White Fern Suzie Bates tells Scotty Stevenson about her enduring love for cricket — even in the face of selection blues.
Cricketers and their bloody bats. Among the many superstitions that crowd the cluttered corners of a cricketer's brain, the reverence reserved for the bat — identical to the other bats in weight and shape and grain and size — that feels best in the hands and off which runs will flow with a mystically rhythmic percussive thwack, is one of the more puzzling to those of us who have never taken guard and faced down a fastball.
Suzie Bates has a new quiver of bats, all of which are identical. But there's a problem. She is standing in the room, holding a used bat from the recent New Zealand tour to Sri Lanka.
"I really should leave one of the new bats behind because this bat has been knocked in a bit more but then again, I like new, shiny things."
Did you score runs with that bat?
"Not really, but I have used it in the nets."
So begins an exhaustive process of elimination, evaluation, mental bargaining, emotional recollection, shadow batting, de-sleeving, re-sleeving, unpacking, repacking, and rethinking until the cricket bag, slightly frayed and emblazoned with the White Ferns logo and the initials 'SB', laden with pads and gloves and spikes and the assorted flotsam of former tours, contains four identical bats, all of which are now magically imbued with good juju.
Bates is chasing the sun. Again. As she has done since debuting for the White Ferns against India in 2006. In a few hours, she will be high above the Indian Ocean en route to London via Dubai, where she will join the Oval Invincibles in English cricket's The Hundred, a festively Frankensteinian mash-up of cricket formats that have proven to be a hit with the punters while simultaneously confounding and infuriating those who trade in the silken threads of Marylebone tradition.
This will be Bates' second season in The Hundred and her second with the Invincibles, a team she captained to the title last year. She had not been named captain before the season started. She was essentially the last international player selected, a wildcard entry who, through illness to South African star Marizanne Kapp, played the first match and was subsequently elevated to lead the team for the rest of the season, culminating in that final victory at Lord's.
"I guess when you play cricket for as long as I have, embracing a format that challenges you to think differently is genuinely refreshing," she says.
"Having men's and women's matches together at the same venue with packed out crowds, DJs at full volume, and the associated hype that the tournament has been able to conjure up in such a short space of time is so great.
"I remember our first game at The Oval, trying to hear what Dane [original Invincibles captain Dane van Niekerk, who Bates replaced the following week] was saying and finding it impossible with so much noise from the crowd."
The Hundred will be the first stopover on the latest iteration of Bates On Tour. So far this year, she has been to South Africa and Sri Lanka with the White Ferns and Hong Kong for the Fairbreak Invitational tournament, which brings together some of the game's biggest names to play tournament cricket with women from developing nations. After The Hundred, it is on to the Caribbean where she and New Zealand captain Sophie Devine will link up with the impressively monikered Guyana Amazon Warriors in the CPL before re-joining the White Ferns for another South African tour. After that, there is a potential contract in the Australian Women's Big Bash, in which Bates last year played for beaten finalists, Sydney Sixers. That will end just in time for the start of the home international summer against Pakistan.
Why does she do this?
"I love playing cricket. I love competing. I want to challenge myself and just get better each day, and I have no desire to slow down."
There's something else, though, something that is easy to forget in the face of the surging popularity of women's sports and the normalisation of coverage and patronage: This is actually all quite new.
Bates received her first 'contract' in her eighth season playing for her country, and the job description was less professional cricketer, more development officer. The Hundred is just two seasons old, as is the CPL. The Women's Big Bash has been around less than a decade, the White Ferns were first contracted on a full-time basis just six years ago, and they received match fee parity only last season. The women's IPL, leveraging global cricket's deepest pockets, launched just this year.
Bates wasn't at the tournament, passed over in the inaugural draft held, with requisite — and some would say repulsive — Indian billionaire flex, in the middle of the Women's T20 World Cup. Bates only knew she had missed a spot when the first of many sympathetic text messages landed with a melancholy digital thump.
"I was having a bike in the hotel gym as I didn't want to watch the draft. I have never made any assumptions nor taken anything for granted in my career, but I had hoped to be a part of it because that's what I live for — to participate in these tournaments and these occasions that advance the game for all women.
"But I can't lie. I was absolutely devastated."
Bates' non-selection was as heart-breaking for her as it was confusing for many pundits and teammates. No player in the game has scored more T20 International runs than her. Bates also has made the most half-centuries in T20 Internationals and taken the most catches. Notwithstanding the peculiarities and peccadilloes of the IPL's powerbrokers, passing in on a player of her calibre was a perplexing call.
Like all cricket disappointments (and no other sport serves them up with such reliable predictability and in such abundance), Bates took time to assess what this particularly vicious rejection meant for her career and quickly resolved to get back to what she does best: working as hard as she can and appreciating her role within the sport's ecosystem.
In the White Ferns, Bates occupies an unspecified place on the space-time continuum somewhere between the most enthusiastic kid in the team and everyone's favourite Aunty. She is relentlessly positive, adoring and protective of her younger teammates, respected by the other senior members of the side, and wholly committed to leading by example. Not one for the long periods of solitude described by those for whom tour life is something to be endured rather than embraced, Bates will inevitably be the one organising an early morning run club or inveigling herself into the spinners' group on the pretence she's been working on her arm ball.
"They'll have to physically take the bat out of my hand if they think I am ready to leave this team," she says. "I have loved every second of representing my country, and I am in no way ready to stop. I know I have lots more to give."
There is no doubt she does, but she also knows it won't last forever. After the last World Cup in New Zealand, she bid adieu to her bestie, the indomitable wee wicketkeeper Katey Martin, who retired after 18 years in national colours. Last year, long-serving White Fern Amy Satterthwaite was not offered a full-time White Ferns contract, effectively ending her international career. That decision had a destabilising effect on the senior members of the team. If someone of Satterthwaite's standing could be so mercilessly cut, who else ought to be wary of lengthening shadows?
The shadows have been short this month in New Zealand. Bates has been back in Dunedin, where she was born, raised, schooled and apprenticed with Otago Cricket, and where she still lives with her sister, Olivia, on those rare weeks, she is home from hot climates. Her parents have recently built their dream home overlooking the wind-buffed steel-shaded waters of the Otago Harbour. Her mum still cooks her scrambled eggs on weekdays, and she has recently started studying again. The feet itch, though. As much as she loves being 'home'.
"I feel like I can make any team home, and I think it's important to treat this time of my life that way. I am doing the same job I have done since I was 15. I debuted for Otago at Carisbrook as a Year 10 student when I was called up for a game in the middle of a school day. I didn't even own a pair of spikes.
"I have done this job when I had to pay to do it, and when my parents had to pay for me to do it. I have done this job when it was unpaid. I have done this job when it was poorly paid. And now, I am doing this job at a time when it is well-paid, brimming with fresh opportunities, and growing rapidly. I am so fortunate and very proud to have been a part of a generation that has played through this transition.
"We are grateful to the women who came before us, mindful of our responsibility to them and to the game, and intent upon bringing through the next generation so that they are armed with the professional mindset and skills required to keep this sport on an upward trajectory."
She smiles as she thinks about her departure; her freckled nose scrunches as her mind wanders into a month in London, exploring her neighbourhood between Invincibles games, catching up with old sparring partners, re-engaging with rivalries old and new, dousing her perma-tanned face in another sprinkling of sunshine. With any luck, she'll add a few more runs. Maybe some will come off one of those new bats, the ones that are identical to the old bats, the ones that feel like they are just right.
Well, in any case, and whether the runs flow now, or next week, or the week after that, Bates will chase the sun.
The Scotty Stevenson Interview is a regular feature you can find on 1News.co.nz each Saturday.
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