Alex Hartley has never named a partner in nearly a decade of public life. In that time she has talked about not being able to get out of bed after losing her England contract, and about being on her period during a live radio broadcast. A separate dispute with an England men’s cricketer, after one of her tweets was criticized, led to online abuse she later discussed in detail on her own podcast. Her relationship status is the one part of her life that has never come up in her own words.
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Is Alex Hartley Dating Kate Cross?
There is no evidence that she is. What exists is a joke that has been treated as a confession for six years.
Hartley co-hosts a podcast, No Balls: The Cricket Podcast, with fellow England bowler Kate Cross. The show began in December 2019 and moved onto BBC Sounds in 2021. Much of it runs on the two women’s friendship from their playing days, which is part of why a fan mistook a joke for an answer in November 2020.
On 23 November that year, Hartley marked a year of the podcast with a tweet. A fan asked if she and Cross were together. She replied, “As if I would ever date a CSK fan.” Hartley supports Royal Challengers Bangalore in the Indian Premier League. Cross supports Chennai Super Kings. The joke was about that rivalry. Cross replied by telling her not to judge someone by the shirt they wear in the tournament.
It was not the first time a fan had tried this. Two and a half years earlier, in June 2018, a Twitter user named Sahil Mehan asked Hartley out directly. She told him she would get coffee with him if he could shoot three pointers like Stephen Curry. He said he would learn. Nothing came of it beyond the exchange itself.
Neither tweet was a denial or a confirmation. Both were the same kind of answer, a joke pointed somewhere else that let the actual question go unanswered. No relationship, let alone a marriage, has ever been confirmed by either woman, regardless of what a handful of low-quality websites have published as fact.
The Rest of the Record
The joke about Cross fits into a longer list of things Hartley has discussed publicly since her playing career began winding down.
- February 2021: A tweet of hers was criticized by England batter Rory Burns during a men’s Test match in India. The backlash that followed included messages telling her to “go and die in a hole.” She discussed the abuse in an interview with Sky Sports the following week.
- May 2023: She announced an indefinite break from playing cricket to protect her mental health.
- August 2023: She retired from playing for good, at the end of that year’s Hundred competition.
- October 2024: After England’s early exit from the T20 World Cup, she said publicly, as a broadcaster, that some players were letting the team down on fitness.
- January 2025: During England’s Ashes tour of Australia, teammate Sophie Ecclestone declined to give her a scheduled television interview. Hartley said on the BBC’s Test Match Special podcast that she had been left feeling hung out to dry. Ecclestone said in April that she had moved past the disagreement.
- December 2025: While commentating on the Ashes Test in Adelaide, she mentioned on air that she was on her period. She later said on her own podcast that co-commentator Dan Norcross was “the most open-minded man I’ve ever met,” and that she had received close to four thousand supportive messages afterward.
A Bigger Platform Since She Retired
She has been more visible since retiring from playing than she was during her playing career.
She was born on 6 September 1993 in Blackburn, Lancashire, and spent her playing career as a left-arm spinner for Lancashire, Middlesex, and England. She was part of the England squad that won the 2017 Women’s Cricket World Cup, taking ten wickets across the tournament, including two in the final against India at Lord’s. She lost her central England contract at the end of 2019 and retired from playing in August 2023, after several more years in domestic cricket.
What came after has kept her in front of an audience far more often than her playing career did. She commentates for BBC Test Match Special and TNT Sports, and writes a column for the Daily Telegraph. The podcast has kept going too: No Balls, still recorded with Cross, won Best Cricket Podcast at the Sports Podcast Awards in 2023 and again in 2024. In October 2023, Multan Sultans in the Pakistan Super League appointed her assistant spin bowling coach, alongside fast bowling coach Catherine Dalton, forming the tournament’s first all-female coaching pair. In July 2024, the University of Central Lancashire gave her an honorary fellowship for her contribution to cricket and sports broadcasting.
She is 32 as of mid-2026.
Across all of those platforms, she has not confirmed a relationship or denied one. She has shown, again and again, that almost nothing about her stays private for long. There is no sign that this will be the exception.
