By Simon Burnton in London/The Guardian


Kate Cross will see out 2015 in Brisbane, ending a year which has featured her first home Ashes and seen her become the first woman player in the 123-year history of the Central Lancashire League—where at one point she took eight wickets in one match—by participating in the first Women’s Big Bash.
From the outside, Cross seems to have spent the past 12 months joyously assembling an enviable list of major achievements, but surprisingly she insists the process has felt “really disappointing”.
To be fair, last summer is probably not one that any member of the English side will look back on with great relish, starting as it did with a mood of great optimism, England having won four and drawn one of the six previous Ashes series, only for Australia to win the latest with a game to spare.
“All I want to do is help the team to win and I hadn’t done that,” Cross says. “Obviously there was a lot of stuff going on with the men’s cricket which I was pleased about, but my job is to do well for England and I didn’t do that. I must admit, I didn’t feel very positive coming out of the summer.”
Cross, now 24, has had to cope with the weight of expectation—her own and others’—since she first broke into Lancashire’s senior side aged only 13. Considered a future international since barely into her teens, in the end it took nearly a decade before she represented her country at senior level, in which time she nearly left the sport twice.
“There was this expectation that I was going to play for England,” she says. “I got called up to the Ashes in 2011, there’d been an injury so they flew me over but I never ended up playing a game. When I got back I remember having a conversation with my mum and dad and saying: ‘I don’t think this is for me. I don’t think I enjoy it enough. I’ve still not made my debut and I don’t think I’m good enough.’ I’d pretty much fallen out of love with the game and I just wasn’t enjoying it. I’d been playing and training year-round for six years, I’d never really had a break from it.”
Six months later she returned to Lancashire—“I just missed being with the girls, being on the road with them. I didn’t miss the cricket but I just wanted to be back playing with them”—but she failed to reach her previous standard, and the following winter she was dropped from England’s academy programme.
“I was sat there wondering if this was really what I wanted, but that kind of made the decision for me,” she recalls. “As difficult as it was to hear you’re not good enough, it probably did me the world of good. When you’re playing for your county and you’re the England player, or the England academy player, there is that expectation, but really I’d never performed for them. When I came back in 2013 I had a good summer for them, I played a warm-up game against the Aussies and got a ‘four-fer’, and within two months I was on a plane to Barbados to make my England debut.”
The momentum Cross has built up since has now carried her to Brisbane, where she will be joined by her England teammate Lauren Winfield—in all eight English women will play in the WBBL—as well as her Ashes adversaries Holly Furling and Jess Jonassen.
“As much as we were rivals in the summer, as soon as the Ashes were over we’ve all become good friends,” she says. “That really surprised me actually, how brilliant the girls have been with me. The first thing Jess spoke to me about was to offer for me to stay with her when I get over, which is what I’m going to do.
“That’s why, even during the Ashes Test, in the back of my mind I was kind of hoping that Jess got a hundred. I know I probably shouldn’t say that, but I knew she was going to be a team-mate so I half wanted her to do well.” Jonassen fell a single run short, dismissed for 99 in her first innings and for 54 in the second.
The summer’s best memories came from Cross’s appearances with Heywood in the Central Lancashire League. The 24-year-old has been involved in the club since childhood and her brother Bobby, who played at Lancashire to second XI level and now sits on the county’s board, was captain for a decade until 2013.
“I was so nervous before I played,” she says. “When you make your debut for England there’s not normally a lot of expectation on you—if you do well brilliant, if you don’t, well, it’s your debut. With Heywood there was a certain level of expectation, and it was a completely different level of nervousness than when I play for England.
“We had a warm-up game and I think I was even more nervous for that. A lot of the lads in our league hadn’t seen me play for a few years, and I found that quite difficult. It certainly wasn’t just another game. I’d broken my finger as well in that warm-up, my fingernail was hanging off and I’d smashed the bone, and I thought to myself: ‘I can’t go off here, I can’t be the girl that goes off with a broken nail.’ So I made my debut with a broken finger, and I was quite stressed out because I didn’t want to let anyone down.”
It’s safe to say she did not do that, though some of the credit should possibly go to a small silver pig. Thirty-five years ago the precious porker was given to her father, the former West Ham striker David Cross, by the Hammers’ then physio Rob Jenkins, after it was noticed that David tended to excel if he saw a pig on the way to a game.
He carried it in his hand throughout the 1980 FA Cup final, when West Ham beat Arsenal 1-0, and has since passed it on to his daughter.
“The pig’s the first thing I pack, everywhere I go,” says Cross. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not superstitious but that pig has to go everywhere with me. I got really bad with it this summer. I can’t hold it in my hand like my dad, and it’s rock hard so if I put it in my pocket, if I dived I’d just rip my thigh open.
“My brother for my birthday last year bought me a really tiny little pig to put on my necklace, but it’s not the lucky pig. We’ve now got these GPS things we have to wear when we play, a bit like a sports bra with a little pouch in the back, so I had the brainwave that I could put the pig in the pouch with the GPS. During the Test, every session I would find somewhere different to put the pig to see if it’s got a lucky position. Obviously I didn’t find it.”
With a home series against Pakistan and the launch of the Women’s Cricket Super League on the horizon, 2016 should feature more notable firsts, and perhaps less disappointment.
So long as she finds the right home for the pig, of course.