Friday Hoydens: Ellyse Perry and Suzie Bates

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

There’s something about women cricketers… they just can’t confine themselves to one sport, dammit!

Ellyse Perry plays a forward defensive shot
Ellyse Perry, by YellowMonkey, CC BY-SA
Ellyse Perry is one of the Southern Star’s best known players, playing for the national team since age 16. She’s an all-rounder, and now aged 21 has appeared in 2 Tests and 39 One Day Internationals. (Women cricketers have far fewer opportunities to play Test matches than men do, a lifetime total of under 10 Tests is normal.) She also debuted for the Matildas, our national soccer team, in the same year as she began playing for the Southern Stars. In 2011, when she came on as a substitute in a Norway v Australia game in the FIFA World Cup she became the first woman to have represented Australia in senior World Cups in two different sports.

Suzie Bates stands with bat in the field
Suzie Bates, by paddynapper CC BY-SA
Suzie Bates was made captain of the White Ferns in December 2011. Like Perry, she is an all-rounder (or apparently so, I haven’t found her described as such, coverage of her online is poorer, and if you ever felt like contributing to Wikipedia today is your lucky day): she currently holds the highest batting average in her Twenty20 team, and she took four wickets in New Zealand’s path to the World Cup final in 2009. In addition to her years of cricketing, she also played for New Zealand’s basketball team in the 2008 Olympics, although she told Cricinfo that her responsibilities as cricket captain will probably mean that she cannot play again in the 2012 Olympics.

Perry and Bates will be part of the Southern Stars and the White Ferns respectively during their upcoming eight-match series in Sydney/Melbourne in late January and early February.

References

Ways to spend my time

Ideas already for my unexpected surfeit of time in 2010!

Joining the Sydney Recorder Society. I played recorder a lot in high school, through to seventh grade AMEB. I have very rarely played since, nor in fact really missed it, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy playing again. I’ve also been interested in improving my singing and perhaps joining a choir for many years but up until now I’ve had money or time for music, never both.

My mothers’ group is joining an indoor netball tornament. People tend to salivate at the idea of me playing defence for their netball teams; I’m not actually terribly good at anything other than casting a long shadow, nor do I find netball itself the most fascinating of sports, but it doesn’t sound like it will be a terribly serious team and playing a season would probably be pleasant enough.

Finally doing some sewing on the machine we were given more than a year ago.

Working on the children-on-the-Internet project described here.