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Western Sydney. The early 90s. A young, cricket-mad lad finds the beautiful game consuming his every waking moment.
All he thinks about are dashing centuries, spectacular five-fers, and acrobatic catches. His soul lives and dies with the fortunes of the Australian Test team, and he dreams of someday joining those sacred ranks himself.
He joins a local team, and immediately his dreams hit a snag: he is very, very bad at cricket.
At the same time, just a few minutes' drive away, another youngster takes up one of Australia's most cherished pastimes, and unlike the unfortunate future wordsmith above, discovers she possesses extraordinary talent.
Lisa Sthalekar's achievements have been spectacular by anyone's standards, even if at the time few Australian sports fans were taking notice.
She conquered the cricketing world back when televised women's sport was a rarity and professional female athletes thin on the ground.
But by pursuing her passion, Sthalekar helped make it easier for future generations of female cricketers to do the same, albeit for better pay than she once received.
As the overwhelmingly blokey edifice of Australian sport begins to crack and let through a new wave of professional female athletes, Sthalekar has begun a new career in the commentary box, where she's part of another new wave storming a male bastion — the one behind the microphone.
'My first love was tennis'
It's a buzz to speak with Indian-born Sthalekar, 37, and not a little intimidating.
A bona fide legend of the game who played 187 times for Australia between 2001 and 2013, she established herself as one of the world's premier all-rounders.
Sthalekar became the first woman to achieve the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in one-day internationals, achieving the dream of millions by hitting an Ashes Test century, and crowning a glittering international career with victory in the 2013 World Cup.
Funnily, however, it was tennis that was her first love: "I had tennis posters on the wall," she says.
Having started out playing cricket with the boys "just for fun", it was initially more a social activity than a serious sporting pursuit. Until she was 12, she says, "I didn't realise women's cricket existed".
Although she made some representative teams, Sthalekar was eventually turned off tennis. "I found it a very lonely sport — and it could be quite bitchy as well," she says.
"The fact you're playing your doubles teammate in the singles — that just blew my mind, and I think I preferred hanging out with [my] mates and having a team and supporting each other."
The fact young Sthalekar was ignorant of the existence of women's cricket raises a point that has long nagged at me. When society so frequently sends the message that sport is "boys' business", do female sport-lovers feel excluded?
Sthalekar was teased at school for preferring sport to feminine stereotypes — "playing handball at lunchtime instead of plaiting my mates' hair" — but wasn't deterred.
"I never saw it as an issue, it was what I loved," she says, adding that her family have always been supportive of her passion for sport.
The world is waking up to women's sport
Still, it was a time when a young female athlete might struggle to find visible role models, not least because the media presented the game as almost exclusively male.
Indeed, most of her role models were male players: Steve Waugh, Adam Gilchrist, Mark Waugh, Sachin Tendulkar.
She is enthusiastic about how much easier it is for today's aspiring female stars to find personal inspiration: "On TV there's more women's sport now than there ever was," she says.
"For the young girls watching sport now, they get to turn on the TV and watch women's cricket, football, rugby sevens, basketball … you name it."
Indeed, it almost seems as if women's sport is having a 'moment'.
The national women's AFL competition is enjoying a booming first year, with crowds and TV ratings exceeding expectations. The football community is abuzz with talk of the new generation of talented female stars.
And, of course, the Women's Big Bash League (WBBL) is attracting more attention than ever — partly owing to unprecedented free-to-air TV coverage of the games, of which Sthalekar has been a part both as a player and commentator.
But Sthalekar rejects that way of putting it.
"Women's sport is doing exactly what it's always done," she says. "It's just the rest of the world is waking up to it."
The players haven't changed what they're doing, she adds — rather, administrators and sponsors are suddenly realising, "51 per cent of the population likes sport".
Sthalekar's silverware
But while the history of women's cricket is not so much shorter than men's, it's been a hard road to getting even a fraction of the attention the men's game attracts.
That attention is starting to arrive could be due to a more enlightened set of administrators, or more likely, the folks holding the levers of power realising it was simply poor business sense to keep half the population cut off from the highest levels of cricket.
This realisation is in no small part due to women like Sthalekar, a prime example of the kind of star that helped make women's cricket an appealing proposition for the media: intelligent and articulate but still fiercely combative on the field.
The successful women's teams Sthalekar played in — the 2005 and 2013 ODI World Cups and the 2009 World T20 among the silverware — without doubt helped build the game's profile as one for Australians to take pride in.
She laughs when I point out Cricinfo's description of her as a "flamboyant all-rounder" and uses the word "lucky" more than once to describe her own career, but there's no doubt she was one of her generation's most watchable players.
While they are much improved on a decade ago, the profiles and pay packets of professional female cricketers are still nowhere near the fortunes amassed by the top players in the men's game.
Last year's central contracts from Cricket Australia saw Australian skipper Steve Smith pocket $1.12 million and the rest of the top 20 male cricketers in the country take home $900,000 each.
And that's just retainer fees: they earn thousands more in match fees and performance bonuses, as well as sponsorship deals and fat pay packets from the Indian Premier League and other domestic T20 tournaments around the world.
'Things have changed drastically, and that's a good thing'
In contrast, the maximum retainer for a member of the Australian women's team is $65,000, to which can be added a $15,000 retainer for the top players in the Women's Big Bash League, as well as match payments and tour fees.
(Cricket Australia has recently announced this will jump again, with average pay for international female cricketers rising to $179,000 from July 1 this year, and the average salary for a state player rising to $52,000).
Still, it's a big difference from Sthalekar's heyday, when, as the number-one contracted player on the roster, she was earning just $15,000 a year.
"Things have changed really drastically and quickly, and that's a good thing," says Sthalekar.
"Can it get better? Absolutely. Are we going in the right direction? Yes, we are. It's important that we keep building incrementally over the next few years."
Certainly, as co-founder of the Women's International Cricket League, Sthalekar is working away in the background to help boost the opportunities available to current and future female cricketers.
But it's in commentary — what she calls "the best job in the world" — that she has really made her mark of late, becoming a familiar presence in the box for Channel Ten during the WBBL, for Channel Nine during the international one-dayers and T20s, and on ABC radio throughout the summer.
"Some would say I've missed out," she says of new generation's soaring profile. "But I would say I've come into the game, or the second part of my career, at the right time … what the girls do now, it's professional.
"They're training more, they're playing more games than ever before. I don't begrudge them any part of it."
Mastering a new set of skills
Of course, there will always be some hold-outs who claim to dislike listening to women commentating sport.
The first-ever female cricketing commentator, Kate Fitzpatrick, ran into a solid wall of sexist intransigence from the Channel Nine boys' club when she was introduced as an experiment in 1983.
The old pros of the commentary team seemed to resent their turf being invaded by the opposite sex and closed ranks, making sure Fitzpatrick got the message: no girls allowed.
And even today, female commentators have to endure encounters like Mel McLaughlin's infamous "Don't blush, baby" interview with Chris Gayle.
It's a little surprising, then, that Sthalekar describes her own experience as one of supportive colleagues; if the boys' club still exists in cricketing commentary, she's apparently managed to elude it so far.
"Everyone has been really welcoming, helpful," she says.
Her focus, it seems, is on mastering a new set of skills — for example, "how to call a 'four' fifteen different ways so you don't repeat yourself".
And to this listener at least, it's paying off: Sthalekar's commentary is a breath of fresh air in an environment that can too often deteriorate into stale cliche.
"I try to look at my second career like my cricket career," she says.
"I was pretty shit at cricket when I started, and I'm probably pretty rubbish as a commentator, but practice makes perfect.
"I certainly have not mastered it — that's going to take another 10, 15, 20 years. It's just like cricketers would say, you're always trying to better yourself, you're never going to have a perfect game."
Topics: careers, feminism, people, cricket, women, sport, australia
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