After 267 games, 335 wickets, 1,864 runs, 19 years, four Ashes victories and three in World Cups, Katherine Sciver-Brunt has announced her retirement from international cricket. The decision continues the seamer’s gradual withdrawal from cricket – the 37-year-old left England’s Test side last summer to prioritise the white-ball game, retired from regional and county cricket in January and announced in February, after England lost to South Africa in the T20 World Cup semi-finals, that she had played her last global tournament – and means her active involvement is now limited to the Hundred.
She made her international debut in 2004 at the age of 19 and retires as England’s leading wicket-taker in ODIs, with 170, and T20s, with 114, while she ranks third in Tests with 51. “I thought I’d never be able to reach this decision but I have and it’s been the hardest one of my life,” she said. “I never had any dreams or aspirations to do what I’ve done, I only ever wished to make my family proud of me. And what I’ve achieved has gone way beyond that.”
Sciver-Brunt will play for Trent Rockets in this summer’s Hundred, potentially her final tournament, alongside her wife and former international teammate Nat Sciver-Brunt, whom she married last May. “I have so much to be thankful for, cricket has given me a purpose, a sense of belonging, security, many golden memories and best friends that will last a lifetime,” she said. “Of the trophies and titles I could have wished to achieve, I have reached them all, but my greatest achievement is the happiness that I have found in Nat.”
She was part of the England team that won two World Cups in 2009, beating New Zealand in both finals. In the second of those games, to claim the T20 crown at Lord’s that June, her four overs brought three wickets and cost just six runs. A second 50-over title followed in 2017 but she will look back less fondly on her final World Cup game, the T20 semi-final earlier this year, in which her four overs brought no wickets and cost 33 runs, while with the bat she was dismissed for a first-ball duck.
“I’ve always said I would like to retire on top, where I’m still wanted, I’m still picked in the first XI, I’m not less than what I used to be,” she said after that match. “That’s how I’ve felt in the last six months, those things are starting to creep in where I can see somebody taking my role and doing it just as well. Looking back on my career, I’d like to think I was Mrs Consistent. I’d like to be remembered as someone who was always at the top of my game and always contributing for my country.”
Clare Connor, who was England captain when Sciver-Brunt made her debut and is now the ECB’s deputy chief executive and women’s managing director, said: “Katherine has done so much for the game of cricket and for women’s cricket in particular. She has been an unbelievable role model. She began her career in a completely different era from the one we are in now and we owe her a debt of gratitude for the part she has played in progressing our game, raising standards and bringing a new audience to women’s cricket. She is quite simply a legend of our sport.”
