Lisa Sthalekar has spent close to a quarter-century being one of the first women in the room. The first cricketer of any nationality to complete the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in women’s ODIs. The first woman appointed to the executive of the Australian Cricketers’ Association. One of the first four female commentators in the IPL. The first female president of the World Cricketers Association. An ICC Hall of Fame inductee, a four-time World Cup winner, and now — as of March — the Sydney Sixers’ T20 Youth Academy Director.
Add to that list her newest venture: Around the Wickets, a travel company that takes fans to women’s cricket, co-founded with Rina Hore. The pair began running tours in early 2025 and have built it quickly. Around the Wickets is now an official ICC travel partner — with a focus on women’s cricket that makes it the first of its kind. With the Women’s T20 World Cup approaching, the venture is having a moment.
Sthalekar herself is having one too. The compounding of her roles — icon, broadcaster, administrator, coach, mentor, and now founder — places her at a near-unique vantage point in the women’s game. Around the Wickets, in many ways, is built on top of all of it.
A career of firsts
Raised in Sydney, Sthalekar was introduced to cricket by her father in the family’s backyard. She made her ODI debut in 2001 at the County Ground in Derby, and went on to play 125 ODIs, eight Tests, and 54 T20Is, scoring 3,913 international runs and taking 229 wickets. She was a member of four World Cup-winning Australian sides — the 2005 and 2013 ODI Champions and the 2010 and 2012 T20 champions. She retired the day after the 2013 World Cup final played in India.
The retirement was a transition more than an exit. Even before it, Sthalekar had been quietly working on the institutional side of the game. She and Karen Rolton approached the Australian Cricketers’ Association to begin representing female players — a process that required rewriting the association’s constitution to allow women to become full members, and that culminated in her appointment to the ACA executive in 2011, the first woman to hold that role.
Through the ACA seat, Sthalekar joined what was then FICA — now the World Cricketers Association — in 2015, brought in to extend the female-representation model globally. She is now its President, and a member of both the ICC Women’s Committee and the ACA board.
In parallel, in 2015, the Board of Control for Cricket in India hired Sthalekar, Mel Jones, Isa Guha, and Anjum Chopra as the IPL’s first female commentators — a decision that put the league ahead of any other major cricket property on that front. “They realized that, whilst the tournament was going well, they still weren’t kind of captivating the female audience,” Sthalekar says. The role itself was, she admits, “literally my first real foray into proper commentary — talk about being thrown in at the deep end and having to learn on the fly.” She credits it with launching her broadcasting career, which now spans Channel 7, Cricbuzz, the IPL, MLC, PSL, the Big Bash, and ICC tournaments.
The pattern across all of these moves: Sthalekar tends to arrive in spaces where women have not been before, and stay long enough to make sure they continue to be there.
A travel company built for the women’s game
Around the Wickets started, by Sthalekar’s account, with a simple observation. Women’s cricket was getting more exposure, the calendar was growing, the destinations were becoming more interesting — and yet none of the established cricket-travel operators were doing anything for it.
“It’s a completely different audience that you’re trying to captivate, capture — predominantly female. So your activities of just going to the pub and drinking beer may not quite fly with the clientele.”
The co-founder she chose for the venture is someone she has known since 1997, when Rina Hore was the manager of her New South Wales open side. Hore was the first woman to serve on the Cricket NSW Board, is currently the museum head at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and brings event and athlete-management experience to the operating side of the business. There is also a more sentimental thread to their partnership. When Sthalekar travelled to South Africa as a player for the 2005 World Cup — her first — Hore came along as a fan, with a small group of friendly faces in the stands. Two decades later, that experience is essentially what Around the Wickets is now bringing to fans.
The first major test was a tour to India for the 2025 Women’s ODI World Cup, taking ten participants — nine women and one man — across the country to follow the Australian team. Sthalekar and Hore have since run experiences around the Australia women’s calendar at home and the Women’s Premier League, and have a substantial slate planned for the upcoming Women’s T20 World Cup, including a Lord’s tour and a dinner the night before the final.
A community for fans who have followed alone
The pitch is simple in language and quite specific in audience. There is a generation of women’s-cricket fans, Sthalekar argues, who have been trooping to grounds and tracking the game for years on their own — sometimes literally on their own. “In women’s cricket, even in that group of 10, there were a couple of women that love the game but none of their friends like it,” she says. “They were like, ‘Well, who do I go and see this with? None of my mates want to go.’ Because women’s cricket is probably still growing in numbers, you kind of go to the ground by yourself and sit by yourself.”
The company name for these fans — Around the Wickets calls them Troopers — captures the rest of the framing. “If you join us on one tour you’re a Trooper for life,” Sthalekar says. “You’ve got to be a Trooper to be able to follow women’s cricket and love it because it’s been hard to find for such a long period of time. You’ve had to search the magazines and search the channels — where is it?” As the women’s game grows and stadiums fill, Sthalekar notes that the diehards risk getting lost. Around the Wickets is built to give them the chance to enjoy the changed atmosphere — packed stadiums, their best players up close.
That gathering function is, in Sthalekar’s view, the central proposition. “It’s about creating a community that wants to follow and support women’s cricket — that loves it just as much as you do, but you’ve never met each other because you’re not in the same city or the same town,” she says. Around the Wickets bills itself as a way for those scattered fans to travel together, share the same matches and the same hotel breakfasts, and meet people for whom none of it requires explanation.
The clientele is global, not Australian-only. A New Zealand participant on the upcoming T20 World Cup tour is making the trip specifically to watch Suzie Bates, Sophie Devine, and Lea Tahuhu before they retire — chasing all three players’ final matches. Other Troopers have come from markets where women’s cricket has long had loyal but isolated followings.
Off-pitch as the difference-maker
Cricket-travel businesses live and die on what happens off the pitch. Match days are short windows; the rest of the trip is what differentiates one operator from another, and tour participants often remember the side experiences as vividly as the games themselves.
Around the Wickets has built its programming with that in mind. The 2025 India tour included Jaipur for block printing and the Amber Palace, the Taj Mahal, and Delhi spice markets. A pre-Test Q&A dinner at the WACA in Perth featured former WACA chief executive and Australian Test cricketer Christina Matthews and Radha Gupta, founder of the Indian women’s-cricket fan group Bucket Hat.
On the Lord’s tour planned for the upcoming World Cup, Hore’s contacts at the SCG museum have led the MCC to agree to a bespoke version of the regular Lord’s tour, with women’s-game items pulled from storage specifically for the group. Sthalekar is also planning a Q&A dinner the night before the World Cup final, with commentators on hand to preview the match. “It’s about creating those types of moments and experiences,” she says.
Her broadcasting and administrative life, meanwhile, gives Around the Wickets a layer of access most operators cannot replicate. Tour participants at WPL matches have stayed in the same hotel as Sthalekar’s UP Warriorz team — meaning breakfast tables next to Meg Lanning and Phoebe Litchfield. For the upcoming T20 World Cup, Sthalekar plans to sit in the stands with her Troopers during the semi-finals and final, narrating the tactical changes as they happen. “I can give them a blow-by-blow of what I think’s happening and why certain bowlers are bowling,” she says. “They probably won’t get that live experience anywhere else, in the stands.”
The two Troopers from the 2025 India tour, who spoke to cricexec for this piece, return to the community theme unprompted. Carolyn Anderson, frames the appeal in terms of what cricket-touring has historically lacked for women fans. She had wanted to go on a cricket tour since the 1970s, she says, but had always written it off as unsafe or unwelcoming when the destination was the men’s game. The Women’s ODI World Cup tour was an immediate yes. “The size of the group was perfect, the other tourists friendly and welcoming. The Indian tour group was fantastic. We laughed like drains, wept bitter tears when the Aussies lost in the semi-final, but I made what I think will be lifelong friendships.” The group has since reunited at the SCG, a small marker that the friendships outlast the tour.
Helen Marshall, on the same tour, points to the social dynamic itself. “We loved being with other cricket tragics, mostly women. We found we had a lot in common, and there was never a shortage of conversation.” She describes the trip as “blending the right amount of sightseeing, culture, and cricket.”
Anderson adds an observation that gestures at why Around the Wickets is landing now. “Growing up in the seventies, the only women’s sport on television was tennis and the occasional golf tournament. To witness the emergence of particularly women’s team sports has been gratifying and long overdue, and to be part of a group that is genuinely invested in promoting women in sport is icing on the cake.”
Wider than cricket
Around the Wickets is the venture, but Sthalekar frames it more broadly. The company has Corinne Hall — a former Hobart Hurricanes captain, ACA staffer, and Sthalekar’s longtime friend — as its resident artist. Hall’s book Victress, published in collaboration with Cricket Australia in 2020, drew the female athletes who inspired her growing up; one of her recent works, a portrait of the retired Alyssa Healy, is being prepared for auction with proceeds going to a foundation. “The whole idea is not just cricket,” Sthalekar says. “We’re just here to keep supporting women’s sport in general. The tide is rising — and it takes a lot of people, not just one person.”
The roadmap from here is busy. After the T20 World Cup, the company plans to run experiences during the Australian summer, more WPL trips, and a tour to Sri Lanka next year for the Champions Trophy. Sthalekar’s other roles — at the WCA, at the Sixers academy, and as a fixture on global broadcasts — feed each tour with the kind of contacts and context that take a working lifetime to assemble.
It is the rare side venture that compounds rather than competes with everything else its founder is doing. Around the Wickets is what it looks like when Sthalekar’s broadcasting profile, administrative authority, coaching network, and fan-side enthusiasm for the game all show up in the same business at once. Today’s Troopers are the early adopters; with the World Cup window and an ICC partnership in place, more are on the way.
