[sport] Phoebe Graham on leaving her job at Sky to become a professional cricketer

[_Happy boy]

Phoebe Graham will start 2021 with a new job.

Not only a new job, but a new career. At 29, she is leaving her post as a marketing lead at Sky to become a professional cricketer.

"At my age, perhaps the socially acceptable thing to be doing is buying a house and settling down, maybe even having children," says the fast bowler with a warm Yorkshire accent.

"The decision I've made was bigger than just deciding to play cricket, because when you look around, social media is full of comparisons. I'm taking a completely different route to what a lot of others are taking.

"But there is some sort of fire in me that wants to keep playing cricket and I can't fight that. Now is the time to explore cricket, to see where it can take me. In a few years' time, the business world will still be there."

Graham is one of 41 women below the England team to have been handed a full-time professional contract by the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Bar 34-year-old Jenny Gunn, who ended a 15-year international career in 2019, Graham is the eldest of the group. In that sense, she is bucking a trend that sees many women drift away from professional sport if they have not made the grade by the time they hit their early 20s.

The last player to make an England debut past the age of 24 was Rebecca Grundy five years ago.

As well as growing the depth of talent in the English game, the new structure of professionalism means cricket can still be a career for those who have not reached international level by the time they would ordinarily be going into full-time work.

"Before, it felt if you weren't in the England academy at 19 or 20, your chance was gone," says Graham. "If you got to 21 and didn't have an England contract, there was a chance you were going to drop off. I'm hoping the new structure makes people think differently."

That certainly could have been the case for Graham, who at 18 decided the path of professional cricket was too narrow, so opted to play alongside studying at Exeter University.

Club, county and university cricket may have been the extent of her career until she had a trial for Northern Diamonds and landed a spot in the squad for the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy in the 2020 summer.

It meant juggling her cricketing dream with working responsibilities.

"There were one or two occasions when I had the laptop in the dressing room," she says.

"I hated it. You're in a meeting, then you arrive at training, but you're still thinking about your to-do list. That is one of the hardest parts."

There have been occasions in Graham's working life when her cricketing team-mates have all been teenagers, but the maturity that comes with holding down a job in the 'real world' does not necessarily help with the problems that arise in serious sport.

Graham admits to being "close to tears" when she was told she was going to be left out of the Diamonds' opening game of the season, even if that was only because England's all-time leading wicket-taker Katherine Brunt was available.

Then there were the times when the different parts of Graham's world collided. Not only did she have her own blog on the Sky website, but she also played in the televised final of the Heyhoe Flint Trophy, "quivering" with nerves when she revealed to her work colleagues that they could watch her on Sky.