Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

68 Chapter Ten After ‘76 Following the Australian tour in 1976, there were no international matches in 1977, and Unigate had decided to end their sponsorship of women’s cricket ‘because of the economic climate’, meaning that they didn’t seem to be gaining anything from it, so there would be no international visit in 1978 either. But there were trial games to select the team to go to India for the World Cup. In June the Cricketer listed some of the season’s fixtures including the Queen’s Silver Jubilee match between Prince Charles’ XI and an International Women’s XI (this was later described as a WCA XI, with Rachael Heyhoe Flint as captain and Enid vice-captain) a game which in the end was completely washed out. By this point Rachael Heyhoe Flint (as a working journalist) was writing the token column in the Cricketer , and in July she listed more fixtures, including Lord’s Taverners against an International Women’s XI at Burton-on-Trent for Bass’s bicentenary. Whether these games actually took place, who knows? Despite the promises made, there was nothing about Women’s Cricket in the Cricketer for the rest of 1977. Enid’s only appearance on Cricket Archive in 1977 was for the Rest against the WCA, when she bowled ten overs for 19 runs and scored 67 not out, the Rest, rather embarrassingly for the selectors, winning a single innings game by ten wickets. Oddly, as it seemed at the time, Rachael Heyhoe Flint was not selected as captain of the WCA side, the captaincy going to Mary Pilling. Enid says ‘ Rachael came to Lynne Thomas and me saying that she could not understand why she was not captain. In those days we did not ask selectors about their decisions but my memory is that we did not know either. We told her that neither of us was interested in being captain and Lynne said “why don’t you go and ask the selectors?”. Much later we were told that the real reason was that the selectors had told Rachael to stay with the team at night but she sometimes went home (she had a young son, Ben)’ Enid says that Rachael talked to her and Lynne Thomas at the time and suggested she might be dropped, so the final result was not as much a surprise to her as suggested by Heyhoe , which of course was written to maximise the sensational. In July the Possibles played the Probables. Enid, not being a candidate for the World Cup party, did not appear. Under the heading ‘England Prepare for World Cup’, the Guardian noted: A gifted opening bat, Enid Bakewell,