What would it be like to play sport professionally?
For many women it is a pipe dream but a couple of Ireland's top young cricketers – teenager Kim Garth (19) and Laura Delaney (23) – got to observe it first-hand recently thanks to Australia's inaugural women's Big Bash Twenty20 League.
The fledgling WBBL had a rookie programme which brought talented internationals from seven other countries Down Under to spend six weeks training with their clubs.
Garth (Pembroke CC) and Delaney’s (Leinster) impressive performances in Ireland’s nailbiting T20 Qualifier in Thailand before Christmas saw them selected for this unique sporting internship.
“Three days before we were due to fly home from Thailand myself and Laura found out we weren’t going home at all but going straight to Australia,” Garth explained. “It was very last-minute but very exciting.”
She spent her "rookie" period with the Hobart Hurricanes in Tasmania while Delaney was placed with Perth Scorchers, whose team included England star Charlotte Edwards.
They only returned home recently and faced another lightning quick turnaround.
Garth had to cram in a deferred exam at UCD (where she studies sport and exercise management) before re-packing her bags and heading off for the Ireland team’s latest challenge.
Victory in December qualified them for their second T20 World Cup and they flew to India yesterday where they will have two warm-up games (March 10th-12th) before their tournament opener against New Zealand on March 18th.
England’s women are now reputedly on contracts worth £40,000 (€52,000) pee year and Ireland will be the only non-professionals in the tournament, so what did Garth learn from the pros Down Under?
“The main difference is they don’t really fear anyone, They’re not afraid to get [bowled] out, they don’t play cautiously,” she says.”The overall standard of fielding was also quite a bit higher than ours too.”
Senior debut
She got to play with a local club in Tasmania while training with Hobart and also benefitted from some one-to-one coaching.
Ireland’s 2015 Player of the Year, who lives in Blackrock, made her Irish senior debut at just 14 when she was still a third year student in Loreto Foxrock and already has over 30 caps.
“My mum played for Pembroke in Sandymount. My dad played for YMCA and they met through cricket so I was kind of brought up watching cricket and playing with my two brothers,” she explained.
“I played with boys in Pembroke all the way up, from U9 to U19. There’s no limit to girls playing with boys in cricket.”
Garth was actually the youngster international in the world when she debuted but insists “14 wouldn’t be too unusual now. The attitude is that if you’re good enough it doesn’t matter what age you are.”
Ireland's burgeoning team, led by veterans like the Joyce twins (Isobel and Cecilia), Ciara Metcalfe and Clare Shillington, includes plenty more prodigies.
Gaby Lewis doesn't turn 15 until later this month and was the first senior international in the world born in this millennium. Her sister Robyn and Lucy O'Reilly are both still 16.
Garth also played Gaelic football with Kilmacud Crokes and, in 2014, lined out at full-forward for Dublin in the 2014 All-Ireland minor semi-finals. Dublin and her Leaving Cert kept her so busy that year that she hung up her whites temporarily but since then it has been all cricket.
She accepts that not everyone appreciates the finer points of the game or the skill and fitness it demands.
“Leading up to big tournaments like this we’d have two to three gym sessions a-week (in DCU), two skills sessions (in North County CC, near Balbriggan) and another optional one. You’d be training five to six times a week. Most of us are based on the southside but we car pool across the city.
Not one -dimensional
“Some people might think cricket is boring if they don’t know the rules but it can be very exciting. It’s not a one-dimensional sport, you have to have some real skills to play and it’s quite technical,” she says.
The Aussies go bonkers for it and its first women’s professional league got significant support. Crowds of 10,00-13,00 were recorded, the average TV audience was 230,000 and the biggest was over 400,000, prompting more games to be added to the live schedule as the season progressed.
This is already shaping up to be one of the busiest years ever for the Irish women.
After the World Twenty20 they’ve got a European World Cup qualifying campaign and South Africa, currently ranked sixth in the world, are coming to Ireland next July/August for a seven-game Test series.
