When women stormed the citadel

By Raf Nicholson for The Cricket Monthly.

Read the full article: http://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/1160684/when-women-stormed-the-citadel

"We haven't invaded the place with knitting needles and breastfeeding like they said we would in the 1990s," reflects BBC commentator and MCC member Isabelle Duncan 20 years on. "They've realised that we're not aliens!"

She should know. Duncan was thrust into the centre of the campaign for female membership in 1998 when she appeared on the front of Wisden Cricket Monthly (WCM) magazine sporting an MCC sweater, and is the only woman currently sitting on the main MCC Committee.

She was plucked out of relative obscurity for the cover shoot. At the time she was a club cricketer in Surrey and sometimes captained her otherwise male side.

"I didn't really know what I was getting into," she recalls, "but I thought it sounded like a good idea." As she tells it, she was approached by the magazine, who were doing an issue on women's cricket and decided that they wanted a female on the front, wearing an MCC sweater. "I'd played cricket against one or two of the journalists who wrote for WCM at the time and they remembered me."

"I was more of a flagship in saying to people, 'Come on, this is an important issue, you must vote.' Looking back on it I'm really glad I was involved because it was so important. You don't really appreciate that when you're 24. But now I look back on it and think, 'Yes, it was a turning point.'"