I challenged an unjust view of the ideal women’s cricketer. It was the right thing to do

When I first started in the Australian team, we weren’t paid to play at all. Even the fact that we had our flights, accommodation and uniforms supplied was a huge win for some of my more senior teammates, like Belinda Clark, who’d had to pay their own way to travel to overseas tours earlier on in their careers. When we started to be paid as cricketers, part of our contracts included work to promote the game, which we all did quite happily.

Then one day the whole Australian squad received an email, announcing that three players – Ellyse Perry, Meg Lanning and Holly Ferling – had been awarded marketing contracts and congratulating them for this achievement. Eventually that list was extended to four players and Alyssa Healy joined the others. I was quite confused when I received the email because I hadn’t heard anything about these marketing contracts being available and in my view we were all working hard on promoting the game.

I questioned Cricket Australia’s high performance manager Pat Howard about the process and how these contracts had come to be awarded. Pat told me they had a tool that they were using to measure the marketability of different players in the game. They had used a market research company to survey people on their awareness of players and their likability and had plotted the results on two axes. Those who performed well on both were given a marketing contract.

Some of the names they used were players, but they also included some past players, coaches and media personnel, trying to discover who would be the most sensible people to back as promoters for our sport. To reward them for their time and the use of their image, they would be paid an additional fee. The process and the justification made sense