‘Children’s cricket sessions: £2.’
Amelia Ridgway still remembers the advert her dad Paul spotted in the local paper as she looked to recuperate from the first of several operations on her right hip.
Off her feet for nearly a year, the rehabilitation advice was to play as much sport as possible.
That £2 was arguably the best investment the family has made. Close on a decade since that first speculative trip to Stoke Bruerne CC aged eight, the memories have proved priceless – with power to add.
Still a few months short of turning 18, Amelia is about to mix it with the cream of the nation’s disabled cricketers at the Disability Premier League: a T20 tournament unique in fielding players from three distinct impairment groups – physical, learning and hearing impaired.
Four draft-picked 16-strong squads – Tridents, inaugural winners in 2022, Black Cats, Pirates and Hawks – will battle it out for a final shown live on Sky Sports ahead of England women’s T20 meeting with Sri Lanka at Derby on Wednesday, 6 September.
Amelia’s story is inspirational, but typical of this cricketing circle: a tale of triumph and refusal to accept the limits placed on expectation.
Her Tridents skipper Liam O’Brien, a England Physical Disability all-rounder, born with bilateral talipes, bowls at 70mph-plus and played county-level mainstream for Sussex into his teens.
A captain of Northamptonshire at junior level, Amelia grew up in junior cricket at Stony Stratford CC alongside England Under-19s leg-spinner Josie Groves, a year her senior and currently with Trent Rockets in The Hundred.
Once a left-arm pace bowler, but these days a bustling opener or top-order bat with a nice side hustle in left-arm off-spin, Amelia is also the solitary female in this year’s DPL.
Not that it bothers her – she is used to turning heads. Unable to attend trials while turning out in a women’s pilot event, she was selected anyway on the strength of her stats. The first sight many of her DPL peers had of her was at the first post-draft meet at Edgbaston.
Her mum, Mel, a constant encouraging presence, remembers it well.
Amelia’s ongoing hip issues – six operations thus far, with the prospect of more – affect her warm-up routine. “You could see all the men and lads thinking: ‘who’s that?’ she recalls. “Then she went and had a bat, and it was a case of ‘Aah, so that’s why she’s here!”
Cricket, a game she admits to having known next to nothing about before trying it out, has transformed Amelia’s life in ways she would never have imagined.
It has provided both a focus and incentive to plough through periods of rehabilitation that routinely last six months. Even when sidelined, she never stopped turning up for club training sessions to support her team-mates.
“I’d be stood there – or rather leaning there – on my crutches, just watching,” she says. “No matter what – whenever I was out, I had the drive to get back to playing – I was always doing physio or going to the gym.”
“It’s pretty much cricket all year round,” she adds. “I also coach during winter and summer at Stony Stratford.”
For many teenagers, August is a time spent anxiously awaiting exam results. This summer offers Amelia an examination of a different kind, and the chance to make a name for herself in a game that is growing fast.
The success of last year’s DPL final, where former England spinner Robert Croft waxed lyrical about the left-arm guile of Ben Sutton’s match-winning spell, will increase the spotlight at Neston CC in Cheshire on Sunday morning. Tridents take on Black Cats first up.
Amelia is less nervous, more ready to embrace it. She knows just how far she has come already.
“I like to get on with it,” she says of her batting. “I’m just going to take it in my stride.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, goes the old saying. Or two pounds, in this instance…
The DPL starts at Neston CC, Cheshire (Sunday 20 August), and continues at Valley End CC, Surrey (27) and Loughborough National Cricket Performance Centre (3 September).
