From Pakistan, with love

Often, in the evenings, you’ll find Jalil, who is also a Level 2 cricket coach, coaching girls’ cricket teams at the local oval, or training with them at the nets, with a sharp eye to help the girls get better at their game. Some of the girls have no idea who they’re training with.

That’s because in another life, Jalil is a superstar. There’s a Wikipedia page that essays her achievements, ESPN Cricinfo has a fairly busy stats page on her, Getty Images has 62 photos featuring her, and the Pakistan Cricket Board website lists her as a Pakistan national team cricketer. 

Jalil played cricket as a member of the Pakistan women’s team in over 110 matches between 2005 to 2015. Women cricketers of her time, including her, were paving the way for the female cricket powerhouse that the national team was to become in recent years. The challenges she often faced just to be able to play cricket in a country conservative towards its women at the time were extraordinary. Jalil’s story is one of resilience and battling fierce odds to create a space for herself in the country’s sporting history.

The Pakistan women’s cricket team played its first World Cup in 1997, their performance didn’t quite make a mark or qualify them for the next edition until the 2009 chapter in Australia. The turn of the century was a turbulent time in the country’s history, with terrorism, war, and political instability often affecting normal life in the country. In this milieu, the young Jalil nurtured a dream.

As a young girl, she would follow one of her five brothers as they played cricket and often plead with them to let her bat or bowl. It was also the pointy end of the decade in which Pakistan, under the legendary Imran Khan’s leadership, had brought home its first One-Day International World Cup in 1992, inspiring millions of boys and girls to believe they could also bring glory to their young country through the beloved sport.  

Jalil was one of them. Growing up in the small town of Abbottabad in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, with non-existent cricket coaching facilities for girls, she idolised Khan, and dreamt of being a fast bowler one day. Without any formal training, she honed her skills against her brothers as batters, and often just on her own. In the early 2000s, when she was still in school, her mother heard on a TV show about nationwide trials for women to be part of cricket teams. The closest location to them was Lahore, 468 kilometres away. Jalil’s mother took her to Lahore, a city neither of them had visited before that, so she could participate in the trials.

“When I went to trial for the regional team, I didn’t have a cricket kit. I only wore salwar kameez like other girls of my age. We stayed at a relative’s house in Lahore. They asked a neighbour’s boy to lend me his kit and his clothes, which I wore to the trials,” she says. She was selected for the regional team that would ultimately feed into the national cricket team. That was the start of Jalil’s cricketing journey at a professional level.  

While everyone around her, including a few of her brothers, were critical of her playing, Jalil’s parents supported her to the hilt. Two decades ago, in Pakistan’s patriarchal society, the men of the house would often have a say in what women could or couldn’t do. Jalil recalls an incident when she was in training camp at Lahore. Her father supported her cricket journey, but her parents had not told one of her brothers, who also lived in Lahore at the time, for fear he would stop her from training if he found out.  

However, her brother saw a photo of Jalil in the local papers, realised she was in training camp in the city, and went to the hotel she was staying at. He asked her to pack her bags and sent her back to Abbottabad by train. Her mother, in turn, sent her back to camp in Lahore by the morning train, and she continued training, while her parents let her brother believe she was back home in Abbottabad for weeks after.  

Such adversities only made her more determined to succeed. Jalil joined the Pakistan national women’s team in 2005, and over the next decade, was named in World Cup squads, played over a 110 One-Day and T20 International matches, and was part of the 2014 women’s cricket team that won the gold medal at the Asian Games in Incheon. 

The next year, Jalil moved to Australia to start another chapter of her life. The initial few years, she felt like she was starting all over again, she played premier cricket for Sydney clubs, including the Sydney University team. To get by financially, she also worked as security personnel for Western Sydney University for seven years. “Often, I felt like giving up on the job, but it also taught me a few things,” she says now.  

Her communication skills in English were limited when she moved to Australia in 2015, and even though she speaks the language fluently now, it was often an impediment to getting the right chances in the early years. She feels she is in a good place now, in her current job, where she works in aged care fitness through various centres across Western Sydney.  

However, through all of this, cricket continues to give her a sense of belonging. She has participated in the Thunder Nations Cup and female coaching workshops by Cricket NSW in the last couple of years. She currently plays cricket for the Mounties Cricket Club, and also coaches the junior female teams. Jalil hopes to coach more and more girls in coming years. 

She tries to inspire in the girls the same passion she felt for the game when she was growing up. Where Jalil grew up, cricket is a religion, a way of life. It’s not very different in Australia, and that’s her connection between her two homes. “Cricket is everything to me,” she says, “I can’t imagine life without it.” Thankfully, she doesn’t have to. Cricket has certainly embraced her in her new country.