On Friday, she’ll repeat the drill for the 261st and final time of her 17-year international career, but with a significantly higher profile attached to the occasion. The moment, she admitted, had been “a long time coming” – particularly after her omission from England’s 50-over plans in the wake of last year’s World Cup exit – but will be no less emotional for that. Either way, a maiden women’s Test at Lord’s will be a truly fitting stage for Beaumont’s international last hurrah.

“In my lifetime, women couldn’t even go in the pavilion and couldn’t be MCC members, but now it sounds like it’s going to be packed,” Beaumont said. “To potentially play in front of 20,000 people in a Test match at Lord’s shows how far the game has come in a short space of time. It’s just incredible and something that we can all be really proud of.”

There are few other active players who have lived within the historical arc that this Test match represents. Beaumont would have been seven years old when, in September 1998, Lord’s finally overturned two centuries of tradition and admitted its first tranche of female members. She was 26 and in the prime of her career when, in July 2017, she capped her player-of-the-tournament performance with victory in the 50-over World Cup final. After Sunday’s T20 final loss to Australia, that remains England women’s most recent global trophy.

In between whiles, she’s scrapped for her opportunities and fought back from indignities, including her high-profile axing from England’s T20I squad ahead of the Commonwealth Games in 2022 – a snub that actually drove her short-format game to new heights, including an innings of 118 from 61 balls for Welsh Fire in the Hundred that has yet to be bettered in the men’s or women’s competition.

“I’ve always loved proving people wrong!” Beaumont said, recalling the occasion of her wedding in April 2024, when her dad Kevin caused an impromptu drinking game on one of the rowdier tables at the back.

“I think my dad in his speech at our wedding used the word ‘resilient’, in inverted commas, meaning ‘stubborn’, at least 10 times. For me I was always, well, if you told me ‘no’, I’d be like ‘I’ll show you!’ And I think that’s the moment I knew that I was ready to retire, I was dropped this time and I was like, ‘okay cool …’, instead of I’ll show you …”

Resilience is what England’s players as a whole will need in this remarkable week, as they lick their wounds at the scene of a lasting career heartache, while attempting to gird their loins for a very different, but equally momentous, slice of history.

“I’m really proud of how the girls went in the T20 World Cup, [but] I feel for them,” Beaumont said. “Some of them haven’t gone home, or have had one night in their own bed. Then they’re back here, doing quite literally the opposite end of cricket … having to settle in for long spells, get used to leaving the ball. They are turning up with a brilliant attitude, as they have done for the past four or five weeks.”

The switch will not be easy for either team to make. India have had slightly longer to adjust, having decamped to Wormsley for two days of red-ball training, but they too are returning to the scene of bitter disappointment, following their own loss to Australia at Lord’s that sealed their group-stage exit. More pertinently, however, neither side is remotely familiar with a format that gets played far too infrequently for any player to claim to be a specialist.

“We all want to be really good at things, and one Test every two years puts a halt to that.”

Tammy Beaumont

This includes Beaumont, whose first Test appearance came in the 2013 Ashes – a span that only Joe Root among England’s men can better. And yet, Root has played 166 Tests to Beaumont’s 11, even if her national-record 208 against Australia in 2023 is proof of the heights she might have been able to attain, given even half as many opportunities.

“People always ask me what my favourite format is, and I can never say Test cricket, even though I think it hands down would be if we had the opportunity to play enough,” she said. “It’s called a Test for a reason. You test your mental resolve, physical resolve, technique … but you always feel like you’re playing catch-up; two days’ training going into this one, you never quite feel ready.

“I think the women’s game has lagged behind in that,” Beaumont added. “Most of us want to play Test cricket, but not in a tokenistic way. We want to really sink our teeth in and master it, and that’s starting to come in the T20 format. We are all elite sportspeople at the end of the day. We all want to be really good at things, and one Test every two years puts a halt to that.”

In a similar vein, Beaumont voiced a note of caution about the recently completed T20 World Cup, which boasted record crowds in excess of 245,000, as well as a hefty 28,887 for the final alone – the highest women’s attendance for any cricket match in England.

But, she added, the lack of competitive matches was a concern, even though the passion was apparent from all teams, not least Scotland and Ireland, both of whom registered their first World Cup victories.

Overall, Beaumont acknowledges she’s had it pretty good in the course of her career. Only the great Charlotte Edwards has scored more ODI runs than her final tally of 4,738, while her record of 12 hundreds in the format will only realistically be challenged by another of England’s finest, Nat Sciver-Brunt.

But the beginning of the end is fully in motion now. “It has been difficult,” she admitted. “It has probably accelerated in the last week or so, lots of conversations behind the scenes and people I had to tell. I had to tell them to take the day off on Monday to get here, so it has been pretty mad.

“I told the girls today, which was probably the hardest bit. Amy Jones looked so shocked. I don’t know if she’s got over it yet. Then, it’s back to business, facing a red ball, getting annoyed that there’s never enough net-bowlers or never long enough to bat. Once it was all out there, it’s down to business and enjoy batting for as long as possible.”

Curiously, Beaumont will bow out having emulated a feat that Ben Stokes achieved in his very last Test innings, having batted at every position from 1 to 11 in the order. And that, in turn, reflects the era into which she was inducted. “You used to pick someone as a squad player to train them up, whereas now there’s probably a pool of 50 players who’d be able to perform for England on the world stage.”

Her proudest memories have been almost too numerous to mention, and include her defining role in the 2017 World Cup, as well as her Ashes double-century. But, in her estimation, captaining England to a thrilling five-run win against India at The Oval last summer came out top of the pile.

“I never thought my highlight would be scoring two runs on a road at The Oval,” she joked. “But empowering the girls and seeing how amazingly they responded to that, and seeing what this group is capable of. That atmosphere is why you play the game. Obviously, 2017 is definitely right up there, but it’s so long ago that I can barely remember it …!”

It’s been quite the journey for a kid from Kent whose first claim to fame was as a National Schools Gymnastics champion … not that she ever quite saw that as her future.

“I was never going to make it in gymnastics!” she said. “I was no Simone Biles. But I think of some of the most surreal things that have happened to me, I’ve met the Dalai Lama, I’ve met Prince William, so many things have happened… I would never have taken up golf, and I’ll probably play a lot more now …

“Some of the most surreal things have happened over my career, and that’s all off-field stuff. It wouldn’t have happened to a little kid from Sandwich, down in Kent. It’s definitely been worth it.”