“It still feels a bit surreal,” says Linsey Smith of a near-perfect couple of weeks.
Just a month ago, Smith was on the periphery of England’s plans. If she was picked at all, it was as the fourth spinner in the T20I XI, playing in just one of the Ashes games over the winter, and even then only once the series was already lost. Almost seven years on from her international debut, she had yet to make her bow in ODI colours.
Fast forward a few weeks, and not only has she pushed Sarah Glenn out of England’s T20I squad, but she was by far their best bowler in the ODI series win against West Indies. At Derby, she became just the second Englishwoman to claim a five-for on ODI debut. Now, having spent the best part of a decade on the periphery, she looks set to play a central role in England’s plans both for their home series against India and a World Cup in the subcontinent.
But the resurgence of her international career, like for so many of her late millennial contemporaries, has been against odds stacked against her.
Smith made her England debut in 2018, in a T20 World Cup in the Caribbean. With Sophie Ecclestone struggling with injuries over that winter, she played in two T20I series in Asia before she was dropped after one match of the home 2019 summer. While her stats from that first spell with England – 13 wickets from nine matches at 14 apiece – suggest success, Smith’s reflections are different.
“I was almost a bit embarrassed that I’d played for England,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I was quite ready or that I had had as much exposure as I needed. I definitely wasn’t the best bowler I could have been, and I had a lot more to develop and get better at. So, for me, it was probably the best thing to get away from that set-up. Obviously, it wasn’t up to me and it was really tough to take at that time because when you’re young, all you want to do is play for England and give it your best shot, and I felt like I hadn’t really given it my best shot.”
Smith’s experience of being selected at that time rings true with another player given a second chance at England honours this summer. Speaking to Wisden Women's Cricket Weekly podcast ahead of the series against West Indies, Em Arlott detailed her own feelings of imposter syndrome when she first came into the set-up in 2021. “Personally, I’m so grateful I didn’t play,” she said. “I know that’s a terrible thing to say but looking back now, had I debuted I would have had half the impact I’d love to have now because of what I’ve learned and experienced off the pitch as well as on it.”
The time period where Smith and Arlott received their first international call-ups was a complicated one for the professionalism of the women’s game in England. The ECB had been giving out central contracts since 2014, but apart from those playing in the KSL – itself not a full professional league – the rest of the domestic set-up was amateur until the first tranche of domestic contracts came in at the end of 2020.
For younger players picked for England at that time, they weren’t only on the rapid learning curve of international cricket, but learning how to fit in a professional environment for the first time. “We didn’t have the volume of cricket or exposure that we have now,” Smith says. “I hadn’t played Big Bash at that point either. The amount of games we have now and playing all across the world really helps you settle into that environment.”
Beyond the time they spent in the international set-up, players whose careers followed similar trajectories to Smith’s and Arlott’s at that time faced even tougher challenges when they were dropped, going from the England environment back to the largely still amateur domestic set-up. At that point in their mid 20s, without income from student loans or being supported by their parents, life trying to regain those England places became complicated quite quickly.
“At that time I’d come out of uni and got a full-time job coaching with Leicestershire,” says Smith. “I wasn’t on a full-time cricket contract so I had to fit my training in around that and work out my priorities. That was a breaking point because I was coaching cricket every day, I was working in cricket, and I also had my cricket to focus on. It got so overwhelming for me, you need to be able to live and you need an income to get by, you can’t just be training all day and not have any income.”
The ECB gave out 21 central contracts to female players in 2019, with Smith awarded a newly established ‘rookie’ contract. It wasn’t until the following year, when Smith wasn’t included on the England contract list, that regional professional contracts were given out for the first time. Even then, the yearly income from these contracts at that time was reportedly only £18,000 per year, well short of the national minimum for players then stipulated by the PCA of £27,500.
In that environment – trying to hit the personal milestones of mid 20s independence while existing as a professional athlete on a shoestring budget – Smith and others on the periphery had to overcome obstacles to regain their international places. The difficulties of that challenge are evident in those that fell away.
Rebecca Grundy, played 19 times for England before losing her central contract in 2016 at the age of 26. She played her last domestic game in England the following year, before moving to Australia and establishing her coaching career. Susie Rowe played 22 T20Is for England between 2010 and 2013, but left the sport altogether in 2015 to focus on her hockey career, only returning to the game when professional domestic contracts came in.
“There wasn’t much below England [at that time],” said Rowe in an interview with The Cricketer in 2020. “There was the England Academy, which was full of youngsters and it wasn’t something I really wanted to be part of when I was 25 or 26. There wasn’t really anything beyond that, and I was ready to take a complete break from the game.”
Having battled through those times, several of those who’ve lasted the course are reaping the rewards of the hard yards they’ve trodden on and off the field under the Charlotte Edwards era. Players who burst onto the scene amidst the shiny lights of The Hundred, like Alice Capsey, or those who’ve been largely able to stay the international course as the domestic game caught up, have dominated England XIs over the last five years. But Edwards heralds a new approach to rewarding domestic performance.
The recalls of Smith and Arlott, as well as Alice Davidson-Richards who, against West Indies, played her first match since scoring a Test century on debut in 2022, represent rare success stories of a forgotten generation, consistently forced to chase the crest of the professionalism wave.
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