I basically never got out in 2008: Taylor

Claire Taylor’s eyes turn towards the wicket at Lord’s as she talks about one of her most famous innings. It was there on that pitch with a well-known slope she made that 156 not out, after all.

That remains the highest ODI score — for men or women — at Lord’s. Her innings came against India in 2006. The previous best score at the home of cricket had belonged to a certain Viv Richards (138 not out: yes, that iconic knock against England in the final of the 1979 World Cup).

“Jhulan Goswami was absolutely unplayable that day,” Taylor tells The Hindu. “There was an early wicket and I went in. I couldn’t get bat on ball. She was metronomic. If there is a female bowler that you could compare to Glenn McGrath, it is Jhulan. But she was too good that day. If she had been worse, I might have got an edge.”

That is one of the several brilliant innings Taylor played in her 12-year-old international career that saw her turn out 168 times for England. She scored four hundreds and two fifties in the 15 Tests she played. She also hit eight hundreds in ODIs.

In 2009, she was the Player-of-the-Series in both the World Cups England won — in the ODI and T20I formats, scoring 324 and 199 runs, respectively. That year, she also became the first woman to be chosen as one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year, breaking a century-old tradition.

“It wasn’t something I ever expected,” recalls Taylor, who studied Mathematics at Oxford and left a lucrative IT job at Procter & Gamble for the sake of cricket. “When Scyld Berry, the Wisden editor, said, ‘Come, can I meet you for lunch?’ I just thought he wanted to talk about the upcoming World Cup. And for that first half hour, we just talked about the World Cup. Then he said, I want to name you as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year. It was, of course, for my performance in 2008, when I was basically never out. We chased every game and won”.