Here is a story that says a lot about cricket’s next generation star, Phoebe Litchfield.

When she was 16 and a relative newcomer to the Sydney Thunder in the WBBL, Litchfield decided to play a prank on a newly-arrived “rookie” on the team, who happened to be the England captain Heather Knight.

With the team camped in a Covid lockdown bubble in a Sydney hotel for two months, Litchfield wrestled the mattress from her own room down the hallway and stood it up across her illustrious teammate’s door, which Knight discovered when she tried to leave her room.

What does this say about Litchfield? She can find the fun in any situation, she’s willing to take a risk and she’s not daunted by reputation.

That pretty much explains her rise from teen prodigy to a 21-year-old middle order batter who is expected to bring the “x-factor” to the Australian team that will defend the T20 World Cup title in Sharjah and Dubai over the next three weeks.

Litchfield hails from Orange in central western NSW where she first learned her craft from her father Andrew, a local vet and former Sydney grade cricketer, who heads Cricket NSW’s western region female academy in his spare time. His daughter’s hand-eye coordination was apparent from the time she was five years old.

By 14, the little left-hander was playing men’s grade cricket alongside her dad, who does confess to some anxious moments when she was facing adult male fast bowlers on difficult wickets.

“But she actually handled it well,” he says. “That’s probably when I realised that she had a real aptitude for being gritty and watching the ball and batting. She not only managed to score runs and handle herself, she looked as though she enjoyed it. She’d come off [the field] with a smile on her face. She loved the challenge of getting in the middle and trying to score runs. And I think that’s something she’s never lost.”

At 15, Litchfield was playing in the first grade men’s competition in Orange when she was selected for the Australian under-19 women’s team. She was also playing hockey, and was named in the Australian under-16 team that would be touring at the same time.

Something had to give, and when Cricket NSW came through with a contract to play for the Sydney Thunder she took it. She juggled school and playing in the WBBL for a couple of years before moving to Sydney to study communications at the University of Technology Sydney and play cricket.

Her ascent to the highest level of the sport happened rapidly. She made her T20 debut for Australia in late 2022 against India, scored back-to-back unbeaten half-centuries in her first ODI matches against Pakistan in early 2023, followed by an Ashes Test in England, a maiden ODI century against Ireland and a successful ODI tour of India, where she averaged 86.66. It was enough to earn her the ICC’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year award last year.

But a full international schedule took a toll on the youngster. Earlier this year the runs started to dry up and she lost the fun as she struggled to meet her own high standards. By the end of the summer it was apparent that fatigue was eroding her form.

“She had just played so much cricket in such a short space of time, and it’s really hard to sort of step back and take a break and kind of refresh mentally as much as physically,” says Leah Poulton, Cricket NSW’s Head of Cricket (Women).

“I think everybody knew that Phoebe just needed a break at some point where she could go away and think about things that weren’t cricket, and then she came back to training and was actually able to train and work on things. At that age, they really need those development windows.”

Litchfield used that time to regroup, work on her technique, and she returned to play a starring role in The Hundred in England in July and August, when she scored 450 runs at a strike rate of 130.43 for the Northern Superchargers.

Her strong form confirmed her place in the Australian team for the T20 World Cup and she joined her teammates for last week’s three-match warm up series against New Zealand in Queensland, which gave a glimpse of what we may see from Litchfield in her first outing on the global stage.

She scored a career-high 64 in the opening match in Mackay, reaching her half-century off 32 balls and going on to smash the winning runs with a daring reverse sweep over the in-field to the boundary.

“Any runs is good runs,” she said, after producing an array of drives, pulls and sweeps, conventional and otherwise.

“I’m not really looking to play for selection, I’m just playing for the love of the game and also the fact that I get to play for this team…it was just so much fun out there. The way we want to play is an attacking brand of cricket and it will come off sometimes and sometimes it won’t. We are always looking to score.”

Coach Shelley Nitschke called it an “exceptional” innings.

Litchfield now has the highest strike rate of any woman who has scored more than 200 international runs since the last World Cup. She has passed her first real test of resilience and the fun is back.

Former international cricketer Poulton predicts Litchfield will be a “game changer’’ for women’s cricket as she continues to develop.

“The thing that makes Phoebe such a fantastic player is that she’s just got this aggressiveness about her style of play out there, looking to score runs every ball,” Poulton says. “And for someone on the sideline, it just looks fearless out there, throwing caution to the wind.

“That can get beaten out of you in international cricket. If you have a couple of poor series or whatever, then you can go a bit more defensive. But that aggression is Phoebe’s strength, so it was nice to see her come out against New Zealand and just play like Phoebe Litchfield. When you watch Phoebe, the excitement is because you feel like you are watching the future.”

The Australian team that will defend the World Cup is a blend of established stars and youngsters like Litchfield, Annabel Sutherland and Darcie Brown. The champion 30-somethings – captain Alyssa Healy, opening bat Beth Mooney and all-rounder Ellyse Perry still dominate the top order, but the next generation is hungry for honours to match those who have come before.

Poulton has no doubt that Litchfield will thrive in this environment. “She’s ready to go and light it up at the World Cup,” she says.