How kid from Kapunda found world fame – fast

Darcie Brown grew up bowling fast beamers at her brothers’ heads. Now she’s about to make her World Cup debut for Australia. She reveals the wild child within.

Darcie Brown celebrates taking a wicket with captain Meg Lanning as Australia wrapped up the Ashes in Canberra last month Picture: Getty Images

A young Darcie Brown is playing backyard cricket with her older brothers. They do her a deal. She can have three lives when she bats.

First ball, out. Perhaps a nick to the electric wickie, who never seems to drop one, or the row of pot plants masquerading as three slips and a gully. Second ball, gone. Middle stump cartwheels into dad’s toolbox. Third ball, on your way, cue the laughter and sledging and everything else that makes a youngest sibling’s blood boil. It never feels like they’re laughing with you when you’re the smallest. Everyone’s laughing at you.

“Sometimes I’d throw the stumps over the road,” Brown says ahead of her World Cup debut for Australia against England at Hamilton on Saturday. “Or I’d take the stumps and the bat to my room and lock myself in so they couldn’t play anymore.

“How funny’s that? I don’t remember too much about it but I was a menace, from what I’m told. A bit of a terror. I actually had a bit of a nickname with my family when I was younger. I was called Sheryl the Feral.

“My brothers would give me three chances when I was batting. I’d get out in three balls, and then I’d crack it.”

Great image. The girl with fire in her belly in the backyard at Kapunda, about a 80km north of Adelaide. The girl who played “heaps of netty and footy” before cricket took over. The girl refusing to accept she was out – but if she was, there goes the neighbourhood.

Batting still ain’t her forte. Her meteoric rise to fast-bowling duties for Australia at the age of 18 comes with the fine print that she’s an entrenched No. 11.

Since her ODI debut against New Zealand last year, her batting returns have been DNB, DNB, DNB and DNB. Did Not Bat. She’s MNB. Might Never Bat.

Asked if there’s a danger she’ll grab all three stumps and chuck them across the road if she’s dismissed at the World Cup, she says: “Well, if I’m ever batting for Australia, I think we’re in deep strife already.”

I remember Brown’s arrival on the scene. It was her debut for the Adelaide Strikers in the WBBL.

It feels like only yesterday because it pretty much was. I was told to watch the 17-year-old having her first game because she had it. That something special. She let rip with a monster inswinger at a decent clip that cannoned into Nicola Carey’s stumps. A blink of an eye later, she’s at the World Cup, her brothers proud as punch, probably deserving a bit of credit for toughening her up, one merciless hat-trick at a time.

“I must have been hard work back then,” Brown says. “Maybe I should apologise for it? I’m not going to. They were older than me and the only way I could hang out with them was to play sport with them. They’d bully me around a bit in cricket – not that they’d see it as bullying – but it was actually great for us to bond in that way.

“Dad played with us and then even mum would come out and play some cricket. I look back now and it was just a really nice family activity that we did. But they definitely never took it easy on me.”

She says: “I’m pretty sure I just used to bowl full tosses at their heads. Trying to bowl as fast as I could, that was the only way I could make an impact in the yard at home. These days they’re always messaging me, asking how I’m going at training and what I’ve done throughout the day. That sort of thing. I love their support and I’m so grateful to have them.

“My brothers didn’t get out too often back then but I played against them again recently, just before Christmas. I got one of them out first ball. Got the other one out not long after that. Good to get back at them. All’s well that ends well, I say.”

You could forgive that headstrong kid for becoming a nightmare as an adult. For trying to knock everyone’s block off and giving a gob-full of abuse for good measure. Brown is the opposite. She’s nearly too nice and cheerful to be a fast bowler.

I’m trying to imagine her sledging. Cop that! Then she looks mortified and says, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean it! Did I offend you? I take it all back! Please forgive me. Would you like a half-volley? And yet don’t get the wrong idea about her. The fire in the belly is still there. Kids like that never lose it.

Come on, haven’t you ever sledged? “No. Never,” she says. “Only when I’m joking with close friends back home. I try to sledge Tahlia (McGrath) if I ever bowl to her but usually she hits me around a bit so there’s not much point sledging her then. It’s pretty weak when I do it, anyway.

“I don’t mean it at all, and I think it’s going to come out wrong and I’ll just be embarrassed. And I feel like if I sledge, and if I ever have to bat, I’ll just be setting myself up to cop it. You practice what you preach and I don’t like my chances of backing it up with the bat.”

Where’d that cranky, dummy-spitting child go? “I don’t know at what age I changed, but I have. I don’t get very angry or frustrated on the field because I know it’s just a game. You try your best and have some fun and that’s all anyone can ask of you. You can’t do better than your best.”

Brown is a character. She used to wear glasses when she bowled, but they kept falling off. She once had a free hit but let the ball go, dying from embarrassment when she realised what she’d done. “The kid from Kapunda,” Meghan Schutt said when giving Brown her Australian cap, “Who once ate an entire Maccas family box by herself purely because we said she wouldn't be able to.” But her raw ability and blazing start to her international career is no joke. Her four ODIs have produced nine wickets at an average of 15.11, economy rate of 4.53 and strike rate of 20.2. Exceptional numbers.

Brown has been clocked at 126km/h, just a puff of wind behind South African Shabnim Ismail’s world record of 128km/h. Prediction? Brown becomes the first woman to break the 130km/h barrier at the World Cup. She looms as a serious weapon as Australia chases its first World Cup triumph since 2013.

“I’m pretty shocked that I’m here,” Brown says. “But the girls in this team are great. They’re just lovely people. They’ve welcomed me with open arms. There’s a few big dogs here, some really big names, but they’re such nice, normal people. They’ve all got their own lives and stories and journeys to how they’re here. There were a few I was probably too shy to go up and say hello to in the early days but they all introduced themselves and from the start, they’ve been so good to me. They’re such great people and I’m loving every minute of it but I’ll be honest with you.

“Part of me still can’t believe it’s happening so fast.”