Violet Wattenberg

My name is Violet Wattenberg. Eight years ago I seriously started playing cricket, a traditionally English sport. In some ways, cricket can be compared with baseball in that there is a batting team and a fielding team, a bowler and batsmen, and the match is divided into innings; the statistics of the individual and team performance are also recorded in detail. It could be said in a way that baseball is effectively the American version of the much older English game of cricket.

For a number of years I have been playing with the Haarlem cricket club Rood & Wit, a team that in recent years has on consecutive occasions become Dutch champion. For the last three years, I have been a member of the Dutch national team where I play as wicket keeper and opening batsman.
Although cricket is a relatively small sport in the Netherlands, worldwide, more people play cricket than football! Above all in the former British colonies, cricket is a major sport, for example in countries like India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Pakistan.

The Dutch women’s team is currently tenth in the world rankings. For a country like the Netherlands, where cricket is not played professionally on a very large scale, this is an excellent achievement. The top ten countries in the world rankings have so-called Test and ODI status, which means that these countries can play test matches (four-day matches) and One Day Internationals (one-day matches) against one another. On this basis, the Netherlands regularly plays internationals against countries further up the rankings.

Starting this season, the Netherlands has also been playing in the English County Championship, at present one of the toughest competitions in the world. The English women’s team became world champions in March of this year, due to a large extent to the tough domestic competition. Participation by the Netherlands in the county championship offers an excellent opportunity for us as a team to face up each summer to good quality international opposition. In addition, English playing conditions, for example on grass wickets (in other words a natural surface rather than the artificial surface generally played on in the Netherlands) better match the international standard.

The first match by the Dutch women’s eleven was played against Oxfordshire. This match was won relatively easily, because Oxfordshire was unable to withstand the Dutch bowlers, amassing the very low total of just 33 runs in their innings. This score was easily defeated by the Dutch batsmen.
The programme for the next day saw us facing Gloucestershire. The match was played on an idyllic cricket ground, behind the village church. Gloucestershire performed clearly better than Oxfordshire, making 178 runs. Despite the good quality bowling and fielding of our opponents, in the end we managed to better their total. For me personally this was an excellent match, in that I scored 53 runs. Achieving 50 runs (a half century), 100 runs (a century) etc. is a milestone for every batsman. In other words, in cricket, it is possible to deliver a good individual performance that makes a major contribution to the team victory. Partly for that reason, cricket is described as the most individualistic of all team sports.

This summer season, the European championships are planned for the first week of August. As part of the competition, the Netherlands will face Ireland and Scotland in an attempt to win the European title. Leaving aside England, these three countries are the three leading European cricketing nations.

For me, this season is also due to have an interesting conclusion. The European cricket association has launched an initiative this year whereby the 14 leading European woman cricketers are brought together in a European team, and together with four other Dutch players, I have been invited to take part. Together with this team, under the watchful eye of very highly qualified English coaches, we will be training and playing against the English Academy Team, a team of young talented English players who are not (yet) included in the English national team.
Our long-term goal is for the Dutch women’s team to qualify for the World Cup in India, in 2013. The qualification tournament that will lead up to this event is to be held in Dubai, in 2011. In other words, the Dutch team must be at its peak in that cricketing season.

For that reason I am delighted that in the lead-up to this tournament, Plantina wishes to sponsor me by providing me with its products. This will enable me, alongside my work as a legal advisor at Royal Haskoning, and my course of studies at the Grotius Academy, to still perform at my best on the cricket pitch.

Cricket is a sport which imposes severe demands on physical fitness, speed and endurance, but which also demands the utmost of every player’s mental strength: tiny errors in cricket can have massive consequences for individual and hence also the team’s performance. To succeed as a cricketer, you have to learn to deal with considerable mental pressure; I have learned this skill by building confidence in myself on the basis of solid preparation and training. For my cricket this translates into the philosophy: “Back Yourself”.