by Rebecca Jones*
Thursday, November 8, 2001

I am here because I married a cricketer. Not a footballer, or a rugby player, but a cricketer.

I was thrown into the world of English county cricket and didn't know what to expect. It was an interesting experience.

Each club has its traditions, and I'm sure most have a particular person who likes to rule the roost and think she is the queen bee of the cricketing wives. The clubs that don't should count their lucky stars, as these women would be better suited to playing the Joan Collins role in some crummy American soap.

You know the type: really full of themselves and desperate to be the centre of attention, forgetting that cricket, and not their latest gossip, is top of the agenda. Every week brings a new outfit – the scantier the better – and you'll know in no uncertain terms where it was bought and when.

One such wife, the quintessential queen bee, met her husband while waitressing at the county ground a few years earlier but couldn't be more insistent that the current crop of young cricketers stayed clear of the present waitresses. She'd keep a close eye on all the squad, especially when it came to drinks in the bar after matches, suggesting that waitresses were common and a waste of time. Clearly a case of forgetting from whence one came.

The faces that initially smiled and welcomed me, soon became filled with scrutiny and unpleasantness. Queen Bee made it her task to upstage me. What I had done, I will never know. Maybe I was different, coming from the Southern Hemisphere, but after a couple of conversations with other travelling wives I discovered I was not the only one cold-shouldered.

It wasn't all bad. There were some lovely ladies around – the problem was that they were all so closely knit to Queen Bee. If you said anything about feeling unwelcome or viewed your concerns over the bitchiness, you knew that it would go straight back up the hierarchy. The pettiness is simple to explain – you'd be fine if you were badly dressed or a bit out of shape. But as soon as you made an effort, Queen Bee would have it in for you. I once returned from the sun with plenty of new highlights in my hair. Several of the squad commented on it, but did so in the presence of her majesty – three days later my husband came home with a big smile on his face saying that her hair was now exactly the same colour as mine.

It couldn't possibly have been that they were jealous, could it? My husband and I are friendly and outgoing and about more than just cricket. We realise that life has more to offer besides the game and try to have other interests. We have friends outside cricket and perhaps that was frowned upon. From what I saw, most of the players slept, ate and drank cricket. This doesn't seem healthy to me and never will, but perhaps it is the sad reality for county cricketers because they just play so much. Perhaps the other wives had become too reliant on the cricket fraternity to realise that life holds a bigger purpose.

Those of you out there thinking about putting your hands up and volunteering for cricketing-wifedom should think carefully and opt for the buy-one-get-one-free bullet-proof vest, so that you and your girlfriend can safely put on your Sunday frocks and make your way down to the one-day game and not feel violated by the other wives' daggers, gossip and general pettiness.

The point is that being a cricketer's wife on the county circuit is lonely and often uncompromising. Definitely not for the faint-hearted, and I would suggest that perhaps one needs to be a bitch to survive. I won't happily admit to failure, but maybe in this instance it has been good to fail.

*Rebecca Jones is a pseudonym.

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