.png)
4 hours ago
1
Sometimes, those behind-the-scenes cameras show more than they know. In a silent Australian dressing room in 2019, the players were staring at the indeterminate middle-distance like commuters on a train. Eventually, the one raised voice belonged to Alyssa Healy.
This was the last day of the Ashes Test at Taunton, where Australia had to decide whether to offer England a chase in an attempt to win, or bat the game to death. Criticised afterwards for choosing the latter, coach Matthew Mott and captain Meg Lanning adopted thin-lipped Australian sternness to insist that an England team trailing in a multi-format series didn’t deserve to be offered a path back.
In the documentary footage shown later, with Mott and Lanning laying out their reasoning and asking if everyone agreed, it was not a forum set up for dissent. But the issue was less about offering England a chance and more about Australia creating one for themselves, however unlikely. When Healy spoke up, she probably wasn’t thinking of the long-term implications of a compelling finish as an argument to administrators to schedule more women’s Tests. She was thinking like a competitor, wanting to have a crack at England with the ball.
She didn’t deliver a stirring monologue that got everybody on board: nobody backed her and the issue was dropped. But it was notable that Healy at least felt compelled to speak, and able to. Nothing changed that day, but it has changed since, from when Lanning retired in 2023 until Healy followed suit last weekend.
Perhaps this is simply generational: the team in Healy’s final Test featured genuine youth in Phoebe Litchfield, Georgia Voll, Lucy Hamilton and Darcie Brown, among other youngsters with recent debuts, a change from an era of hardened semi-professionals. But there is a broader change among the players, along with their greater visibility through televised games and the hungry churn of digital media. Perhaps the observation is simplistic, but the Lanning era felt like players could only think about proving themselves. In the Healy era, they could express themselves.
Healy was front and centre of this, with her natural chattiness as well as a flair for deprecation usually directed at herself and occasionally at another deserving target. When among the ranks, she had perhaps felt pressure to keep a lid on her personality, not wanting to set off the tall-poppy tripwire that can take down any Australian seen to be seeking attention. Perhaps she has simply had more opportunities to speak since taking charge. Repeated match-winning knocks in World Cup finals don’t hurt when it comes to being afforded latitude.
Either way, Healy’s entertaining speeches, her smackdowns of online sniping, and her recent star turn on men’s Ashes commentary before returning to the pitch for her own farewell series against India, have all offered an example to women cricketers that they can excel on the field while also being widely seen and heard elsewhere. As a player who took many years at the top before blossoming with the bat, she has flourished most of her all in her final years.
In terms of being embraced in the men’s side of cricket, Healy does have advantages through connections of both blood and marriage, but that prominence would also work against her if she hadn’t got herself up to the mark as a player. Her final ODI innings, that monster 158 she looted from India, made sure she stayed at that mark until the end. Her Test that followed, bowing out with a score of 13 in Perth, didn’t duplicate that euphoria, but that’s the way of the game: everyone has more quiet performances than substantial ones. The win is what matters, and Healy skippered one more of those to close out her collection.
If anything, her final match underlines a recurring truth about the women’s game: that with Test opportunities so much scarcer than for men, those quirks of bad luck can cut rather than sting. Every odd dismissal, every injury, and the wait for even the best players to get their next chance is most often measured in years, if it comes at all.
Healy closes a 16-year career having played 11 Tests. Ellyse Perry has a claim to being Australia’s greatest in the format, and has played 15, pushing through a quad injury that would probably have kept her out of a short-form match so as not to miss the chance in Perth. Annabel Sutherland averages 89 with the bat and 23 with the ball, but unless the game’s scheduling changes she may not play more than Perry.
Had Perry missed last week, it would have meant two years between drinks. The Australians were supposed to supplement six white-ball matches in the Caribbean next month with a Test, their first against West Indies since 1976, and the first time they would have played two Tests in such quick succession since 2005 in England.
That match is now cancelled because an underfunded Cricket West Indies operation wanted to offset costs by hosting all seven matches at the same ground, while Cricket Australia wanted two venues. The issue as ever is reluctance to pay the bill, which comes back to how cricket’s finances are unequally apportioned. There are some things Healy has helped change in the game, and some beyond one player. Hopefully, with a prominent voice in retirement, she can at least keep raising it in support of more opportunity than she received.
