'Just one more': How 'Lismore Lyn' graduated to the top shelf

Lyn Larsen ended the phone call, attempted to compose herself, and soon began another.

The 50-time Australia captain, between 1986 and 1993, couldn't quite believe what she'd just heard. That almost exactly thirty-five years after she had led her country to its third Women's ODI World Cup title, she was to be inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame.

"Honestly, I was blown away when (ACA chief executive) Todd Greenberg phoned me," she tells cricket.com.au. "Completely shocked. I think there was a stunned silence. Todd might've thought I hung up on him."

Larsen needn't have been so surprised. Her credentials – as player, captain, and later as an administrator, selector and coach – make her one of the most influential figures through what was a period of considerable flux in the women's game.

Yet the 60-year-old from northern New South Wales, who to this day resides on the same patch of farming land on which she was raised, is modest to a fault. In her mind at least, such accolades are not hers to receive. 

"I feel like, all of the women who have played for Australia, we're all on a bookshelf," she says. "There's your top shelf ones – Belinda (Clark), Sharon (Tredrea), Raelee (Thompson) and all the current crop, and I'm down on the bottom shelf somewhere among everyone else who played."

All of which explains the surprise, the emotional reaction that followed, and the recipient of her next phone call.

"The first person I called was Marie Lee, who started women's cricket in Lismore," Larsen says. "Since my parents passed, Marie's been my ongoing connection back to that time, so she was the one I wanted to tell first.

"I don't normally get too emotional, but I was actually howling. Marie's in her mid-80s, she was very close to Mum and Dad, and she was just over the moon."

* * *

Larsen remembers as a kid hitting balls on the clay tennis court of the family's Tuntable Creek property, 30km north of Lismore, with her father, George. There was a half cricket pitch too, near the old dairy, and dad and daughter would spend countless hours on the land, building a lifetime bond.

"As a kid, I was crazy for tennis," she says. "But I played cricket, too, and Dad, the poor fellow, he had Parkinsons, but every afternoon he'd be out there bowling to me, hitting me catches down on the tennis court.

"I'd forever being saying to Dad, 'just one more' – one more ball, one more catch or whatever it was – and we had that real connection through sport. There was never anything pushy from him, I just played because I loved it."

Larsen's skills not only stuck but developed, through watching and playing at home, participating at Tuntable Creek Public School and later via taking part in the local women's competition. A month before her 16th birthday, having been noticed while playing for Lismore in the state's Country Cricket Championships, she was making her first-class debut for NSW Junior Women at the 1978-79 Australia Women's Cricket Championships.

Incomplete scorecards from the tournament indicate Larsen made 55 and 32 and took two wickets in that match, and a year later she was in the senior NSW side, scoring 31no from No.11 in her first appearance against the might of Victoria and perhaps Australia's greatest ever women's new-ball pairing, Sharon Tredrea and Raelee Thompson, to stamp herself as a kid with true country mettle.

Promoted to No.10 for the second match, Larsen made 27no then watched – and bowled – as South Australian Jill Kennare hit an unbeaten 101. At the time, she couldn't have known that in four short years, Kennare would be her first Test captain.

"I remember people pointing out to me players like Jill," she says. "Then spending time around the Victorians, like Sharon and Raelee, I was just in awe as a young kid of their skill and their determination."

Larsen's homespun bowling style was labelled by most observers as leg-spin, however she details it differently. In an era that preceded a coach even for the national women's team, she honed her craft in her own way, "rolling" the ball out of a wrist that tended to over-rotate from her days hitting top-spinners in tennis, and relying on flight and natural variation off the pitch to deceive a batter.

"My favourite moments were always getting a stumping, when you'd deceive someone in flight or just move one enough to beat the bat," she says. "I always considered myself more of a bat though, and I probably got picked as a bowler first off. So if I didn't score runs I'd be more disappointed than if I didn't take wickets, but I always wanted to do both."

It will be 40 years next month since Larsen set out on her maiden international tour. In Delhi she took three wickets and made 25 and 7no on her Test debut, 43no in the second Test, two wickets in her first two ODIs and 8-58 in a tour match. When she searches her memory of those weeks however, she heads well away from the playing field.

"I turned 21 over there and it was the best 21st I could've imagined," she says. "We all had our saris on, I got given a horn, and it was just the best tour. There were a number of us who were new in the side, but young enough and adventurous enough to embrace all that India had … we just were out there hitting the streets of India, and loving the attention.

"But it was funny because, after being celebrities for a month, we landed back in Perth, we walked into the airport, and no-one knew who we were. Chris Matthews was saying, 'What's wrong with these people? Don't they know we're famous (laughs)?'"

Larsen's next opportunity with Australia came on January 1, 1985, when she returned in Baggy Green for her first international on home soil and produced one of the finest performances of her career, with 52no and 4-33 against England in Brisbane. The match was drawn but the 21-year-old allrounder had done enough to convince selectors she should be in the mix for the long term.

The next summer she was named NSW vice-captain, but given that was the extent of her leadership experience, she had scarcely considered that path as part of her future. All that changed during the 1985-86 National Championships in Adelaide, where she was only once dismissed amid a run of consistent scores to average 136.

"I was batting in one match and we went in at tea, and Sylvia Faram, who was the president of the Australian Women's Cricket Council at the time, pulled me aside and in her distinguished English accent said, 'I'd like to invite you to captain Australia'," Larsen recalls.

"And of course I went back out there and got out straight away – I don't know where my head was (laughs).

"I wasn't even a state captain, but the cards just fell my way. Denise Emerson was the incumbent (Australia) captain and she split her webbing in that tournament, and somehow my name got pulled out of the hat. But I had great support from the new coach, Peter Carlstein, and couldn't have asked for a more supportive vice-captain than Lyn Fullston, who was fantastic."

Larsen can still remember the 'ping' the ball made off her heavily-taped old Gray-Nicolls through some of those innings, while that Championship also stands out in her memory for a decision her parents made that put her life on the path it ultimately followed.

"My grandfather died while I was there, but my parents decided not to tell me," she says. "Had they called me home for the funeral, as my friends wanted them to, I'd never have been made captain.

"So I went off to New Zealand (for an ODI series) as captain, thinking how proud Pop would be, and I sent him a postcard that he never saw."

* * *

Larsen skippered Australia in their one-nil Test series triumph in the UK in 1987, and the victory in the opening match at Worcester is one of her proudest achievements, primarily because, throughout her first Test in charge, she backed herself.

"That's one that stands head and shoulders above for me," she says. "(Former England captain) Rachael Heyhoe Flint had written something saying I should've declared, but my theory was, while we still had wickets in hand, we should get as many runs on the board as we could.

"We did that, and we only had to bat once – we won by an innings.

"I didn't necessarily know what the best way to go about it was, and I was happy to soak up the criticism. But we went with our instinct as to how to play it, Belinda Haggett scored a hundred on debut, our bowlers bowled them out, and we really started that tour in style."

The success continued a year later when Australia's women marked the country's bicentenary celebrations in style, winning the World Cup on home soil against an England side that had defeated them earlier in the tournament.

Larsen recalls a mixture of relief, pride and satisfaction at gaining redemption over their old rivals when it mattered, more than any specific moments of what was a fairly drab decider (Australia cruised to victory by eight wickets, with 91 balls to spare).

"It's a whole range of emotions," she says. "There was pressure on us at home, and as holders of the trophy, to get the job done, and we were just so clinical – we went in with five bowlers and every one of them bowled so beautifully and put England under pressure from the word go.

"Doing the lap of honour, running round with the trophy in front of all the empty stands was very special. It didn't matter to us that there weren't many people there – it was a World Cup final and we were playing against a very good England side, so it was just a magical moment."

When she returned to the MCG in 2020 for that year's T20 World Cup final as a Cricket Australia invitee, the contrast in atmosphere was impossible to miss. That night, among the 86,174 people in attendance, she caught up with teammates such as Ruth Buckstein, who she hadn't seen since that tournament, and they marvelled at how far their sport had come.

Larsen had played an active role in that evolution, even beyond her playing days, which finished in January 1995, a month before she turned 32. By then she had played 64 internationals across a decade, ending her unbeaten 15-Test career by scoring 86 in a then world record stand of 222 with Denise Annetts (148no).

Having trained as a teacher out of school, she instead landed a NSW Government role in sport and recreation, which she worked in through her playing days. After hanging up the spikes, her experience and skills were evidently an attractive package when she was asked to be involved in the process of integrating the International Women's Cricket Council with the International Cricket Council.

"I was very privileged to be part of that, and to work with those various bodies," Larsen says. "And then when the merger took place after the 2005 Women's World Cup in South Africa, the ICC took the ball and ran with it. Not long after that there were T20 World Cups, they were televised, and suddenly the girls were up in lights … it was an amazing escalation of that integration."

Through the years of that escalation Larsen also fulfilled a coaching and development role with Cricket Australia, where she saw the likes of Beth Mooney, Grace Harris, Jemma Barsby and Tahlia McGrath rise through the ranks. It allowed her to maintain a connection to the game and added another strand to a remarkable portfolio, which in 2020 resulted in her being named a Member (AM) in the general division of the Order of Australia in the Queen's birthday honours list "for significant service to cricket as a player, selector, manager and coach at the elite level".

Throughout it all, she has stayed as close to her roots as one can. Her brother lives on another house on the same property, and together they have managed to keep the farm running in various guises across the years since their parents passed. The old clay tennis court is bitumen now, the half-cricket pitch no more, but the spirit of those times endures.

"It's certainly not a living, and it's a lot of work, but at the same time it's in my blood, and it's what I love doing," says Larsen, who continues to work as a project officer with the Office of Sport in the NSW North Coast regional office. "We've got macadamias, some beef cattle, a few pineapples, mangoes, pawpaw.

"So we try and get things to grow, I love my garden, love my animals, and I just love pottering around here. I haven't found anywhere else that I prefer to be, and I wouldn't change a thing."

Next month Larsen will attend the men's Gabba Test, where she will be recognised in person as one of this year's two entrants into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame. She will have family and friends there to celebrate the achievement, hopefully including Marie Lee, the first person she called when she found out the news.

"After I finally got through the tears and got out what I wanted to say," she smiles, "I said to her, 'If you're not doing anything, the Gabba Test – we're there'."

- Photo / Jason O’Brien