It probably wasn’t the tightest game seen at Hackett Neighbourhood Oval, but last weekend the Wood Ducks XI fell seven runs short of Barton CC in a tense round eight fixture of the Canberra City and Suburban Cricket Association 6th-grade competition.
In fairness to the Wood Ducks, the odds were against them: Barton’s captain, also its opening batter and opening bowler, contributed 73 runs, took 2-29 from nine overs and expertly marshalled her team. She also happens to be among the select few Australians to have hit the winning runs in a World Cup final, and once vied for the title of best fast bowler in the world.
Former Test and one-day international star Bronwyn Calver is a 51-year-old public servant now but not the type who wears a cardigan and sits still.
“People say, ‘Why are you still playing?’,” Calver says.
“I say why not? I love it.”
In 1997, Calver was a vital cog in Belinda Clark’s world-beaters. With her hooping in-swingers, she was the ice to Cathryn Fitzpatrick’s fire. If the defining image of the final at Eden Gardens is the photo of Clark leading the team on its lap of honour past packed stands, the vision that stands out is Calver’s outrageous delivery to remove the middle stump of New Zealand batting ace Emily Drumm and set Australia on the path to victory.
Has any Australian bowler swung it more to take such a crucial wicket?
“That was probably the best ball I ever bowled,” Calver admits.
“I’d bowled a few down the leg side and they weren’t called wides. I think that added to the pressure on Drumm. I’ve seen footage of it — massive in-swing, perfect spot. I couldn’t have bowled a better ball. It just lifted the whole team and we knew that nothing was going to stop us.”
And nothing has stopped them since.
The ’97 Australian team not only took the trophy, it elevated the game to new heights, thanks to luminaries such as Clark, Cathryn Fitzpatrick, Mel Jones, Zoe Goss, Karen Rolton and Julia Price. That special squad maintains an ongoing influence in administration, coaching and punditry.
A true all-rounder
And Calver might be the great all-rounder of the lot. Decades before Ellyse Perry’s dual-sport brilliance, Calver was a youth international goal-keeper before football officials gave her an ultimatum. Later, in her spare time, she became a FIFA referee and officiated at international level. She’s also been an ICC scorer and statistician, extending her former role as Clark’s on-ground human calculator.
At 38, she took up Aussie Rules and only stopped at 45 when recovery from games started stretching past mid-week. A triathlon and baseball were other forays.
“My motto’s always been ‘use it or lose it’,” the Canberra local says.
“I’ll give most sports a try.”
But cricket eventually called again, and there was no great reluctance when she was dragged back to play with “the fellas”.
“One of the guys at work asked me four years ago whether I’d be interested in filling in for them, because he knew I’d played,” Calver says.
“I hadn’t got rid of my gear. That filling in turned into pretty much full-time. Then they asked me to captain the side. It’s a real mix of youth and old heads. And we have quite a few who’d never played competition cricket before, so it was a good challenge.”
It’s brought Calver full circle, squaring off against the sort of all-male teams she faced as a youngster when the family decamped from Footscray to Canberra in 1979. A flyer went around the local schools: “Junior cricketers wanted”.
She certainly could. Some weekends in the early 1980s, it went something like this: a junior boys game, then lower-grade men and schoolgirls cricket. On Sunday afternoon, it was time for the senior women’s competition.
“My mum played for about seven years when I started,” Calver says.
“She didn’t have a cricket background. We used to struggle for numbers and there was one game where we had to rope her mother in to play as well, just so we didn’t forfeit. We had three generations in the one team, which was pretty cool — my grandmother was 69 years old when she played that game, so there’s a long way for me to go to reach that point!”
Representative honours
At just 13, Calver was handed her first senior representative cap, playing for ACT women in the national carnival. From that 1982-83 season, she was a fixture in top cricket in a career that spanned three decades and multiple generations of game-changers.
When ACT stopped entering a team in the national competition, a 15-year endless commute began to play Sydney grade cricket for Gordon, but with it came seven titles in eight seasons with New South Wales.
“It wasn’t a chore,” Calver says.
“I wanted to play that level so I had a chance at the next level.”
Her Australian debut seemed to take forever and then arrived in a rush, in a 1991 limited overs game against New Zealand at Bellerive Oval.
“I wasn’t meant to be playing that game,” Calver says.
“Lyn Larsen was the captain and she got food poisoning. It was a late change. I was fielding on the boundary and I remember these kids waiting at the fence to get my autograph, which had never happened before.”
Such was the strength of the Australian team and the paucity of women’s international fixtures, it was two years before Calver got another run. There followed Australia’s disastrous 1993 World Cup campaign.
“We were sitting in the stand at Lord’s, watching England win the final, and it was just…” Calver says, still shaking her head at the memory.
“We’d been talked up. We were the favourites. And we lost to England first, then New Zealand absolutely thumped us. It was terrible.”
When retribution came in ’97, it was sweet.
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“We really enjoyed beating England in the round match,” Calver says with a mischievous laugh.
“We did a particularly loud rendition of our team song after that game, and somehow the door came open, so England might have heard a bit more of it than normal.”
Relief was the prevailing emotion when she stroked the winning runs in the final.
“I was in the right place at the right time. I played it forward of point and just remember putting my hand in the air. It was so good.”
A year later, Calver packed her three-Test career into as many weeks, simultaneously thrilling and anticlimactic — the result was three draws in wet and lifeless conditions. After that tour, she started feeling the aches and pains more than ever.
“My body was just done. Cooked. But I kept playing. I just didn’t think I could get back to that level again. But then, the following couple of seasons for New South Wales, I was like, ‘Oh, why did I do that?'”
“I did reverse the decision and contact the chair of selectors after the 2000 World Cup loss,” she says with another chuckle.
“But I didn’t hear anything back! That would be the only regret of my career, I’d say. I retired too early.”
She takes quiet pride in the heights the women’s game is reaching now, and was one of the 86,174 present to watch Australia claim the World T20 title in March.
“It was such a joyous occasion, seeing what they did on the field and seeing all the people I’d played with in the past.”
Still, she wouldn’t swap eras.
Perhaps Calver will someday break Nan’s record and play at 70. Every time a new thought on the game spills out, it’s invariably punctuated with a phrase that explains her ongoing involvement: “I just love it.” Calver says it over and over.
Two seasons ago, having already paid her fees, she ruptured her Achilles on season’s eve but still spent the season scoring for Barton’s 4th XI.
Her plans now: “Just playing, and teaching the young ones how to do colour-coded scoring,” Calver says.
“When I’m not batting I do the scorebook. In our comp, the batting team does both books. I grab one of the young guys and say, ‘C’mon, this is what we’re gonna do’. It’s good fun.”
