possibly a year too soon for us, for all those reasons but crikey we lost that first game to India and then just didn’t look back and got stronger. And physically and mentally we were strong and our medical teams did such an amazing job. We had a squad of 15 players and we only, in a really intense schedule, of high-pressure cricket with a lot of travel and a volume of cricket, we only needed to use 13 players. So our medical job did an amazing job. Our Head Coach Mark Robinson was incredible.
Heather Knight proved just every game showed something more amazing as a young leader. And obviously key players stood up at different times whether that was Tammy Beaumont, Sarah Taylor or Katherine Brunt and Anya Shrubsole. Nat Sciver – amazing, really came into her own as one of the world’s best allrounders. So to go through that and to end up in front of a full house at Lords.
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And the ICC and Lords had sold Lords out before we even knew we were in the final which to me is just, shows the power of a home event and the hopes of the nation, hoping that you’re in that final perhaps. We’d snatched victory from the jaws of defeat essentially and I think, you asked me what are my, I didn’t even mention it when you said, what are you most proud of? That, without doubt, as a moment, and I was able to watch the last 40 minutes or so.
I’d done sort of official duties and a bit of hosting and hospitality and been to the pavilion, been to the media centre and been around and thanked people, and seen people and I had the last 40 minutes up in the Tavern Stand watching with my dad and brother and my best friend from university and went through every emotion. It was incredible, it was absolutely incredible and I’d never thought I would see a day like that.
SA: I guess moving on to The Ashes this Summer and not the result that anybody wanted. Those players and the support staff team. Do you feel that there’s a positive coming out of that in terms of – you alluded to the strategy - the new strategy moving forward but where the women’s game is going now? Did we need to have that disappointment this Summer to know what we need to invest in?
CC: These are all such sort of speculative conversations aren’t they, that we always have in sport? And you always know things with hindsight, and I think it showed us a few things that are incontestable. That Australia, and whether their performance in that 2017 World Cup was their moment because they didn’t make the final and they under-performed. But certainly this Ashes series showed us that Australia have widened the gap. Now whether that’s because some of our players and our team performance has stood still or whether we’ve moved at an okay pace, but they’ve flown in the last couple of years.
Either way, something has to happen and fortunately over the last year, prior to that defeat, we have been writing a new strategy too – as we’re saying in our strategy called – Inspiring Generations, our focus is on transforming the game for women and girls. And we’ve got some big expensive and ambitious plans over the next couple of years at all levels of the game. Whether it’s clubs and facilities or whether it’s girls county age-group pathways, local pathways or our new semi-pro domestic structure and doubling the number of women who can earn a living from the game in the next two or three years. We were writing those plans and I suppose The Ashes defeat has shown that we need those plans more than ever and we need the investment and the focus that the game and the organisation is going to give to the women’s game.
So that’s the good news. The defeat was obviously a huge blow. Certain players, lots of players will be really disappointed with their performance. So it’s such a great test, that multi-format series and it’s brutal. Because if you lose those first two One-Day Internationals and there’s only three to play and then you’re straight into a Test Match with so much riding on it and we play so little Test Cricket, it is a real test for those players for their character and their skills and their resilience really. So yeah, it was a disappointing, very disappointing series. Fair play to Australia for how they out-performed us and I suppose the good thing to come out of defeat is that it re-focuses – that sounds bad ‘cos it sounds like we all needed a re-focus – but it just sharpens your focus I think. And it’s a test for us all. Tests our resolve and it tests, okay, well what do we want to do about that and how serious are we about the plans for the next phase of the women’s game?
[0:40:17]
SA: And hugely positive last week with the Commonwealth Games 2020 announcing it will be included in Birmingham. What impact do you feel that could have on the women’s game and profile, very exciting?
CC: Yeah, potentially Sue, even a bigger impact than winning a World Cup I think. Because the world cup is your pinnacle event in your sport but I think multi-sport games like the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, they sort of transcend that and we see, don’t we, different sports getting these huge new reach or new audience, new following? Then I guess the challenge is making that endure past the Games themselves. It’s the first time women’s cricket’s ever been in a multi-sport Games. Men’s cricket was in the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and not once since then. So it’s a huge opportunity. I think cricket is the true sport of the Commonwealth, when you think of the likes of India and Pakistan, South Africa and the prominent teams as well in women’s cricket align really nicely to the big Commonwealth countries.
And we’re there on our own right. We’re not an add-on to a men’s tournament and I think that gives us a really unique opportunity that women’s cricket probably hasn’t had before. Because it’ll be free to air television coverage in our time zone, in our country. We won’t go into it necessarily as World Champions because we’ve got the World Cup in New Zealand the year before it but to be able to go into a home Games and compete on a different platform really and hopefully to lots and lots, millions, thousands of new potential fans and to show girls that that’s another really enticing or attractive thing about our sport, that we’ve got that opportunity to be part of a games, aside from our normal cricket calendar. So yeah, I’m really excited about that.
SA: And I’m assuming you’re very involved in the business side?
CC: Yeah, it’s been a joint, the main credit if you like must go to ICC because they’ve been working with the Commonwealth Games Federation for the last probably two-and-a-half years and then ECB got involved I suppose in the last 3 or 4 months of 2018. So we then joined forces from a logistics and pulling the bid together and that was very much led by ECB and ICC jointly with obviously us. And then some key folk from ICC from Dubai came over and we presented to the Birmingham 2022 panel up in Birmingham and that was a joint ECB/ICC panel presenting.
So it’s been a really lovely project and one that we’ve really, really all enjoyed working on because we had a very tight timeline. It was during the Women’s T20 World Cup as well in the Caribbean at the time, so we were all involved in that. And it was one of those kind of projects that I think you make a few friends for life in those situations because you’re really reliant on everyone pulling their weight. A little team. and we were all on different time zones. We had the Dubai people and some of us were out in Antigua at the World Cup and people here in the office in London. So we got it over the line and really, really looking forward to that.
SA: Last year you ruled out applying for that role within the men’s game. In the future do you think you would wish to work across the male and female sports?
[0:44:21]
CC: I’m not sure. I think I would just have to see kind of how I felt at the time really. I have given it lots of thought and being completely, completely honest, I think my identity is very sort of tied up in this role and in many ways that’s really good and in some ways maybe not so good. I think taking on this new role that I’ve taken on since the start of this year - so my role for a period was Director of England Women’s Cricket and now my role is Managing Director, women’s cricket - so it’s a much broader role in line with the strategy and in line with our ambition to transform the game for women and girls at all levels. So I feel it’s certainly a new lease of life and a really new, much bigger challenge with – I can’t even work out the percentage increase in budget – but the board have approved £20m to this area of the strategy in the next two years, with a view to, if all goes well, that becoming £50m over the period of the strategy, so over 2020 to 2024.
So I’ve got this huge sense of responsibility, new responsibility, to make that investment pay dividends for women and girls at all levels. And I have been historically very focused on the elite end and maybe, as an organisation, we have kind of nailed our investment and our approach very much around England Women and the Kia Super League and building that infrastructure around high performance, and I think it would be fair criticism to say that we haven’t spent as much time on the grassroots of the game and the pathway and schools and clubs. And so I’ve got now the opportunity to make sure that we do that and we’ll be re-organising ourselves structurally in terms of people to match the investment and the strategy to do that.
I suppose at the moment I feel that I’ve got a big new opportunity in the women’s game but which is a core 1/6th , we’ve got 6 core pillars in the new strategy and it’s one of those six. So for the moment, to answer your question, I still feel hugely committed to making the game as good as it can be and as inclusive as it can be for women and girls. If other roles appear down the line which are in men’s sport, men’s cricket, men’s sport more widely, or both, then I am certainly open to them. But I just think whilst this is such a monumentally exciting time for women in sport and particularly cricket, with this opportunity then certainly my commitment and my focus will be here for the next, certainly the next couple of years I think.
SA: And there’s sometimes an assumption isn’t there that working in men’s sport is that pinnacle for the professional in our sector. Do you feel that’s the case?
CC: Definitely not! No and I’ve challenged myself a lot on this. Yes it’s more in the spotlight, more money attached to it, more commercial maybe, maybe to work with bigger budgets and more profile and to be the bigger brother. But if you challenge yourself on why you go to work and at the moment do I think I could make a difference or get the fulfilment or find the same meaning in men’s sport? At the moment I don’t think that I could. I’m not saying that wouldn’t be the case in the future or a different role wouldn’t present that.
But I think women’s sport is where to be, is where you can find all of that because women’s sport collectively – not just women’s cricket – is on the eve of such a game-changing time and to be part of that and to be really part of making sport more visible, more accessible for 51% of our population - who previously have never seen themselves as having that opportunity or right or access - I think that we need to flip that debate.
[0:48:52]
I wholeheartedly disagree with that mentality that it’s somehow better to be working in men’s sport. Surely it’s better to be working where you feel, where can I make the most difference and try and make the most impact and take something forward? And at the moment that’s in women’s sport.
SA: What an extraordinary woman. I’m so grateful for Clare’s honesty in sharing her thoughts with me. You can just feel her passion for transforming women’s sport.
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