HEATHER KNIGHT

The England captain spoke to Jo Harman ahead of her eighth Ashes series about her greatest tussles with Australia, her love for a format she rarely gets to play, and how you go about beating a team which seems near-enough unbeatable

JO HARMAN Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine editor

@Jo_Wisden

'' Anti-climactic” is how Heather Knight remembers her muted Ashes debut in January 2011. A fortnight after Andrew Strauss had skippered England’s men to an era-defining victory at the SCG, a 20-year-old Knight walked out to open the batting just a few miles down the road at the Bankstown Oval in a one-off Test match which would decide the Women’s Ashes.

Four days earlier Charlotte Edwards’ side had completed a 4-1 trouncing of their hosts in the T20 series, an impressive achievement against the format’s world champions, but, two years before the advent of the multi-format points system, the result would have no bearing on the outcome of the Ashes.

“It was just so low key,” says Knight of that match at Bankstown, which was played out in front of no more than a few hundred fans. “One game at the end of the tour, almost a token, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do the Ashes’.”

The greenhorn opener made scores of 2 and 19 in a seven-wicket defeat as Australia claimed back the trophy they had surrendered in 2005.

Knight admits she has almost no recollection of that 2005 series, when Katherine Brunt inspired England to their first Ashes victory for 42 years, the 20-year-old fast bowler taking nine wickets and scoring a half-century in a six-wicket win at Worcester.

“I don’t remember it being on the telly or publicised at all. I remember the men’s series, coming home to watch it on the telly and then going to the park and telling my mates all about the Ashes win. When I was younger I was more about playing as much cricket as I could, not watching as much. But I vividly remember the men winning in 2005.

“Back then I barely had any knowledge of the England women’s team. I obviously later played with a few of the girls who won in 2005 and they talked about the Trafalgar Square bus journey. Isa [Guha] said everyone thought they were the wives and girlfriends of the men…”