Lydia Greenway had big plans for this summer. Last September she was appointed head coach of the new Oval Invincibles women’s team in the Hundred, and right about now she was supposed to be busy getting the team ready for their first match on 24 July. That’s on top of her second job, running Cricket for Girls, the schools coaching programme she set up in 2017. Then lockdown started, the schools shut, and the Hundred was postponed. And while the rest of us settled down to books and boxsets, Greenway got to thinking about a project that had been in the back of her mind for a while, if only she could find time: an online cricket store for women and girls. Greenway had been reading Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Women, which lays out what Perez calls the “one-size-fits-men approach” to design, the way in which, for instance, the average smartphone has been built to be too big for a woman’s hand. It was a problem Greenway knew about from cricket, where girls often have to play in kit designed for boys, in pads that are too wide, with straps that are too long and with bats that are too big, a problem that, she decided, it was finally time to try to fix for good. So Greenway, who describes herself as “a real technophobe”, started teaching herself how to build a website. “There were times when I wanted to throw my computer across the room,” she says, “but it is still intact.” The site she built launched on 1 June. So in the space of a few weeks, Greenway had realised an idea she had when she started running Cricket for Girls, and saw for herself how the sport was changing at that level. Back when she started playing in the 1990s “there was really only one type of girl who played cricket and that was the girl who didn’t mind playing with the boys,” she explains. More often than not, the way into the game was through a male relative. In Greenway’s case, it was her dad. And that same male relative would then sort out the kit. “You got what you were given,” Greenway says. And since women’s kit was pretty hard to come by, it would most often be stuff designed for boys. These days, “there’s been quite a big shift in the types of girls playing the game, because the route into the game has become much more diverse,” she says. “Now it’s part of the school curriculum we’re seeing more and more girls play cricket not because their dad, or their brother, or their uncle, introduced them to it, but because they played it at school. And then suddenly when they say to their parents: – who might have no knowledge of the game – ‘I want to get cricket equipment’, the parents think: ‘Well, where do we start?’” Back in 2018, an 11-year-old girl called Olivia Cotter made the news when she wrote a letter to Kookaburra complaining that she had been given a voucher for her birthday and wanted to spend it on some Kookaburra pads, like the ones Alyssa Healy wore. But she had to buy some labelled “boys”. “It made me a little bit sad that the size was just called ‘boys’,” Cotter wrote, “as so many girls are playing the game now too. I think you should consider changing the size name from ‘boys’ to ‘kids’.” In fact Kookaburra had already done that, the previous year, but Cotter’s local shop didn’t have the stock. In the end, they had Healy present her with an entirely new set of kit. Kookaburra are one of the three manufacturers Greenway is working with on this project, along with SM and Viking. “They didn’t need converting to support the women’s and girls’ game,” she says. “They were already doing it.” All three have put a lot of time and effort into developing their girls and women’s ranges. “They’ve been being really specific in the changes they’ve made,” Greenway explains. “The bats are lighter and have shorter, thinner handles, same for the pads. And straps aren’t as long because women and girls have thinner legs, so you don’t get that overhang, same for the gloves. They might seem like small things, but it makes a big difference.” These are all steps that take the game away from what it was, towards what it ought to be. Anyone who loves cricket knows what it feels like to buy your first proper kit, anyone who loves cricket can imagine how dispiriting it must be to find those little imperfections in it, telltale blemishes, which tell you it’s not for people like you. “I think about the girls we’ve been coaching, all the parents I’ve spoken to,” Greenway says, “and all they want to do is support their daughters and their pupils and make sure that they’ve got the right stuff, and that’s the biggest reason why I’ve done this. We want to be able to say to those people: ‘Right, this is what we’ve picked for you, you don’t have to sift through the boys’ and men’s stuff. This is just for you’.”