Sarah Taylor has admitted she shed a tear when the former England wicketkeeper-batter was notified that she was to be inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame.
The 36-year-old on Monday became just the sixth female England cricketer to be inducted – alongside the likes of Charlotte Edwards and Rachel Heyhoe-Flint - and the first female wicketkeeper from any nation to be included.
“I have to admit I cried. I think it’s because how I finished my career, I feel like it was quite an abrupt stop,” said Taylor, who got notification while at working as the cricket pro at Dulwich College.
“I did take a moment. I was at work walking around the boundary with my colleagues and I genuinely stopped when I got the email and my colleagues kept carrying on - I had a moment. I was ‘Oh my God, this can’t be real’.
“I was checking to see who it had come from to see if it was legit and it was actually legit. I think my colleagues saw me and I was a bit teary and they were elated for me.”
A three-time World Cup winner Taylor was once described by now fellow Hall of Famer Adam Gilchrist as the best wicketkeeper in the world, female or male.
Taylor scored more than 6,500 runs for her country across formats and, perhaps most remarkably, made 104 stumpings in 226 international appearances.
Taylor was a key part of the ground-breaking team that won the 2017 ICC Women’s World Cup at Lord’s - two years before she called time on her career.
“I haven’t really spoken about my career too much in that regard,” said Taylor, who has this week been working with the England Lions as a coach.
“I moved into coaching and I hadn’t had time to process my career. Life had very quickly shifted. Since finishing it has been about coaching, which has been about everyone else and trying to get the best out of other people and players and to pass on your knowledge.
“Nothing is about you – it’s all about them. So that moment, it was suddenly all about me, and what I achieved. It’s bizarre but I am really so proud and could never have imagined I could be seen in the bracket as some of those legends.”
While Taylor could not be at the awards ceremony at Abbey Roads Studio – instead still on coaching duties with the Lions in Northampton – her induction was rubber stamped alongside greats of the game such as MS Dhoni, Hashim Amla, Matt Hayden, Sana Mir, Graeme Smith and Dan Vettori.
Reflecting on the 2017 success at Lord’s, Taylor’s eyes light up at the thought of a team that had built an environment where winning and enjoying each other’s success came hand in hand.
“It was huge. I am so proud of that World Cup,” she said.
“I’d obviously taken a break in 2016 for personal reasons and to come back – it wasn’t necessarily the cricket that we played but how we played.
"We had such an amazing group of players to be a part of. We enjoyed each other’s successes and when you get down to it - if you look at that final at Lord’s - then numbers wise you would have ruled us out, but none of us believed we would lose.
“Winning from that position didn’t surprise us – we were thinking ‘we’re going to win’. Everything we had done had led us to that moment and Anya produced the goods at the end.”