Can lightning strike twice?
Nick Friend asks New Zealand’s star allrounder Amelia Kerr if she can inspire her country to another shock World Cup win
ABOVE Amelia Kerr batting for Manchester Originals in The Hundred
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or almost a year now, Melie Kerr has been a world champion. Whatever her belief in her team-mates, not many beyond those dressing room walls ever thought 2024 would bring that story. New Zealand spent most of that year losing. By the time they reached Sharjah and Dubai in late September for the T20 World Cup, they’d lost 14 times to England alone since January, across two tours – one at home, one away. During the summer, Sophie Devine – the captain – cut such a forlorn figure, asked in press conference upon press conference about what progress she had seen, that you’d have been laughed out of the indoor schools of Canterbury and Bristol, where she’d sat in front of microphones and insisted that she was seeing grounds for optimism.