Australian women chasing place in history as first defining moment looms in to view
With 100 days until the start of the Women’s T20 World Cup, gun batter Beth Mooney believes this current Australian women’s team are just two important steps away from true greatness.
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It’s a pub debate that rarely finds consensus. How do you rank great teams and performances produced across distant eras?
Australian gun batter Beth Mooney, however, is convinced that the current women’s cricket side are well placed to settle at least one such argument and become indisputably the greatest ever.
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If, that is, they can fulfil the dual ambitions they have set for themselves in the next 15 months. The first of which arrives 100 days from now, when the T20 World Cup opens with a match between Australia and India in Sydney.
“We’re not far off I don’t think,” she says. Though she refutes the notion that things come effortlessly at times for her all-conquering side, insisting “it’s never ‘easy’ being out there playing cricket,” despite recent dominance across the formats.
“If you look at our last couple of years we haven’t lost too many games [but] I think to be the greatest ever you have to win the really big games consistently,” she says.
“We’ve got a couple of those coming up, hopefully, in a World Cup semi-final and a final on home soil [in next year’s T20 World Cup]. Then the following year we’ve got the one day cup in New Zealand, which we weren’t successful at last time.
“So those two big carrots are dangling for us to achieve that goal. Though we’ve got plenty to come before then.”
That includes the remainder of the fifth season of WBBL, which concludes in early December. Mooney led Brisbane Heat to a first title last season with a match winning performance in the Grand Final win over Sydney Sixers.
And Mooney’s vaulting ambition is not limited to the international stage, admitting “as soon as you’ve won one you think about how you can stay on top and win another … and a third.”
The Heat currently sits third in the competition, two points behind ladder leading Adelaide Strikers, with a successful defence of their title still very much within grasp.
Once domestic matters have been taken care of, however, thoughts will swiftly return to national honours. And a competition not just with current rivals but history, too.
The task of becoming the best international women’s team the game has seen means taking over the mantle of the incredible Belinda Clark-led Australian side of the 90s.
The current squad overtook the record ODI winning streak of that side earlier this year. And though eyes are fixed on the immediate future, the latest crop of stars are quick to pay tribute to the trailblazers who went before them.
“That’s really important to our group,” says Mooney’s Australian team-mate Rachel Haynes.
“We’re really proud of our achievements … but I can’t help but think the women that have gone before us, the amazing legacy they’ve left for us as players.
“They showed us what it means to be an Australian cricketer.
“I’ve no doubt we wouldn’t be professional cricketers if it wasn’t for them juggling careers away from the sport and just basically working their backsides off for the sport and the country.”