Aussie captain Meg Lanning reveals that there’s more to her than what you see on the pitch
She’s been the Australian Women’s Cricket captain for six years and has grown up in the role. Now she reveals that what you see on the cricket pitch is not all that you get.
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She may be a stalwart of Australian cricket and been captain of the highly successful women’s team since 2014, but there are still facets of Meg Lanning that people misunderstand.
“On the field, I come across very serious and that’s generally because playing cricket can be a pretty serious thing and I’m thinking a lot as a captain,” she muses.
“But I would actually say I’m a really relaxed person who’s pretty casual and likes to have a laugh.
“I’m not a worrier, I don’t get caught up in things. Cricket is very intense and captaincy can be quite intense as well, on the TV screen I probably look really serious and that I don’t like having a laugh, but I’d say that as a person, I’m pretty relaxed off the field.”
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That unflappability on the field, however, is what has transformed Lanning into a leader who values her off-field relationships with the players as much as her on-field performances.
But as with her personality, what we see on the field is only part of the story.
“The on-field cricket stuff you learn on the job a little bit and every game’s different, but even still you come across games where things happen that haven’t happened before and you’ve just got to roll with it,” the 27-year-old middle-order batter says.
“A lot of it is instinct and going with what you feel like the right decision.”
And once you’ve made a decision, you stick with it.
One example of this mentality in Lanning’s career happened in June, 2017 in Australia’s opening game of the ICC one-day World Cup against West Indies when Lanning headed to the middle of the pitch alongside her opposing captain Stafanie Taylor for the coin toss.
Taylor won the toss, electing for her side to bat, quickly rescinding her decision to say the Windies would bowl. Lanning was having none of it and argued her point. She won. The West Indies batted first and were thoroughly beaten by the Aussies.
To this day, Lanning says she would handle that situation in the same way.
“Yes, I think I would,” she says.
“I’m always someone who stands up for what they believe in and I knew that was what had happened and I wasn’t going to back down.
“I’m a pretty competitive person, I do the right thing, I don’t think I did the wrong thing in that situation, I was sure she said they were going to bat, and then changed her mind, I wasn’t going to let her get away with it.”
Lanning played her 100th T20 international against Sri Lanka in Perth on February 24 and fittingly hit a match-saving unbeaten 41 (44) to secure her side’s first win of the T20 World Cup. She is the country’s greatest run scorer in the shorter format, with more than 2700 runs against her name.
At the heart of that long and successful career is simply a love of cricket.
“I love cricket. It’s fun and that’s the reason I started playing as a kid and it’s still the reason I play today.”
She started playing because her dad loved the sport, even despite there being so few female role models in the game.
“My hero was Ricky Ponting growing up, I actually saw him playing a lot and I didn’t really know there was female cricket to be fair, and now that’s very different,” she says.
“Today, there’s Megan Schutt, Georgia Wareham; young girls are seeing those players on TV and they can want to be them.”
Lanning also acknowledges the mounting pressure of modern-day women’s cricket that comes with the increased exposure.
“There’s nowhere to hide in cricket these days,” she says.
“Every game you play, every training session you do, people are watching and trying to work out how to get you out, I guess, and it’s my job to try and improve things and make little tweaks here and there to keep trying to stay ahead of them.”
And trying to stay one step ahead of the rest starts on Monday in the do-or-die clash with New Zealand at Melbourne’s Junction Oval when she’ll call on all her experience and all her intuition to lead Australia in her 102nd game.