Marg’s ambition pays dividends
WOMEN’S cricket pioneer Marg Jennings still remembers the letter informing her she had been selected to play for Australia ... and the more sobering note that followed it.
“You got your letter to say you were selected, and then a note to say this is how much you have to pay,” Jennings said.
But the former Australian captain would not change her trailblazing journey for all the money in the women’s IPL, after being inducted into Australian Cricket Hall of Fame.
As a girl born in 1949, Jennings would go with her father to the MCG where she watched the every move of Australia’s wicketkeeper Wally Grout (now her fellow Hall of Famer).
Despite not even knowing women’s cricket was a thing until she went to high school, she followed in Grout’s footsteps and went on to carve out her own reputation with the gloves.
She became the first Australian female wicketkeeper to score a century, and still today is the only women’s Test player to captain, keep and open the batting in a Test.
She found herself back at the MCG almost five decades later among the 86,174 fans who attended the 2020
Women’s T20 World Cup final, and felt a life-long mission had been realised.
“I remember sitting in the stand and James Sutherland (former Cricket Australia chief executive) was in front of me,” Jennings, 73, said. “He turned around and he said to me, ‘ Did you ever think you’d see this?’
“And I said, ‘No, but I dreamt it’. It’s just wonderful. To think we started off getting selected and they’d say, ‘now here’s your bill’, and all of those things mounted up.
“But you wouldn’t swap it. The friends you made, the places you went to, the people you met overseas, it was all worth it.”