The T20 Women’s World Cup was the last major sporting event to be played in Australia and its legacy will live on in many ways
Australian cricket captain Meg Lanning and coach Matthew Mott reflect on their victorious T20 World Cup final victory four weeks ago as sport now deals with the coronavirus crisis.
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It was Sunday, March 8 – exactly four weeks ago today – when traditional cricket rivals Australia and India were doing battle in the ICC T20 Women’s World Cup final at the MCG.
Australia batted magnificently, reaching 4/184 and in reply India was crumbling under the pressure of the Aussie bowlers.
Sometime after sunset, the numbers, 86,174, flashed up across the stadium’s big screen: the official attendance, now the biggest for a women’s stand-alone sporting event in Australian history.
There were five overs left in the game, and India was at 5/81, needing more than 100 runs to win from the 30 remaining balls.
The match was all but won.
At this point, Australian captain, Meg Lanning, felt the weight of expectation lift from her shoulders.
So she paused for a moment to look up and see that a Mexican wave was rolling around the packed stands and the crowd had pulled out their mobile phones and was holding them aloft – a twinkling salute to the fact that women’s sport was taking centre stage on International Women’s Day.
“At that moment I just looked over at Ash Gardner and Rachael Haynes and we had the biggest smiles on our faces because that’s something we never got to experience,” Lanning said earlier this week. “To be able to take that all in, will be something I will always remember.”
A fortnight after the final, coach Matthew Mott was in self-isolation in Brisbane with his young family, when he received a phone call from former Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds.
“(Symonds) said: ‘I’m just so proud of this team’,” Mott reveals. “He said, those images of the players celebrating and dancing with Katy Perry at the end, they will last in the memory of anyone who watched the game or watched that event for many years to come.”
This will be the long-term legacy of the match, Mott muses, once the coronavirus dust has settled and normal life resumes.
“In the short-term, there are obviously more important things,” he says. “But I do think the images and the way that we played in that tournament, the adversity we came up against, the players have become heroes for a whole new audience.
“It’s important that it’s a male audience as well … the young boys and girls who will be inspired by that event, I’ve already had so much feedback on the positivity around that.”
Mott has personal experience when he talks about this.
“I was playing backyard cricket with my son the other day and he did a little hop and a skip as he came into bowl and he said he was “Shooter” (Megan Schutt) coming into bowl.
“For me, that’s just magic and it gave me goosebumps at the time and shows we’re not just inspiring young girls, but young boys as well and the next generation will be so much better for the experience that we went through.
“The bums on seats, the eyes on TV, it could not have got a greater audience, so credit to everyone who put in the work behind the scenes.”
One of those working tirelessly behind the scenes was Nick Hockley, CEO of the ICC’s 2020 T20 World Cup.
He says he hopes the success of the event (which included it becoming the world’s most-watched women’s cricket tournament in history), has reaffirmed Australia’s international reputation for hosting great sporting events.
And it could prove also important in Australia’s bid for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“Hopefully it was a visible and current example demonstrating that Australia’s a very knowledgeable and sport-loving society and that it gets behind events that they are driving equality … it shows Australia is very much leading the way in the development of women’s sport and we’re determined to accelerate the trajectory,” he says.
Lanning doesn’t expect the halting of sport to stop the momentum around women’s sport.
“I think there’s still been a lot of good work done and that won’t all be lost, but there will certainly have to be a fair bit of innovation done to make sure we do keep that momentum going,” she says.
“But women’s sport/sport it’s all in the same boat around the world and will have to stall for a little bit, but sport is a massive part of culture all around the world and definitely here in Australia and hopefully once we do get back on track we can keep building.”
Personally, on my first day back at work after three weeks away covering the T20 World Cup, I came into the office and found two handwritten letters sitting on my keyboard. One was addressed to the Sunday Mail. The other to Megan Schutt. Both from “Bill” from country South Australia.
Inside the first letter was a card written in careful cursive – the sort that belongs to another era – with a simple instruction on it: “Could you please pass this on to the Australian Women’s Cricket team”. From isolation, it’s finally time to do that:
To the Australian Women’s Cricket team;
What a victory in front of 86,000 fans at the MCG!
I normally don’t get all that emotional, but it made my eyes water to see our girls take the might of Indian cricket apart in the 20/20 final!
Superb batting from Alyssa and Beth. Brilliant captaincy from Lanning! Superb bowling from Jess Jonassen and what about Megan Schutt. She was like a Viking warrior! She put them to the sword with no mercy.
The catching and fielding could not have been better. An all-round masterclass in how to destroy the opposition in a highly competitive sport. A word of sympathy for Ellyse Perry. She will be OK. She has brains, beauty, ability and character. The full package!
Well done, Bill
Bill’s words embody the legacy that Mott speaks of.
Unfortunately, Schutt will have to wait some time to receive the letter written to her … it is still sitting, unopened near the keyboard, beside the two desk plants that by now have likely wilted and died.
Looking back, no one could have grasped on that March 8 night the full devastation that COVID-19 was about to wreak upon the sports industry in the following days: the fan lockouts, then the total shutdowns and the mass job losses.
It was an evening filled with so much exuberance. It was a night when hugs were still allowed and shaking hands a social norm, when it was OK to push past strangers to get to your seat.
That game signalled the beginning of a new era for women’s sport in Australia – one where it is clear that if you fund it correctly, the audience will follow – but ironically was also the last major sporting event to be held for the foreseeable future. Schutt acknowledges the significance of that.
“Hopefully people are going back and looking at the replays and getting a bit of joy out of that because the joy from that game is going to last in us players for a very long time and I hope it does so for the spectators,” she says.
Hockley agrees: “There I was to be a part of such a great event, but on the other side it just makes you hurt for the industry more broadly, because you understand what we’re all missing out on”.
Thinking back to those twinkling phones in the crowd and the Mexican wave that made Meg Lanning smile, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic. The T20 final was less than a month ago. And a whole other lifetime …