The Guardian Women’s Cricketer of the Year is an award given to a player who has done something truly remarkable, whether by overcoming adversity, helping others or setting a sporting example by acting with exceptional honesty. Katie Levick is this year’s winner.
A question: who is the all-time leading wicket-taker in the Women’s County Championship? Go on, take a guess. Perhaps you are thinking of Katherine Brunt, Anya Shrubsole, or even the recently retired Dani Hazell. On all three counts, you would be wrong. The correct answer is actually Katie Levick: a 28-year-old leg-spinner who hails from Sheffield.
You have probably never heard of her, and for that there is a simple explanation: despite her 190 wickets for Yorkshire, and her impressive record in the Kia Super League – across the four years of the competition, she finishes as the leading non-international wicket‑taker with 29 at an economy of 6.6 – Levick has never worn an England shirt.
It is that paradox which lies at the heart of the Guardian’s decision to name Levick as the 2019 women’s cricketer of the year. The award aims to recognise “a player who has done something truly remarkable”, with “overcoming adversity” listed as one of the criteria. For Levick, that adversity came in the form of a phone call which she had to make seven years ago to the then England Academy coach Lisa Keightley.
Levick had spent 12 months training with the Academy squad, alongside players such as Danni Wyatt and Nat Sciver, and was considered a very exciting prospect. But when she graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in May 2012 the imperative was to find paid work. “I needed some cash,” she recalls. With even the England team still two years away from earning central contracts, cricket was simply not going to pay the bills.
Within weeks, she got a full-time job working in a school. “And that’s when I twigged: ‘I’m not going to be able to keep training.’ I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it all. So I had to make that phone call to Lisa to say: ‘Take me out of consideration from now on.’
“It felt really hard at the time. You muddle through and you get told what to do, and that was the first time I’d had to go to my parents and say: ‘Will you be disappointed if I pull myself out of the system?’ But they said: ‘We fully support you. We’re proud of you for getting a job, and making this big decision.’”
Levick describes her background as “very normal, working-class, northern”: her dad is an electrician, and her mum works as a hospital receptionist. For many others of her generation, the only route into the England side – at a time when “making it” required a professional commitment to training, with no financial recompense – was through parental subsidy. For Levick, that option was never there.
“A lot of the girls didn’t have to make a decision [like mine]. They knew they could coast by on family money for a few years until they saw what happened either way. I didn’t have that luxury – never really wanted that luxury, to be honest. Having grown up with my parents and the family the way we are, you got instilled a very strict work ethic, that you work hard to get your money.” So Levick put her England dreams to rest, and got on with normal life.
That life, though, still allowed her time for women’s county cricket, which – as an amateur venture – is always scheduled at the weekend. Other players might have been bitter; might have dropped out of the sport altogether. Not Levick. “Bitterness does nothing for you,” she says with a shrug. “And playing for Yorkshire, wearing the White Rose, that’s always been my proudest thing. Especially coming from a very sport-dominant family, where you religiously follow Yorkshire and Sheffield Wednesday.”
Levick first played cricket thanks to her older brother, Adam, the pair going along to sessions at their local club, Upper Haugh in Rotherham. Sent for county trials by the colts coach Dale Kerruish when she was 11, Levick was “spotted” by the then England bowler Laura Spragg, her unusual action setting her apart even then. “I get compared to a frog in a blender quite often,” Levick jokes. “I have absolutely no idea how I bowl leg spin, it just happened that way. I genuinely can’t do anything else.”
Above all it is her consistency that sets Levick apart: “I’ve never been someone who bowls 15 different magical mystery balls, I just know I can put it anywhere I want to. I like to think that the batters facing me know that ‘she’s not going to let up and bowl you a bad ball, so you’re going to have to try and go after the good ones’, and that’s when you obviously pick up your wickets.”
She eventually debuted for the Yorkshire first XI aged 16. With two parents working full-time, it was a struggle all the way along: Levick was reliant on lifts from “adopted grandparents” at Upper Haugh, as well as her Yorkshire teammates. “I got picked up a lot from junction 35, that was my pick-up stop!” she says with a laugh. “I used to sit at the side of the motorway with my cricket bag until one of the girls passed!”
Twelve years down the line, bowing out of 50-over women’s county cricket as the competition’s leading wicket-taker seems fair reward for such graft.
As, too, does her success in the KSL, a competition which every August for the past four years has given her just a small taste of what it might have been like to be a professional cricketer. “I did wonder for years: ‘Could I have done it?’ The Super League was my chance to bowl against international players. Doing all right, you think: ‘Actually, I could have done this.’ So it’s nice for my own peace of mind, I’m content that I know I could have competed if things had gone differently.”
In so many ways, Levick is representative of a lost generation of sportswomen who, thanks to the chronic underfunding of women’s sport, have missed out on international glory. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s shake-up of domestic cricket from next season, which will include payment for players below the elite, comes too late to make a difference for Levick, whose future remains uncertain. “With it being the end of the KSL and still the unknown, I don’t know if I will play next year.”
Either way, the abolition of the Women’s County Championship in its current form at least cements her name in the record books permanently. Some small compensation, perhaps, for never gaining the England cap she so richly deserved.