Even Root found it tough batting with blindfold

THIS WEEK...

DAN FIELD

England VI Wicketkeeper Age: 28 Clubs: England Visually Impaired and Sussex Sharks

What is your story?

I started playing cricket at about six years old – my Dad was massively into the sport and used to take me to games. I was born visually impaired and it was around about the age of 11 or 12 when everyone else kept growing and my sight became a real hindrance and I could not keep up. I would spend a lot of time upset and angry because people were better than me because they could see, not because of anything else.

Around that time I found blind cricket and slipped into that when I was about 12 and then went on to make my England debut when I was 17.

How did you find visually impaired cricket?

A guy called Geoff Smith had been involved in blind cricket for years and he moved down to Sussex and said he wanted to set up a blind team. He managed to get some funding together and Sussex supported it as well. There was a charity called Blatchington Court Trust, who are an education trust that supports people under the age of 28 in Sussex, and they passed my details on to Geoff. He got in touch and asked if I wanted to play some cricket.

What is the state of VI cricket in England?

The first World Cup I was involved in was in 2006 in Pakistan, and in order to go to that we had to shake a bucket in Waterloo station to raise the funds! Now we have the backing of the ECB it is completely different – we have a full-time medical team and physios, it really has moved on to another level.

But you should not get any of that stuff for the sake of it, you need to earn it. The story of shaking buckets may not sound great but you have to show a level of dedication.You can’t just call yourself the England team because you want to. But the support and facilities we get from the ECB are excellent and really do help us improve.

What was the ‘Cricket has no boundaries’ event like to be involved in this week?

It was great to have Eoin Morgan, Joe Root, Adil Rashid, Moeen Ali, Kate Cross, Tash Farrant and Heather Knight all down to support the event. Joe Root had a go at batting with a blindfold on and found it very tough, which shows the skill that our guys who are fully blind have when they face balls that are 50mph-60mph. But their support and respect is very important. It was great to be involved in and if it helps raise the profile of disability cricket then that is the main thing. It was good to show that we are not a hard-luck story but rather that we are serious cricketers who put in a shift.