Cricket stands on the shoulders of the female WG Grace

In the 1930s they played the first-ever Women's Test. English women - only single women because married women were not allowed to be away from their families - travelled to Australia and won by nine wickets. That should have been the biggest thing to happen in Women's cricket, that decade, but it wasn't. In 1939 Rachel Heyhoe-Flint was born.

Heyhoe-Flint, purely as a player, was a legend. She hit the first six in a Test. She batted for 521 minutes in making 179 against Australia at The Oval to force a draw, a world record at the time. She averaged 45 in Tests. She made three hundreds. When she retired, she'd made 33% more runs than any other woman. She was the cricketer of her time. And up until recently, of all time.

The first World Cup started after a conversation with an England captain over a bottle of brandy. That captain was Rachael Heyhoe-Flint. In 1973, two years before the men, the women played the first World Cup. The teams were Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, England, Young England and an International XI. Women's cricket has had great players, and even of recent times, some great teams, but it has always lacked depth. At this stage, it lacked teams, and coverage.

Heyhoe-Flint and the other players went around town putting up banners to promote it. She also tried to ring up as much media attention as she could. It was tough. The first game was between New Zealand and Jamaica. It rained, and no one turned up to watch it. But regardless Heyhoe-Flint kept fighting for her tournament, and she forced others to talk about it. She went out on street corners taking donations. She found some of the first sponsors for the game. She wrote about it as a journalist, often writing match reports of games she was in just to make sure someone covered them. That isn't the work of a cricketer - as great as she was as a player, she was so much more than that.

She captained the first Women's team at Lord's. She was in the first group of Women MCC members. She is a life member of the MCC. She is on the board of Wolverhampton Wanderers. She was one of the first-ever women sport's commentators. The first woman inducted into the ICC's Hall of Fame and one of the two first women appointed to the board of the ECB. She became a House of Lord's peer, a baroness. MCC should be ashamed that, while they have elected rebel players to be president, they never found a place for one of the club's shining lights.

There is a part of the women's cricket fraternity that hates when women cricketers are compared to male ones. Don't call Mithali Raj the Sachin Tendulkar of the women's game; she is Mithali Raj, a great in her own right, she doesn't need to be compared, even favourably, to a man.

The problem with Heyhoe-Flint is she towers over women's cricket, and all of cricket. There is no person to compare her to, other than WG Grace. It was Grace who built modern cricket, and also a fair bit of modern sport. He was modern sport's first global star, in a day when things didn't go global. And he did it all by being a great cricketer.

Heyhoe-Flint did just as much for cricket as Grace, and she didn't do it for herself, she did it for the sport itself. Grace wasn't out on street corners grabbing people's spare change or writing up a solid 150 words on matches he played in. That is not what great male cricketers have to do, but that is what Heyhoe-Flint did. And she did more, and more, and more. She didn't change cricket just because she was a great cricketer; she changed it because she was great. She and Grace aren't cricket legends; they are cricket's founders.

There will be better cricketers, better administrators, there might even be better promoters in the women's game, but there will never be someone like Rachael Heyhoe-Flint again. She promoted a game that no one wanted. She forced it into newspapers' coverage despite living in a world where Len Hutton had just said: "A woman playing cricket? That's just like a man trying to knit!".

Now Heyhoe-Flint has passed away in the middle of the Women's Big Bash in Australia, in what is truly a special time for cricket. When women's cricketers are being paid as professionals in a domestic competition with players from New Zealand, South Africa, India, England and West Indies in Australia that has been broadcast on TV. When Heyhoe-Flint was a child, she wouldn't have dreamed of such a thing. Now young girls can grow up and dream of playing cricket for a living.

When Rachael Heyhoe-Flint played, the cricket world didn't have an interest in women playing cricket. They barely had an interest in this woman. This cricket pioneer. This one woman cricket industry. This legend. But, because of her, and everything that she was, the next legend of women's cricket will be supported, watched, and paid.

Those little girls who dream of cricket, they don't know it, but their dreams stand on the shoulders of Heyhoe-Flint. A great, an icon, a founder, and a woman who wasn't just someone who played cricket, wrote about cricket, or ran cricket, but someone who was cricket. The best of cricket. The young girls aren't the only ones standing on Heyhoe-Flint's shoulders, cricket stands on them too.