‘It is a stupid game but that’s what makes it lovable’: Sarah Taylor on cricket, coping with anxiety and coaching with Andrew Flintoff

Sarah Taylor was stuck in traffic inching south when she got a call. She had just spent two days at Loughborough working with the England Lions wicketkeepers, taking Lancashire’s Matty Hurst and James Rew of Somerset through some drills overseen by the head coach Andrew Flintoff. The sessions had gone well. Hurst, who had personally asked if Taylor could be there having worked with her at the Manchester Hundred franchise, was especially receptive. It was Ed Barney, ECB’s performance director, on the line. Would she fancy joining them on tour in South Africa? Before she could think herself out of it, she blurted out an answer.

“Internally I was absolutely petrified,” she says. “I hadn’t flown for quite a few years. But what came out my mouth was: ‘Absolutely, when are we leaving?’ And that was the start of it.”

It has not been easy for Taylor to get to a place where she can say yes to things. Not long ago, just boarding that flight would have been unimaginable. The end days of her once brilliant career had been bedevilled by performance-based anxiety and a creeping agoraphobia. “Oh, I absolutely wanted to bin the game off. I was so bitter about it. Stupid game. And it is a stupid game. But that’s what makes it lovable.”

Severance from playing brought peace and, in time, a fresh perspective. The Lions came along at the perfect moment. “The opportunity was there and I felt if I’d said no to that opportunity, then one: I wouldn’t be where I am today. And two: like, you’re genuinely an idiot if you say no to this. I didn’t know where it was going to lead, but I knew it was going to be a great experience, no matter what. I’ve genuinely loved it.”

Most recently she has been with the squad in Abu Dhabi, hunkered down in a palatial bunker at the point at which the world turned darker still. For four days, until they were lifted out of the region, the soundtrack to their lives was a cacophony of banging and sirens. Many of the cohort were more than a little perturbed. Some of them were outright panicked. Flintoff, the man of a thousand lived experiences, was the centrifugal force around which the rest coalesced. He pointed out, sanguinely enough, that it was not exactly his first rodeo.

Taylor and Flintoff have forged a tight bond, to the extent that her work with the Lions, focusing on the keeping and fielding side, will roll on this summer. “If Fred speaks, you do not want to be the person speaking afterwards,” she says. “He’s so genuine, just such a lovely, lovely guy. He cares so much about the guys and how they do, he probably cares in equal parts about them as people, and wants to get the best out of them, but also to make sure they’re OK.”

Seen through the lens of a next generation that hangs on his every word, the reintegration of Flintoff into English cricket starts to look less like a favour and more like good sense.

When she last spoke to us at Wisden Cricket Monthly six years ago, Taylor was edging tentatively towards this new life but unsure if her volatile relationship with the game could withstand it. She had tried out a few sessions at Bede’s School in Sussex, after which she was offered the chance to work with the keepers in the Sussex men’s squad, the switch that convinced her it was worth pursuing.

Wrestling with impostor syndrome and hyperconscious of walking into a male environment, the nerves were “eliminated” by the kindness of the people around her – Ian Salisbury, James Kirtley, Grant Flower. She came to see that she was there because few human beings knew more about the mysterious, elemental art of catching cricket balls than she does. If that sounds over the top, consider Adam Gilchrist, no stranger to the skill, saying in 2018 that he considered Taylor the best wicketkeeper in the world.

Keeping is universal, she says. “Doesn’t matter who I’m working with. I’m still looking at exactly the same things – the skills to be able to either help or manoeuvre or work out a technique that works for that player. Sure, the ball will be thrown a lot harder in the men’s game. Doesn’t mean that the girls don’t throw it hard too.”

And the other bit? Navigating the hoary old “men are from Mars, women from Venus” proposition? “There’s pros and cons with absolutely everything. And girls are better at handling things more factually, the more professional the game gets – though I don’t think I was that professional when it came to my emotions! And the guys could probably open up a little bit more – that would be my only thing.

“But across the board, as soon as you get to know the individual, then you deal with that individual. Because there will be some guys that are more emotional, and some girls that aren’t. It’s not like a one-size-fits-all. There’s a generalisation that women are more emotional, but men are probably equally as emotional, just in a different way.”

While in the main she has been inducted into set-ups without a murmur, she is not naive to the residual sexism that lurks in certain corners; later she will tell me that having worked not entirely fruitfully with one prominent young player this winter, she suspects it was not merely her ideas he objected to.

Later in our conversation she will list the numerous coaches she has worked with, all of them men, apologising along the way to those she has omitted like it is an Oscars speech. In the sense that no other female coach is so embedded in the culture of men’s cricket, she is unique – though this was much the case when she played. Even in her prime, evolving perceptions of women’s cricket more profoundly than any of her contemporaries, she remained a singular presence: “super-charming but unknowable” – as an England colleague once described her to me; essential and enigmatic, bubbly and brittle, all at once.

No sooner had she been parachuted out of Abu Dhabi than Taylor was up in London, sat around a table in a crowded room bidding for cricketers with the coaches of Manchester Super Giants. It was a pinch yourself moment, she says. “It was one of those: this is how far the game has come, how far the game has moved on. It was an amazing thing to sit there and think about. The first day was the women’s auction. We’re paying £210,000 for players! And it was like, ‘Wow, this is insane’. And then I’m like, ‘How good is this?’”

She was only supposed to do the women’s stuff, but was asked to chip in on the men’s too – which suited her fine, she says, being more in tune with men’s cricket. “I had Meg Lanning and Matthew Mott on one day, and then I’m sat opposite Justin Langer and Tom Moody the next day, and I’m like, ‘Where am I?’ It’s been an experience.”

It is a not entirely serious question but does she mildly regret that she did not come through a decade later, to reap the rewards of her brilliance on a grander financial scale? “I genuinely don’t, because I went through the stresses of playing. I went through my own journey with it and I don’t want to do it again. I was really happy with my career. I had a lot of downs and I had a lot of ups, but I’m OK with that. I’ve made my peace with that.”

She came up, at 17 years old, into a world where you paid your way, took your tips and played for kicks. She remembers her first game for England, at Lord’s, where we are meeting today. It was August 2006, against India. Just a single stand was open, for a few family members and curious onlookers. Eleven years later, at a gleefully heaving Lord’s against the same opposition, she would get to lift the World Cup, having been sensitively managed by a dressing room that rallied around their most precious and precarious talent when she feared she wouldn’t have the strength to get there herself.

Up to a year before that World Cup, she had been experiencing panic attacks and was suffering with a form of agoraphobia. “I thought agoraphobia was when you can’t leave your house. Actually, it just means you’re always looking for escape, or you’re stuck in your safe place, which at one point was my car.”

Did it stem from cricket? “It absolutely did. There was a performance element that I really struggled with. Like, I need to perform, otherwise I’ll get abuse here, or the girls won’t like me. There were all these ridiculous thoughts that won every time.”

Being at her peak made things worse. “I’d rather have been somebody who was just hiding,” she says. “Because when you’re at the top, you’ve only got down, right? Rather than going, let’s see how far I can go here.” Her attitude now, she says, is sunnier, more reflective of that upward curve. “But back then it was: ‘Don’t be in the limelight. Don’t be different. Don’t do that interview.’ It was ridiculous how tired I was and I hadn’t even stepped on a pitch. Then that anxiety manifested in having a panic attack on a plane.” She was in India, at the 2016 World Cup, when it really snowballed. She recalls struggling to breathe before one game during the national anthem.

It is still not entirely clear how she got through that summer of 2017. “To perform how I did … I very rarely say that, but yeah, I’m pretty proud of myself.” She hung up the gloves soon after, strung out at just 30, consoling herself that she had at least paved the path for others to prosper.

These days she is good, she says. She is managing. “I have good days and bad days, like everyone else, but I couldn’t get on trains, coaches, buses, nothing – taxis, no good. I was the driver all the time, in control, and then I blink and I’m in Abu Dhabi on a coach, or I’m in India and the ground’s an hour away, and I don’t even think twice about getting on the bus, whereas before that would have been unthinkable. This is the part of the game, Sarah, this is life, crack on. Like I say, it has its challenges. But to anyone listening to this who did suffer, oh my God, it gets better.”

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