In 1998, the last year of her five-year presidency of the British Women’s Cricket Association (WCA), Norma Izard made a decision that would change the course of the sport’s history. “The Australians were like, ‘Why don’t we have a cup when we play England?’ he kept saying. But they did nothing about it,” he said in a 2017 interview. “That’s when I thought I would do it. I was the president, so no one can stop me!”
Inspired by the Men’s Ash jar, he asked a friend, engraver Brian Hodges, to create a hollow wooden cricket ball. Then on 20 July she gathered the England and Australian women’s cricket teams together at Lord’s, had them sign a miniature bat, borrowed a wok from the kitchens of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), burned the bat and left it “ashes in a wooden ball”.
It was a decidedly low-key affair; Yet the “Ashes of Women” concept captured the public imagination so vividly that 25 years later, in the summer of 2023, record crowds flocked to watch the two teams battle to win Norma’s little wooden ball.
For Norma, who has died aged 90, it was to be her last act as WCA president: four months earlier she had chaired an extraordinary general meeting at which WCA members voted to merge with the England and Wales Cricket Board. This meant the end of Norma’s 50-year association with the Association; It had begun in 1948 when he attended a coaching session for schoolgirls in Kent (the first ever held in the county), had a spell as a national selector and culminated in 1948. Appointed England manager in 1984.
Women’s cricket was still entirely amateur in the 1980s and the role was unremunerated, but Norma (nicknamed “Stormy Norma” by the England players) gradually adopted a more professional outlook, enforcing a strict 10pm curfew and one pint a day. . limitation on tours. In 1988 she persuaded the WCA to appoint Ruth Prideaux as England’s first permanent coach.
It was a masterstroke: Ruth’s radical ideas about sports psychology and fitness, combined with Norma’s quiet efficiency behind the scenes, enabled England to overcome their status as underdogs to victory in the 1993 World Cup final at Lord’s. The tournament was a fitting song for Norma, who remains the longest-serving manager of men’s or women’s cricket in England.
Born in Beckenham, Norma was the only child of Olive (née Goss) and William Preston. William was a Metropolitan police officer and a keen sportsman who played football and cricket for Cornwall and the police, instilling a love of cricket in his daughter from an early age. “By the time I was three, I had my own bat,” Norma recalled. “I would put newspapers on my legs as pads and play in the garden.”
Originally evacuated to Cornwall during the Second World War, Norma was delighted when she joined Beckenham primary school for girls in 1944 and discovered that it was one of the few girls’ schools in the country to offer cricket. When Norma was selected for Kent Juniors in 1948, when the clothes rationing card was still in force, her mother, a seamstress, somehow procured a yard of cream-coloured flannel to ensure her daughter had a white cricket kilt, a requirement of the WCA for all representative cricket.
By the age of 17 Norma was playing for Kent’s senior team and had also participated in the Kent Nomads WCC. He was invited to England trials ahead of the tour to Australia and New Zealand in 1957–58, but Prideaux invited him to take up wicketkeeping duties.
Norma trained as a physical education teacher at Dartford College between 1951 and 1954, captaining the cricket team and playing for the hockey and lacrosse first team. Her first teaching job was at Kidbrooke girls’ school in Greenwich, London’s first purpose-built comprehensive school. In 1955, she married airline executive and RAF reserve officer Peter Izard, whom she met while playing in a mixed hockey match.
He took a break from teaching and cricket in 1960 to raise his two sons, Barrie and Mark, but later captained Kent’s second XI and played his last match in 1983, aged 50. In 1981, she became the manager of the first women’s Junior team. England side.
She was appointed OBE in 1995 for her services to women’s cricket, and in March 1999, after the MCC made the decision to finally admit women, she became one of the first 10 women to be admitted to the club as an honorary life member. Peter was a long-time MCC member; She claimed she never told him whether she voted in favor of acceptance.
In later years Norma continued her keen interest in women’s cricket and became a trustee of the charity Chance to Shine. She has visited Australia on many occasions, including presenting the Women’s Ashes award to Charlotte Edwards in 2008. She was present at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 2020 when a world record attendance of 86,174 was reached for a women’s cricket match.
Peter died in 2011. Norma is survived by Barrie and Mark and her two grandchildren, Caitlin and Rhiannon.
• Norma Jean Izard, cricketer and cricket administrator, born 9 September 1933; Died December 30, 2023