In 1998, the ultimate 12 months of Norma Izard’s five-year stint on the helm of the English Girls’s Cricket Affiliation (WCA), she decided that may change the course of sporting historical past. “The Australians saved on saying ‘why don’t we’ve got a trophy once we play England?’ However they by no means did something about it,” she would say in a 2017 interview. “So I believed, properly, I’ll do it then. I used to be president, so no person might cease me!”
Impressed by the boys’s Ashes urn, she requested a buddy, the woodcarver Brian Hodges, to sculpt a hole picket cricket ball. Then, on 20 July, she gathered collectively the England and Australian girls’s cricket groups at Lord’s, had them signal a miniature bat, borrowed a wok from the kitchens of Marylebone Cricket Membership (MCC), burned the bat in it, and positioned the “ashes” within the picket ball.
It was a distinctly unglamorous event; nonetheless, the idea of the “Girls’s Ashes” so vividly captured the general public creativeness that 25 years later, in the summertime of 2023, document crowds would flock to look at the 2 groups compete to win Norma’s little picket ball.
For Norma, who has died aged 90, this could be her last act as WCA president: 4 months earlier, she had presided over the extraordinary basic assembly at which WCA members voted to merge with the England and Wales Cricket Board. That meant the tip of Norma’s 50-year relationship with the Affiliation, which had begun in 1948 when she attended a schoolgirls’ teaching session in Kent (the primary ever held within the county), concerned a interval as a nationwide selector, and culminated in her appointment, in 1984, as England supervisor.
Girls’s cricket was nonetheless solely beginner within the Eighties and the position was unremunerated, however Norma (nicknamed “Storming Norma” by the England gamers) slowly launched a extra skilled outlook, imposing a strict 10pm curfew and a one-beer-a-day consuming restrict on excursions. In 1988, she persuaded the WCA to nominate Ruth Prideaux as the primary everlasting England coach.
It was a masterstroke: Ruth’s radical concepts about sports activities psychology and health, coupled with Norma’s quiet effectivity behind the scenes, noticed England overcome their underdog standing to triumph within the 1993 World Cup last at Lord’s. The event was a becoming swansong for Norma, who stays the longest-serving supervisor of any England cricket workforce, males’s or girls’s.
Born in Beckenham, Norma was the one baby of Olive (nee Goss) and William Preston. William was a Metropolitan police officer and a eager sportsman who performed soccer and cricket for Cornwall and the police, and nurtured a love of cricket in his daughter from a younger age. “By the point I used to be three I had my very own bat,” Norma remembered. “And I might put some newspaper round my legs for pads, and play within the backyard.”
Initially evacuated to Cornwall through the second world conflict, Norma was delighted when she joined Beckenham grammar college for women in 1944 and found they had been certainly one of solely a handful of women’ faculties within the nation who supplied cricket. When Norma was chosen for Kent Juniors in 1948 with garments rationing nonetheless in power, her mom, a tailor, in some way procured a yard of cream flannel to make sure her daughter had the white cricket skirt that was a WCA requirement for all consultant cricket.
By the age of 17, Norma was taking part in for the senior Kent aspect and had additionally joined Kent Nomads WCC. She was invited to England trials forward of the 1957-58 tour to Australia and New Zealand, however Prideaux pipped her on the publish to the wicketkeeping position.
Norma educated as a PE instructor at Dartford Faculty between 1951 and 1954, captaining the cricket workforce and taking part in within the first workforce for hockey and lacrosse. Her first instructing job was at Kidbrooke college for women in Greenwich, the primary purpose-built complete college in London. In 1955 she married Peter Izard, an airline government and reserve RAF officer, whom she had met whereas taking part in in a blended hockey match.
She took a break from instructing and cricket in 1960 to boost their two sons, Barrie and Mark, however later captained Kent’s second XI, taking part in her last match in 1983 on the age of fifty. In 1981, she grew to become supervisor of the primary feminine Junior England aspect.
She was appointed OBE in 1995 for companies to girls’s cricket, and in March 1999, after MCC lastly voted to confess girls, she was one of many first 10 girls admitted to the membership as an honorary life member. Peter had lengthy been an MCC member; she claimed he by no means instructed her whether or not or not he had had voted in favour of her admission.
In later years, Norma retained a eager curiosity in girls’s cricket, changing into a trustee for the Likelihood to Shine charity. She visited Australia on many events, together with in 2008 to current Charlotte Edwards with the Girls’s Ashes trophy. She was current on the Melbourne Cricket Floor in March 2020 when the world document crowd for a girls’s cricket match – 86,174 spectators – was achieved.
Peter died in 2011. Norma is survived by Barrie and Mark, and two granddaughters, Caitlin and Rhiannon.
