15 minute read
Sophia Dunkley
BAT TO THE FUTURE As one of the rising stars of English cricket, SOPHIA DUNKLEY plays by the rules of a game first laid down in 1744. But every time she walks onto the pitch, bringing new fans with her, she’s reshaping the sport for modern times
Words RICHARD EDWARDS Photography OPHELIA WYNNE
Swing star: Sophia Dunkley, photographed for The Red Bulletin at the Oval in south London in June this year
It’s the summer of 2006, and in a north London cul-de-sac a seven-year-old Sophia Dunkley is at a loose end. The football has been kicked relentlessly against the wall, the netball is flat, and then her next-door neighbour Zak Carr appears, carrying a cricket bat and a tennis ball…
It’s far too simplistic to trot out the phrase “and the rest is history”, but this childhood friendship charged an imagination and put a trailblazer on a course that’s changing the face of women’s cricket for the better. Dunkley turns 24 this July, just over two weeks before the start of the second season of The Hundred, a faster reinvention of a stuffy old bat-and-ball game that was first played in southeast England in the 16th century. It has brought in a younger, more diverse audience and propelled women’s cricket into a previously unimaginable stratosphere. As Dunkley’s face beams down from billboards around the country, the all-rounder is at the forefront of this very modern revolution.
She’s also the first Black woman to play Test cricket for England – the historic moment occurred in June last year, against India in Bristol – and Dunkley’s emergence as a cricket tour de force is a starting gun for young Black female cricketers up and down the country to take up the sport. But when they follow her onto the game’s biggest stage, she hopes it won’t be a big deal at all. “Hopefully that will be normal, that we won’t be in a situation where we’ll have people saying, ‘She’s the second Black person to play Test cricket for England,’” says Dunkley. “I think it won’t be too long until that’s achieved.”
Dunkley is speaking from her hotel room in Pune, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where
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she’s competing in the Indian Premier League as a member of the Trailblazers in the Women’s T20 Challenge. It’s the final stop of a breathless winter that has seen Dunkley and her England teammates attempt to wrestle back the Ashes in Australia in January and February, before heading straight to New Zealand in March for the World Cup. Both quests ultimately ended in disappointment, despite Dunkley’s impressive run-scoring contributing to England reaching the World Cup final after losing their opening three matches of the tournament. She can look back on a series of performances that haven’t just cemented her place in this England side but also confirm her as a standout performer in the global game.
Currently, there are only three teams in the women’s Indian Premier League – by comparison, the men’s IPL this year featured 10 – but next season there’s talk of a full women’s league with eight teams. And a player auction, which will see the likes of Dunkley go under the hammer alongside some of the greats of the men’s game, including England’s new Test captain Ben Stokes, and players who routinely command seven-figure sums in the world’s most lucrative league.
“Watching that auction would be as nerveracking as any game I’ve ever played,” says Dunkley. “But to have a full women’s IPL would showcase just how good the women’s game is and how far it can go. Hopefully 2023 will be the year.”
The Lambeth-born all-rounder has clearly come a long way since she first picked up a cricket bat and ball, but her feet are still planted firmly on the ground. “At primary school [in north London], football was probably the main sport I was into,” Dunkley recalls. “Then I started playing cricket with my next-door neighbour Zak. We’d constantly be outside, playing either on the road or in the garden.
“I couldn’t tell you how many balls we ended up losing, but there was the odd smashed window. We’d leg it, but you didn’t need to be a detective to work out where the ball had come from.”
Carr brought Dunkley to cricket training with him at Finchley, where she began her fledgling career in the club’s boys’ teams. At the time, Dunkley was unaware that other girls even played the sport. “It was through boy’s cricket that I found girl’s cricket,” she says. “Someone suggested that
I go to the Middlesex [girls’] under-11 trials. I remember walking into the sports hall and thinking, ‘Wow.’ I didn’t watch women’s cricket on TV, and I’d never been to a women’s game, so to see so many girls playing was an eye-opener for me.”
Dunkley’s rapid progression singled her out as a rare talent. In 2009, she won a scholarship to Mill Hill School, where she joined the boys’ cricket first XI and was the only girl in the school team for almost her entire time there.
“I was the first girl who’d played in the boys’ team at school. It was daunting, but a very good standard of cricket,” she says. “The reaction to me playing was pretty calm, but if I hit a few boundaries there’d be more aggression to me on the pitch. I came home upset from one game, saying I was never going to play boys’ cricket again, but I soon got over it. Coming out the other side of that, and enjoying it and playing well, really helped my mindset.”
By the age of 14, Dunkley had made her full debut for Middlesex, and her performances were beginning to catch the eye of those involved in the upper echelons of English cricket. “We picked Sophia for the Club Cricket Conference XI when she was only 15 years old,” says Simon Prodger, managing director of the National Cricket Conference. “She turned up for matches against Combined Services [the British Armed Forces team] and the MCC [Marylebone Cricket Club] and scored hundreds against both. It was one of those moments that still makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Here was this 15-year-old playing against all these experienced female cricketers and dominating them. It was extraordinary to see.
“But the main thing I took away from those two games was just what a great young person she was – always smiling, willing to listen, and clearly an incredibly talented cricketer.”
In 2015, Dunkley was picked for the Club Cricket Conference XI at Lord’s to celebrate the organisation’s centenary – her first appearance at the legendary London venue, the world’s most fabled cricket ground. It was, however, a trip back there two years later that had the most profound impact on her career.
SWEATSHIRT AND LEGGINGS BY GYM + COFFEE
Eye-opener: Dunkley admits that when she went to her first girls’ under-11 trials, she hadn’t even seen a women’s game – in real life or on TV
England hosting the 2017 Women’s World Cup was a watershed moment for the sport. The competition was unrecognisable from the inaugural event hosted on English soil back in 1973 when, to swell the number of teams involved, an International XI (made up of leftover players) and a Young England team were included. Its modern equivalent included a $2million prize pot and the eight finest teams on the planet. What’s more, England were the favourites. A nation expected.
After topping the Super Eight stage of the competition – a round-robin group that saw the top four sides qualify for the semi-finals – Heather Knight’s England side beat South Africa in a gripping semi and sealed their place at Lord’s in a sold-out final against India, the team that had beaten them in the opening match at Derby.
“I net-bowled on the Nursery Ground [behind Lord’s iconic Media Centre] the day before the final and you could sense the whole thing building and building,” says Dunkley. “The next day was unreal. The queues outside the ground first thing in the morning were amazing – we’d never seen anything like it for a women’s match.”
To cap it off, England scraped home in a thrilling finale, beating India by nine runs, mainly thanks to Anya Shrubsole, who took six for 46 – the bestever bowling figures in a World Cup final. What happened after the final ball was bowled has stuck in Dunkley’s mind.
“I was sitting in the stand at the end of the game,” she says. “After the trophy was presented, they announced the next World Cup was going to be in New Zealand in 2021 [it was eventually postponed to this year]. I took a moment and thought, ‘That’s a good target for me. Something I can really work towards.’”
If you had told anyone leaving Lord’s on that warm 2017 midsummer evening – including Dunkley herself – what she’d achieve between that final and the next World Cup, they would have considered you hyperbolic. But just a year later, in the summer of 2018, her breakthrough season arrived with standout performances for regional team Surrey Stars in the Kia Super League, beating Loughborough Lightning in a final at Hove in front of a bumper crowd of more than 3,500 spectators and thrusting her into the sights of England’s recruiters.
“Jonathan Finch is the man who phones to tell you that you’ve been selected,” says Dunkley, referring to the Director of England Women’s Cricket at the England Cricket Board. “[In autumn 2018] I’d been called up to play a couple of training games with the first team a couple of weeks before they headed off to the [ICC Women’s World T20] in the West Indies. It didn’t click in my mind that these games could have an impact on team selection. At the final training session, when they said they’d call those selected, I just thought, ‘Oh well, I’m not going to be involved in that.’ Then, at three in the afternoon, Jonathan’s name flashed up on my phone.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘I hope you’ve got your passport ready.’ I have absolutely no idea what else was said during that call. I was in complete shock. You never get that feeling again – of being called up to play for your country for the very first time. It’s still hard to describe exactly how that feels.”
It wasn’t just a special moment for Dunkley, but for her mother Caroline, too. Dunkley is an only child, and as a single parent Caroline worked extra hard to help her daughter pursue her sporting dream, despite knowing little about cricket herself. “My family wasn’t particularly sporty,” says Dunkley. “She’d be driving me up and down the country to different venues, paying for coaching, shelling out for my equipment –she had to make a lot of sacrifices.”
In fact, it was belters on the dancefloor, rather than in front of the stumps, that occupied Caroline’s mind. “She’s a music artist manager and booking agent,” says Dunkley of her mum’s profession, confessing to not necessarily sharing the same music tastes. However, Caroline’s music connections did once grant Dunkley a rare opportunity to sit in a chair owned by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. “I didn’t think it was a big deal, but Mum tells me otherwise,” she says, laughing. “To be fair, it was a great chair.”
Given the unseen hours she would put in, there was no way Caroline was going to miss the fanfare surrounding her daughter’s England debut, in the second game of the tournament against Bangladesh in St Lucia in November 2018. “She was there so early,” recalls Dunkley. “She didn’t want to miss any of it: the national anthem, the handing of my cap. It meant so much to me, seeing her in the crowd.”
Dunkley played every game in the tournament, scoring 35 runs off 30 balls in her debut T20 innings against the West Indies four days later – the top England scorer for that match. And in June 2021, when Dunkley stepped up for her Test match debut against India, she may have made history as England’s first Black female Test cricketer but she’s also remembered for scoring 74 unbeaten runs. As the ‘almanac of cricket’, Wisden, tweeted afterwards, “It’s the highest score by an England women’s Test debut for nearly 35 years.” It was now a statistical fact: Dunkley rocked.
Golden bat: Dunkley was thirdhighest scorer in last year’s The Hundred tournament and helped her team Southern Brave to the final
This year, with a huge summer of cricket underway, Dunkley stands at the epicentre of another transformative moment for the women’s game. At the end of July, fresh from a full series against a touring South Africa, she’ll join her England teammates at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham – the first time women’s cricket has featured at the sporting event – facing a formidable international roster that includes Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Barbados. And it isn’t even the main event of the cricketing summer. That would be The Hundred.
Launched last year, The Hundred was devised as a way to make cricket more accessible to a younger and more diverse audience. Whereas traditional women’s Test matches take four days to play, complete with lunch and tea breaks, attempts to make the sport more digestible have emerged throughout modern times. One-day internationals (currently consisting of 50 overs, or 300 balls, per side) debuted in 1971; in 2003, Twenty20 or T20 cricket upped the pace with 20 overs, or 120 balls, per side, reducing play to four hours. The Hundred has slashed that game time further still – 100 balls per innings, two and half hours per match.
But it’s the way the series is staged that sets it apart: eight clubs, each with equally billed men’s and women’s teams, competing in city grounds rather than country venues, with each day featuring a double-header of both a men’s and women’s game. With little break between them and only five hours of play, spectators last year stuck around for both matches. The format worked. The total number of spectators for the women’s games was around 267,000 – the highest ever attendance of a women’s cricket event (the previous record, at the 2020 T20 World Cup, was around 136,000). And opening- night viewing drew a peak audience of 1.95 million – the most watched women’s cricket match in history. More interestingly, 39 per cent of viewers and 21 per cent of spectators were women, with 59 per cent of tickets purchased by people under the age of 45.
Unsurprisingly, this new flavour of cricket has soured some palates. After last year’s opening games, Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar wrote, “The only word that comes to mind is insipid”; and writer Sam Morshead of The Cricketer concluded it was for “teenage mums and their stupid offspring… who have the attention spans of concussed goldfish”. Former England and Yorkshire Test cricketer Geoffrey Boycott enjoyed it, however. “It cannot be a bad thing if people enjoy watching cricket, whatever the format,” he wrote. “The Hundred is a concept for today’s society.” Dunkley shares the sentiment. “It makes it a lot easier for young girls to watch and get into,” she says. “You can only aspire to what you see. I think it’s the perfect showcase for the women’s game.”
Last year, Dunkley was drafted into The Hundred by Southampton-based team Southern Brave. After helping them to the finals at Lord’s as the third highest scorer of the tournament, she returns to the team this year as one of the stars of the competition, mixing with some of the biggest names in world cricket, not least the Australian World Cup-winning triumvirate of Meg Lanning, Ellyse Perry and Alyssa Healy. “I want to see how they go about things,” she notes. “It’s about learning and improving. I need to keep moving forward.”
Dunkley’s emergence onto the world stage couldn’t be more vital. Since former West Indies pace bowler Michael Holding and Ebony RainfordBrent – the first Black woman to play cricket for England – detailed their experiences of racism to the Sky Sports cameras in the summer of 2020, it has become a topic of much discussion. “In our sport, people say there aren’t inequalities,” said Rainford-Brent in an emotional speech, “but you start to look around, at people in a position of power – there are almost zero Black people in our governing bodies. What does that say? Then you look at the grassroots level of a lot of sports – I mean cricket, rugby, golf, tennis, you name it – [and] there are no opportunities coming through. There are structural problems.”
It was, Dunkley says, “A hugely powerful piece of television.”
Especially so for a sport badly in need of a wakeup call. English cricket has witnessed a dramatic decline in the number of Black professional cricket players – as much as 75 per cent in the last 25 years according to the charitable African-Caribbean Engagement programme, started by Rainford-Brent and Surrey County Cricket Club in January 2020 to invest in and support young Black players.
“That has really started a positive change,” says Dunkley. “I hope we’re on the cusp of something. The more that people get involved, see it and are educated by it, then that’s the start of something really special.”
And in Sophia Dunkley, English cricket has the best role model it could wish for, irrespective of the men’s or women’s game. “From a personal point of view, you don’t really think about the kind of impact you can have on the game – you play because you enjoy it,” says the woman who understood her own potential five years ago, 10 years ago, in 2006 when her neighbour Zak handed her that first cricket bat.
“But to know you’re inspiring the next generation, and that even just a couple of boys or girls might take up the game because they enjoyed watching you play, that’s a very special feeling.”
