PLAYER DIARY: Fi Morris on Chris Read's appointment and pre-season so far
From all the things I’ve heard about Chris Read, our next head coach at Thunder, this is a really positive appointment.
I know a couple of the girls from the Trent Rockets, where he was working as an assistant coach in the Hundred during the summer just gone. I’ve been picking their brains a bit, and we’re all very excited.
He’s a great guy first of all, which is the most important thing. But he’s also a really intelligent guy and a good leader.
We need someone to build on the great work Paul Shaw did, but also to take it to the next level and bring those results and trophies.
He’s had a lot of experience playing, and being a keeper I think you have to be tactically smart. He was a fantastic keeper, so Ellie Threlkeld’s certainly very happy.
It’s great news that Pazza and Craig White are staying with us to work alongside Chris.
Those two have been a massive part in our improvement over the last couple of years. I’ve worked more with Pazza than Chalky, but they’re both incredible coaches to have around.
Between the three of them, they’ve all got a wide range of skills, and it feels like a good balance.
I know Chris is due to start work on January 1, but not I’m sure whether we’ll get to meet him or see him before we return to training in the New Year.
I hope we don’t actually meet him on January 1. I might be a bit worse for wear that day!
I think him coming in at the start of January is the perfect the time because he will have some time with the group to put his stamp on things before we go on pre-season tour in March.
We’ve already made massive strides before Christmas, so hopefully he can see us at our best and when we’re on a roll.
I won’t actually be around Emirates Old Trafford too much during the second half of the winter.
There is a Thunder batting camp to India in January, and I’m going straight from there to Australia with Ellie.
We’re both going to New South Wales, where we’ll be training with the state squad and we may get the chance to play a bit of club cricket as well.
I’ve never played abroad before outside of pre-season tours, and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s great I get to do it with Ellie as well, one of my really good mates.
The more we can get outside, the better. No amount of skills sessions indoor can come close to that. And it just shows the support we get from Lancashire. It’s absolutely incredible - better than any other region, I would say.
Hopefully it means I can build on last season. I was delighted with how it went in the summer, but I still felt that I left a few runs out there in 50-over cricket.
To end the season by winning Thunder’s player of the season award was absolutely amazing.
My expectations coming here from Storm were to just enjoy my cricket again. Whatever happened on the back of that was going to be a bonus.
To play how I played, I was delighted with. But I still feel like there’s a lot more to come from myself. To be player of the season, after seeing the way some of the other girls performed, was just a cherry on top of the cake.
We’ve been in training about a month now, and it’s been brilliant - really enjoyable.
It’s been quite nice to have a smaller group at Emirates Old Trafford, with a number of the girls away at the moment.
Naomi Dattani is playing grade cricket in Perth as an example, and that will keep the freshness for when we get together fully as a squad closer to the start of the season.
The 2024 regional fixtures were released last week and threw up a number of interesting talking points; starting against the Diamonds, the increase in fixtures in the Charlotte Edwards Cup and the change to two semi-finals and a final in both competitions.
The increase from seven to 10 games in the Charlotte Edwards is a really good thing. The more cricket, the better.
I’m not sure we quite want to get to where the men’s schedule is, but the more opportunities we have to show what we can do is what we’ve been pushing for.
It’s more of a marathon and not a sprint now, and it will bring out things like strength in depth within squads, are regions investing in their second teams and Academies? That’s just as important as the first-team.
I think this will highlight which regions are doing it right and which ones are just top heavy towards the first team.
Also, from a personal and team point of view, we’ve spoken about it before where if you have a good run of form or a bad run of form, it can become really difficult to maintain or change it if you don’t have another innings for two weeks. This gives more chance of building momentum or being able to fight back.
I have to admit that I actually really liked the format of three teams qualifying for Finals Day. And I would have liked to see it stay like that.
I enjoyed the previous structure of it and how the top team got straight through and had that advantage of not having to play earlier in the day.
For me, personally, getting to Finals Day was a massive privilege this year, and it’s massive kudos to how much hard work players and teams put in. With there only being eight teams in the competition, to have four through to Finals Day seems like quite a lot.
Mind you, I might not be saying that if we finished fourth next year. But that’s certainly not the aim. We want to be higher.
We start against the Diamonds in both competitions, the first being the season opener in the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy up at Durham.
We just had the better of them of this year, 2-1 across the two competitions, and it’s always a pretty juicy affair.
We don’t need an excuse to get up for the first game of the season against whoever, but this is just an extra reason.
The Diamonds have dominated previously, but we dominated them in a couple of games last year. It’s a good and healthy but friendly rivalry. We get on well off the pitch as two teams, but it’s juicy on it.
It’s not technically a Lancashire v Yorkshire rivalry, but at heart it is.
It’s the same with the Originals and Superchargers in the Hundred. The rivalry is definitely strong, and it shouldn’t and won’t change no matter what the teams are called.
I absolutely loved my first taste of it last year, and I can’t wait to get stuck in again.