Hinds captain Mikaela Franks (née Greig) bled green during her long and loyal Central career.
It was a career that ultimately led to a 2019 Hallyburton Johnstone Shield national title with the Hinds; a heartbreaker of a 2024 Dream11 Super Smash Grand Final - and, finally, saw her achieve national honours, in the same year.
In fact, so much of the good stuff came quite late in the piece for the batting, spinning allrounder. She slogged away on the Domestic scene for some 11 seasons before a flurry of higher recognition in the New Zealand game, after having decided to focus solely on her batting.
It was one of the reasons the season of 2023/24 became such a special one, for Franks, who started to add value up the order, with added responsibility, instead of being the senior rearguard.
“I was 28 and I’d got to stage of my career where I never thought I was going to get any higher honours, and I was OK with that," she said.
"I had so many other things going on that it wasn’t a major driver for me, anymore. I just wanted to focus on playing well for the Hinds, for us to do really well as a team. So the whirlwind that happened after that was a nice surprise, an added bonus, in a summer I’d already enjoyed a lot.”
In the last few weeks of that summer, when she was in her late 20s, she chalked up:
- A maiden call-up for the North Island in the North v South series
- A New Zealand A debut, the New Zealand A captaincy
- An equal career best List A score against England A in the crucial, series-winning game
- HBJ Player of the Year recognition at the Central Districts Cricket Awards
- A maiden WHITE FERNS call-up
- Her T20i debut in Queenstown against England - now destined to become her sole international appearance, bar one tour match on a WHITE FERNS tour of England later on in that year.
Franks had a well earned reputation for smoking powerful sixes in the middle order, particularly in the T20 format; as well as possessing one of the best set of hands in the slips in New Zealand Domestic cricket.
But for most of her career, the Hinds had done it tough, and Franks's own contributions and training commitments constantly had to be juggled with her working life.
Early on, that was a sports coordinator and teaching career in Levin - she went to school there herself, at Waiopehu College - and then Palmerston North.
More latterly, she's juggled cricket with her current, full-time job as an Extension Manager for Beef + Lamb New Zealand which means facilitating some 60 events a year to upskill and educate the 4,000 farmers between Wellington and New Plymouth.
With her husband, she's also running a 1,000 hectare sheep farm herself: a busy lady for whom something - cricket - finally had to give.
Franks informed her teammates at CD's end of season celebrations, bringing the curtain down on a career that saw her play 85 one-dayers and 93 T20s for the Hinds.
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With a handful of appearances for The Netherlands as well (as a young player, she appeared in a season in which The Netherlands women competed domestically in the UK's competition), Franks scored 1,153 one-day runs and 867 T20 runs overall in her career.
She took 49 and 23 wickets respectively, and those safe hands snaffled 65 catches across the two formats.
But Franks is one of those sportspeople whose best attributes weren't captured by bald statistics: the leadership qualities, her unstinting commitment, team sense, people sense, energy, enthusiasm, loyalty, and sheer passion for getting the job done.
All of it fed into helping grow and inspire what was increasingly a much younger Hinds team, of which she was the quasi-manager.
The 2023/24 summer was her standout, the one that delivered 404 List A runs at a sparkling average of 50.50. She twice achieved her one-day career best of 84 (for the Hinds, unbeaten on that occasion; and then NZ A); as well as 222 T20 runs - also her season best, by some distance.
In 2024/25, her final season, she hit another one-day knock of 77, but couldn't replicate the consistency as she struggled for quality training time, while also taking on the additional duties and mental burden of captaincy (regular Hinds captain Natalie Dodd having taken the season off, after the birth of her son).
Franks's WHITE FERNS appearance as cap number 206 will probably go down as one of the more infamous runouts: called through for a quick single on debut, when she was yet to get off the mark, for a run that was never there.
But that's cricket, she herself will say. NZC wishes Franks a happy retirement from the game.
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