The final whistle had blown in England’s first Netball World Cup final when Laura Malcolm spotted her teammate Ellie Cardwell in tears. Their side had lost to Australia by 16 goals – no small margin – but Malcolm was having none of it. “She said: ‘Stop crying, stop!’” remembers Cardwell, with a laugh. “You told us to smile all the way through the competition. Now you need to smile!”
Anyone following the England Roses on their historic World Cup run this summer – beating Australia for the first time in the tournament in their group game, defeating the reigning champions, New Zealand, in the semis, and appearing in a final after 60 years of trying – will have noticed Cardwell’s inspirational role. The goal shooter’s high-voltage enthusiasm made her a natural cheerleader – the woman who gave the crowd a double thumbs up after she netted a long-range shot, or found the few England fans in an arena full of southern hemisphere flags and instructed them to sing louder.
“I like to make everyone feel good,” says the 29-year-old. “If everyone else has a smile on their face it makes me feel a hell of a lot better. Sure, you’ve just dropped a ball, but it’s all OK! And if I can be that positive voice on court I’ll be as loud as anyone wants me to be.”
Her team-building efforts were allied to one of the best shooting records in the world. Cardwell – known as the Claw for her one-handed catching style – finished fifth in the tournament goal standings, with 231 at a conversion rate of 90.2%. As England kick off their four-year cycle towards the next World Cup in Manchester on Tuesday, with the first in their three-match series against South Africa, her 62 caps number almost twice as many as the next most experienced players in the squad, Imogen Allison and Fran Williams.
“It’s a different group this time, it’s younger, it’s full of energy,” says Cardwell of a squad missing some of its best-known names – including the newly retired Geva Mentor and the injured Layla Guscoth. “People talk about fresh talent but this talent has been around for a while, anyone who watches the Super League will know how good these girls are.”
After December’s South Africa series comes January’s Vitality Netball Nations Cup, a four-way tournament featuring England, Australia, New Zealand and Uganda with games in London and Leeds. Then Cardwell will head down under for her second season of Suncorp Super Netball. She won Australia’s prestigious league with Adelaide Thunderbirds last year, and has since signed with a new team – but has been unable to announce it while the pay dispute between the governing body, Netball Australia, and the Australian Netball Players’ Association goes on.
The players have been out of contract and unpaid for two months, with reports that some have been forced to sleep in their cars. Cardwell, in almost daily contact with other players from the league on WhatsApp, says “a lot of the girls are struggling” and considers herself very lucky to have England pay.
“I feel really sorry for the girls who have mortgages or rent to pay – some can’t even afford food, never mind rent. It’s really sad that the sport’s in this position because it’s grown so much over the past few years we should be able to celebrate that. Instead we’re stuck – this has been going on since February, it’s bonkers.” Solidarity for the Australian netballers has come from Australia’s women’s cricket team, who have set up a support fund. “It’s amazing that a different sport can come in and help, we’re very grateful for that,” says Cardwell.
Family is important to Cardwell, a self-confessed homebody whose younger sister Elizabeth – a non-professional netballer for Tameside – will accompany her to Australia for the Suncorp season, just as her partner Tom did last year. She has spent the past couple of months taking an extended mental break from netball to decompress from a “crazy” World Cup year, including a caravanning holiday to the Lakes with her parents and a birthday trip to Dublin. “It wasn’t until I was missing the game and excited to see the girls again I knew I was ready to go back.”
Having fallen in love with netball at primary school, by her teens Cardwell was spending up to four hours a day on the motorway to and from training. “It’s hard for the girls farther up north,” says Cardwell. “In Blackpool you don’t have the professional scene, so you have to travel to Manchester if you want to make it.” Her dad took on chauffeur duties, delivering her home from training at 1am before getting up at 6am for his full-time job in caravan repair.
When Cardwell was failing in one of her A-level subjects, her teacher told her she needed to study harder because she was never going to make it in netball. “To be told that in front of 20 other students – I was distraught. Tears flooded down my face. I thought: ‘Is my life over?’” Car journeys became study opportunities, and she upped her U grade to a B. The teacher turned out to be wrong about the netball too: in 2012, aged 17, she came on as substitute goalkeeper in the Super League grand final having played roughly 30 minutes across the entire season, and finished as player of the match.
Still, her potential as a defender was limited, as Tracey Neville, her coach at Manchester Thunder, was the first to spot. By 2015, Cardwell was barely making the team, and had failed her trial for the England senior side. Having filled in at goal attack in training for an absent player, her phone rang early the next morning. “When you get a call from Tracey at 7am you’re thinking: ‘What have I done, why am I in trouble, and do I really want to answer this?’ But she said: ‘I’ve been thinking all night – you’d have to put a big shift in, but do you want to take a risk and retrain as a shooter?’”
Such a change required sacrifices, not least of her pride: Cardwell was sent on shooting workshops with much younger players. “It was really embarrassing, but I had to put myself in those uncomfortable positions to learn.” An early passion for taekwondo gave her a surprising advantage – “People found it hard to shift me, because I knew how to keep myself stable on the ground, and how to turn quickly” – and by the time she was 21 she was one of the first 20 athletes offered a place on England Netball’s full-time programme.
Her senior international debut came against Northern Ireland the same year, although it was only in last year’s Commonwealth Games that she cemented her place alongside her legendary shooting partner Helen Housby. Finishing fourth in that tournament left her devastated. “When I got home I was cutting potatoes in my kitchen with tears running down my cheeks. I’d go into Aldi and feel like I was having an out of body experience because I was so sad.” When she and Housby received their silver medals in South Africa in August, she knew how far the team had come together. “It was like treasure in our hands.”
At the same time, she has built up a following on Instagram through her sports bra reviews – a public service she provides as a “bigger-chested” athlete who knows how vital that piece of equipment can be. “If I didn’t have a sports bra there is no way I’d could physically do sport. When I went to Australia last year my suitcase didn’t arrive for a few weeks and I told the coach I couldn’t train without my sports bra – I’m just not putting myself in that much pain.”
She struggled to convince her own sister to get herself measured until a recent visit to her first netball club in Blackpool, to deliver the free sports bras for teenagers that the England kit supplier Nike had pledged as part of the team’s campaign for women’s health, NETBALLher. “She’d been wearing one that was five sizes too small,” says Cardwell. “I understand why people are daunted by the numbers but when you’re wearing the right size, you feel more confident, it enhances your performance and it reduces your injury risk.”
In her Wigan living room sits a Christmas tree that has been decorated since mid-November – it comes as no surprise that Cardwell is someone who likes to elongate the celebrations, since she spends so much time away from home. She hopes for an appropriately festive atmosphere against South Africa on Tuesday. “I don’t know what it feels like to go back into an office, but it’s a bit nerve-racking, to be honest, after the highs of the World Cup! But we’ve got lots of learning and growing to do, and I can’t wait.”
