MCC’s first female president on putting up with sexism, why Lord’s belongs to all and diamond pendant protocol
Clare Connor has been in cricket ever since she was a little kid on the boundary, watching her dad play at Preston Nomads CC near Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs. The game got under her skin, in that way it does. She wanted to learn how to oil and sand his bat, would have tantrums on the odd weekends she wasn’t allowed to go with him. “I just completely fell in love with cricket.” So she gave her life to it, she played more than a hundred games for England, captained them for six years, then moved into administration at the England and Wales Cricket Board and the International Cricket Council, and now she is the first female president of MCC.
For a lot of that time Connor was the only woman in the room. She played with boys right through her childhood, from eight to 18, when she was the only girl in Brighton College’s first team. She was the first woman to play in The Cricketer Cup and the first woman to play for Lashings CC. As an administrator she was the only woman on the leadership team at the ECB and the only woman on the global cricket committee at the ICC. I have an idea it can’t always have been easy, I only begin to understand just how difficult it was when I ask her about her experiences of sexism.
