India's Pandey goes back to her roots as she takes part in Cricket for Good Clinic
Taking 1000 catches in succession or bowling at one stump for hours on end, Shikha Pandey knows what it takes to be playing cricket from a young age.
So the Indian all-rounder was in her element in Bristol on Monday, as she took part in the latest leg of the ICC Cricket for Good initiative.
Joining teammates Veda Krishnamurthy, Sushma Verma and Nuzhat Parween, the 28-year-old took a deserved rest from the training field to join Brunel Field Primary school students at a coaching clinic, in partnership with UNICEF and the UK’s cricket-based charity, Chance to Shine, at the County Ground.
It was a session that sent Pandey down memory lane too, delighted to see just how far women’s cricket has developed over the past few years.
“They are really impressive, some of them are only ten or eleven years old but the group is really good, there’s some real talent in there,” she said.
“As kids we start playing cricket by watching someone, all of us have idols and mine were Sachin Tendulkar and Shaun Pollock, we love watching them so for the girls to have us with them playing cricket can hopefully be a massive motivation for them.
“We’re having a lot of fun, we played a lot of cricket as kids and it’s very similar stuff.
“We played when we were kinds and wanted to see how many catches we could take, some of them could take 1000 catches in one go, and we would always see how many wickets we could take by bowling at a single stump – lots of fun things that made us better players.”
A change can often be as good as a rest in professional sport and, with India battling for ICC Women’s World Cup glory, a game with a new pace could perhaps work wonders.
That started with kids as young as five on the Bristol pitch, showing some excellent skills also under the watchful eye of cricket legend Charlotte Edwards, who is a Chance to Shine and ICC Women’s World Cup ambassador.
And Pandey is hopeful the ICC WWC can keep on growing across the world.
“The tournament is very compact, five games in and the teams are all really close so we’re all pushing hard for that semi-final, hopefully we can do enough in the last couple of games to be able to do that,” she added.
“The sport is growing so much, when we started age group cricket wasn’t that popular, but now we have a lot of opportunities for girls at all ages to go and start playing.
“You can play pretty early, getting professional training at eight or nine, and when I started that didn’t happen until I was 17 so there is a massive step up there.”