Belinda Clark brings rusted-on cricket knowledge to CA position

Belinda Clark was 12 years of age when she arrived for her first training session. She was quiet. Tough. Brave.

Belinda Clark has replaced Pat Howard as Cricket Australia’s high performance manager on an interim basis. Picture: Picture- Nicole Cleary

Belinda Clark was 12 when she arrived for her first training session. She was quiet. Tough. Brave.

She was joining our little ratbag cricket team because according to the coach, she knew her hills from her hollows. I was to have a new opening partner, and this was a development I viewed with suspicion. I’d have to see off the new ball with a girl.

Interim measure. Had to be. We already had a gun team. Elite smart arses. A lanky young lad called Bruce Hill was the fastest 12-year-old bowler in Newcastle. In the state. On Earth, we swore it. What a reign of terror. No one wanted to be wicketkeeper because Bruce Hill was too quick. No one wanted to face him in the nets. Too dangerous. Those old sausage-style gloves provided stuff-all protection. He had the longest run-up you’ve ever seen in your life. And he liked to bowl short.

Clark was dutifully warned that it was best to avoid Bruce Hill when he was bowling with a tapey, let alone a rock-hard six-stitcher. Preferable to bat against the medium-pacers, she was told. Better yet, go and slog the knock-kneed spinners in the far net. The useless sods.

Opening the batting at Myamblah Crescent Oval, in the Newcastle suburb of Merewether, I remember she insisted on facing the first ball. That was rather lion-hearted of her. She must have been stared at. What are you doing here? She made runs at Myamblah. And then. And then. She made runs all over the world.

Clark became an absolute trailblazer for women’s cricket in a 14-year-career from 1991 to 2005. She was Test captain. Australia won 84 of 101 games under her watch. She became the first female cricketer to be named a Bradman Foundation honoree, placing her alongside Steve Waugh, Richie Benaud, Sachin Tendulkar. She was the first female inducted to Australia’s Cricket Hall of Fame. The first player, male or female, to score a double century in an ODI. Her Test batting average was 45.95.

At one stage she was captain of the women’s team and chief executive of Women’s Cricket Australia. She played when there was no money in it. No crowds. Nothing but the sort of deep-seated affection for the game that convinced her to dip into her own pocket on a few tours.

When Australia’s female cricketers received a $100,000 pay rise, more than doubling their incomes, from Cricket Australia last year, Clark was lauded by the current generation as one of the women who kept the women’s game afloat — purely for the love of it — when it could have sunk without trace.

She was reluctant to take any credit, but said quietly down the telephone line: “I didn’t make any money from playing. I mean, at all. I wasn’t paid a cent to play cricket. For this to have happened, I feel absolutely ecstatic for today’s players.”

She’s the textbook example of an Australian cricketer who went from the backyard to fields ­beyond.

“I remember playing at school and thinking I wanted to go to the cricket academy,” she said. “I had no idea it was for boys only. Now you’ve got girls and young women who can take the leap to saying, ‘I’d actually like to do this as a career’. Imagine one of your daughters walking in and saying, ‘I’ve got a WBBL contract, I’d like to play for Australia, I’m earning this amount of money and I can go to university’. It’s a very different picture from five years ago, let alone when I was a kid.”

Post-playing career, she’s been a mighty contributor to Cricket Australia. She’s run the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, nurturing young talent. She’s been a key figure in the women’s governing body being integrated with Cricket Australia. She’s been up to her neck in implementing more player-friendly junior rules and formats. She’s forged a reputation for disliking limelight as much as she thrives on getting a job done.

When Mark Taylor was listing the people who could lead Cricket Australia out of its current God-awful mess, Clark’s name rolled off his tongue. Her Hall of Fame ­biography describes her as “a pioneer”.

Clark has replaced Pat Howard as the interim high-performance manager at Cricket Australia. What are you doing here? She has one lifelong quality the former Wallaby always lacked. A rusted-on feel for the game of cricket.

You had to respect her when she was a kid. You have to respect her now. There was no girls’ competitions when she started playing in Newcastle. No cricketing pathway for a young woman to cling to. No women’s cricket on TV. She played anyway. She became a dyed-in-the-wool cricketer.

The rest of us wanted to hide behind the dunnies when Bruce Hill marked his run-up at Myamblah. We wanted to feign injury. Pray for rain. Pay the coach to let us face the spinners. But one of the best damn things I ever saw when I was a kid was this. When it was a 12-year-old Belinda Clark’s turn to bat at training, she did what no one else wanted to do. She walked straight into Bruce Hill’s net.