Since the start of this century, England Women have embarked on one of the most extreme youth-based selection policies the modern game has seen. Their preference for selecting players in their late teens or early 20s, with a view to bedding them in for a 10- to 15-year international career has had almost no exceptions.
Few veteran pros have managed to force their way into the conversation. The last player to make their England women’s ODI debut after their 25th birthday was Mandie Godliman in 2002. That’s opposed to 20 players in that time who made their debuts while still teenagers. In New Zealand this year, Hollie Armitage broke an 18-year streak to make her England T20I debut at the age of 26.
However, with most of the established crew absent for England’s upcoming series in Ireland due to the T20 World Cup, that pattern will almost certainly be interrupted in the coming days. Three out of the seven uncapped players selected for that tour are over 25 - Georgia Davis, Georgia Adams and Paige Scholfield. Of the three, Scholfield was the one bashing the door down for selection even if England had their regular names available.
Three summers ago, an England call-up looked some distance away. Scholfield had been a fringe player at Southern Vipers, filling in the gaps for the most successful team in the country without making much of an impression. She spent the first edition of The Hundred as a bench player at Southern Brave while her teammates reaped the benefits the new competition brought. A move to South East Stars at the end of 2022 in her mid-twenties, however, brought her a second wind.
She scored her maiden List A century in her first match for the Stars in April 2023, and bettered it fewer than two weeks later, with 134* off 109 balls against Western Storm. She finished the competition as Stars’ leading run scorer, ahead of Armitage and Maia Bouchier, who both earned England call-ups over the following 12 months. Having struggled for game time at Southern Brave in 2022, she played eight matches for Oval Invincibles in the 2023 Hundred, batting in the middle order and taking eight wickets.
After picking up a back injury which has prevented her from bowling so far across the 2024 summer, Scholfield moved up to No.3 for the Stars in the Charlotte Edwards Cup. That move proved a success both on a personal and team level. She finished fifth in the run-scoring charts, only six runs behind teammate Sophia Dunkley, with Stars reaching the final of the competition for the first time since 2021. That move up the order paved the way for a new role for Oval Invincibles, where she opened the batting for the first time in her career. In the opening match of the tournament, she scored a memorable 71 off 40, which included 12 boundaries.
“I’m still trying to come to terms with it,” says Scholfield of that innings. “I’ve always seen myself as a number five or six. Throughout my career I’ve tried to work on being that middle-order batter. I did enjoy opening, as much as I was nervous around it, and it’s something I will hopefully one day try again. But for now I’ll probably focus on batting at No.5 or six.”
A week after The Hundred ended, the name ‘Jon Lewis’ flashed up on Scholfield’s phone screen. She thought little of it, presuming it was the England Academy coach, with whom she is on nickname terms, rather than the full England head coach of the same name. “I was like, ‘Hey Judgey’, and it turns out it was the big boss Jon. So that wasn’t a good start," she explains. That call confirmed her maiden senior international call-up, the culmination of a career that has spanned every evolution of the professional women’s game in England.
Born in South Africa, Scholfield played cricket for the first time after moving to the UK aged 12 and broke through into the Sussex academy. At the time, that academy was the centre of player production in the women’s game in England. Sarah Taylor, Laura Marsh, Danni Wyatt-Hodge, Georgia Elwiss and Freya Davies all came through the Sussex pathway alongside Scholfield or shortly before her time.
She moved to Loughborough in 2016 to play for the Lightning in the Kia Super League, as well as to be near the England Academy which she was part of at the time. However, after she was dropped from the Academy in 2018, Scholfield feared it was the end of her international ambitions.
“When I got released from the Academy, I thought that was it,” says Scholfield. “I thought the door was shut because, at that time, if you were at the ripe old age of 23 you potentially weren’t going to make it into the team. They obviously want to build players for the future, but I think the women’s game now has moved in the direction of the men’s where I don’t think that’s as much of a factor. It’s on who’s performing at the minute or has future talent in them. Moving forward it’s opened my eyes that maybe it’s still an option. But before that I would have said that would have been it.”
Before 2020, like many of the rest of England domestic women’s players, Scholfield was having to hold down jobs to keep her cricket career afloat. But, having moved south to Southern Vipers, she was named among a group of 24 who had been awarded regional retainer contracts during the Covid-19 pandemic. These were worth a mere £1,000 a month, but confirmed Scholfield as part of the first ever group of professional women’s domestic cricketers in England. Since that first step into the professional world, it’s taken Scholfield four years to earn England selection, a feat that would previously have been impossible at 28.
“The way the women’s game’s gone has been amazing in opening the door for us again and giving us another chance,” she says. “But also for girls coming in now not to have that pressure that they have to be in the England set-up by the age of 23. They do have that time to build themselves as athletes and knock on that door whenever.”
Schofield will almost certainly make her debut on Saturday in England’s first ODI against Ireland. It’s a personal landmark, having ridden out the different phases of domestic cricket to get where she is on indisputable merit. But more than that, it’s a reminder of the importance of professionalism, still only four years old in the English domestic game. Without the safety nets and expanded opportunities new competitions have brought, Scholfield may well have been lost into the ether, a late bloomer cast away before he full potential was realised. As it is, she’s been brought into the fold at the right time for her, still with the potential of many years of cricket ahead of her.
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