Hannah Rainey has missed a few important calls of late but has a better excuse than most for not picking up. The Scotland bowler combines her burgeoning cricket career with a full-time day job as a vet in Cumbria and is often otherwise occupied and unable to get to the phone.
When Oval Invincibles head coach Jonathan Batty tried to reach her recently to offer her the chance to be part of his squad for The Hundred, she was in the middle of having to amputate a cow’s tail. And that’s not something you can simply pause to go and answer the phone, no matter who’s calling.
“I love being a vet as every day is different and you never know what’s going to happen until you get there,” says the Edinburgh University graduate. “I live just outside Carlisle and we cover a large area from Hexham down to Penrith and up to Scotland, lots of farm work which I really enjoy.
“It was a surreal experience missing the call from Jonathan when I was dealing with that cow. It’s a fairly common procedure, tail amputation, but I hadn’t had that many to do so it was a memorable day for more reasons than one! It’s just the luck of the draw what you end up doing on a daily basis.”
Batty, undeterred by the delay in getting an answer, was delighted to have Rainey join his squad for The Hundred at short notice. And although the 26 year-old never got to feature in the tournament itself, she believes just training with some of the leading players in the women’s game was hugely beneficial to her long-term development.
“I enjoyed it a lot, it was a really cool experience,” she adds. “I never really expected to play as an injury replacement so I just tried to soak it all up and try to learn as much from everyone else. I think at The Hundred there was only one other girl who wasn’t a full-time cricketer so it was really fascinating to watch how world-class players like Suzie Bates, Marizanne Kapp and Dane van Niekerk go about their business.”
As a bowler there was also the added delight of getting to work with a bona fide West Indian legend. “Our bowling coach was Courtney Walsh so getting to work with him was really cool,” adds Rainey. “I’ve hopefully picked up bits and bobs from him that I can hopefully work on and add to my own game.”
The poorly animals of Cumbria and beyond will need to find someone else to look after them over the coming week. Rainey is in Spain with the Scotland squad for the T20 World Cup Europe qualifier where they, the hosts, Netherlands and France will battle it out for two places in the main global qualifier next year. It is a somewhat convoluted process just to reach a World Cup but Rainey hopes the Scots, now coached on an interim basis by Craig Wallace, can get safely over this penultimate hurdle.
“We’re all just raring to go and hopefully we can bring the trophy home,” she adds. “We’d like to think we’re the leading side going into this event but we need to put in performances to back that up. We’d never take anything for granted so we’ll need to work hard in every game.”
One of the biggest gripes of both the Scotland men’s and women’s teams is that they don’t get to play enough matches, especially against leading sides. The women’s side played in a competitive tri-series in the Netherlands in July to prepare them for this event but had been largely inactive before then.
“We’ve not had as much cricket as we would have liked,” adds Rainey. “We went about 10 months without playing any games. Obviously when you’re playing internationally it does show when you’ve not been playing together.”
Cricket Scotland’s move to award professional contracts to nine of the women’s team for season 2023/24 is something that has been well received. Rainey is grateful for the support her part-time deal provides but concedes that she would need something else on top of that if she were to consider turning full-time.
“I think it’s been fairly well publicised that Cricket Scotland isn’t in the greatest place financially right now so it is what it is,” she adds. “It’s not easy, and very tiring at times, juggling my job as a vet with all my cricket commitments as I do a lot of driving.
“Sport has got a short lifespan so if there was a chance to become a full-time cricketer then I’d have to give it some thought as I could always go back to being a vet afterwards. Hopefully further down the line Cricket Scotland might be in a position to award more full-time contracts. But at the moment there’s a lot of us playing regional cricket in England and it's great to be able to play at that level of cricket regularly.”
