It’s taken years but Beaumont’s now an overnight sensation
There is no better illustration of the transformation Tammy Beaumont has made as an international cricketer than taking a look at her Test record. To save her blushes, let’s not dwell on it too much, but needless to say, the numbers are dire. Now, she’s the in-form ODI opening batsman going around, with a World Cup player of the tournament trophy for proof.
Due to the deficit England carry out of the ODI component of the multi-format series, a loss would be terminal for their hopes of leaving the country with the trophy in their hand luggage. In turn, there is no better time for Beaumont to transfer her matchwinning white-ball ways to the pink in the inaugural daynight women’s Test.
“I have a lot more about me as a batter now instead of the seven that I average (in Tests),” Beaumont tells The
Cricket Paper in a discussion of less flattering times. “My debut and second Test were part of the Old Tammy Beaumont when I was very much in and out of the team and not really sure what I was trying to do.”
The right-hander says she “genuinely thought about walking away from the game” after five years struggling in the England shirt. “After the World T20 in 2014 where I think I played five games for ten runs,” she added. “It was pretty embarrassing.”
It was four innings not five, but the ten runs she recalls correctly. But it was the turning point as well; the bit that “made me who I am today” in Beaumont’s words.
“I went away for six weeks where I refused to pick up a bat and came back hungrier than ever having identified a number of areas to work from,” she says. And the big bit: “It was there I decided I wanted to try and be one of the best opening bats in the world. That’s what drove me at that point and where Tammy part two started.”
After making her international bow as a wicketkeeper, she had batted all over the England list. “For a long time I was trying to be a cricketer that didn’t suit me,” she recalls, “doing what was available at the time and it was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
But now, finally, she knew where she wanted to be.
Timing suited the ambition when Mark Robinson joined England as coach after the failed Women’s Ashes of 2015, earmarking Beaumont as a player who needed to finally flourish if his tenure was to be successful.
“I nearly messed it up!” she laughs of that first chance given to her as an opener in the new regime. “I went to South Africa for the T20s and got four and four opening the batting. But I must have shown enough to go to India (for the World T20 in March 2016) and that’s where it really took off.”
Impressing there, Beaumont retained the spot when Pakistan toured for the first ODIs of the post-Charlotte Edwards era. In the first three games of the series she made her maiden half-century, then century, then 150 – in consecutive hits. It may have taken seven years, but at age 25 she was finally up and flying.
“Once Charlotte and Lydia Greenway retired there was a lot of us with a lot of potential that had to perform,” she says. “Both of them were such great players but you might actually hide behind them and a few more of us needed to step forward. I’m one of those.” Her opening partner Lauren Winfield was another. Now, they are World Cup winners.
Even though it took retirements and Robinson for Beaumont’s big break to materialise, her journey was radically altered by the introduction of full-time contracts in 2014. To explain the difference between then and now, Beaumont uses the 2017 World Cup, where she struck 402 runs – more than any other.
“Any of the 15 players in the squad could have walked into that team,” she says. “That competition was lacking before. I got quite a lot of games because it was ‘well, we’ve tried that person we better try someone else’ as opposed to taking the chance when I got it.”
When Beaumont was battling away as a fringe player, she was also trying to run a sports massage business that, by her own admission, “failed pretty badly” as she couldn’t retain clients as a result of having to prioritise her sport. Now, she has no idea where professional cricket might eventually take her. It’s the stuff of dreams. “In the last five to ten years look at how far the women’s game has come. I can’t even imagine what it’ll look like when I retire in five to ten more and what will be available for someone like me.”
Plenty, that’s for sure. But first, she has a Test match to win.
“I decided I wanted to try to be one of the best opening bats in the world. That’s where Tammy part two started“