Discovery Channel and Rose: How Aussie keeper Alyssa Healy survived NZ hotel quarantine
Alyssa Healy described Australia’s practice game against New Zealand as a ‘bloodbath’. Where has the loss left the Aussies ahead of the World Cup?
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Christchurch feels like a ghost town.
New Zealand is in the midst of its Omicron wave and that means the lead-up to the World Cup has a funny feeling: New Zealanders know the tournament’s on, but are worried.
We’re preparing to play in front of really small crowds – I think they’re letting something like 10 per cent capacity at our venues, which means about 300 people can go.
Our all-rounder Ash Gardner has tested positive for Covid and she will stay behind in Christchurch as the rest of us fly to Hamilton for game one.
She’ll now isolate for 10 days and we’ll miss her clean, big hitting in the middle-order and her right-arm offies.
We’ve all been trying to be as safe as possible and we’re restricting what we do and who we see, but we are rest assured that there are plans in place so the tournament can continue if Covid sneaks further into the team.
We know that if we get Covid, the protocols mean we can’t rejoin the team for 10 days, which in a tournament like this is three games of cricket.
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OLD ENEMY
OUR opening World Cup game is on Saturday against England. The beauty of playing the Poms first up – and they’d probably say the same thing about us – is that you know what you’re going to get.
We’ve obviously played a lot against them over the summer, so there’s not really going to be any surprises from either side.
Coming into this game, we take the confidence out of our Ashes series win, but we know England are a big threat, and they’re the reigning champions.
But the one thing we can take out of that Ashes series is a little bit of confidence knowing we’ve got some pretty good plans in place for them.
ENGLISH TARGETS
ENGLAND’S new-ball attack is world-class. Actually, scratch that, their whole bowling attack is world-class – Katharine Brunt, Anya Shrubsole, Sophie Ecclestone … there’s no real weak link and they back themselves to restrict sides to minimal totals.
But we know we’ll probably get a good batting pitch at Hamilton’s Seddon Park and England have some quality batters – Heather Knight and Nat Sciver stand out as their real engine room and seem to churn out runs at will.
They’re just a really good, consistent cricket team and a team that you can’t really take lightly.
I guess the beauty of an Ashes series is that you get to play them over the space of three or four weeks, but in this tournament, you play once and off you go to play another team, so you can’t slip up.
CAUGHT NAPPING?
DID the Kiwis catch us napping in Tuesday’s practice game? Yes, we got beaten by nine wickets, but it was a remarkable game of cricket. And NZ captain Sophie Devine was incredible with her 161 not out (117 balls). It was a bloodbath.
The nature of warm-up games though is that you’re playing everyone, so people are just getting four overs and people are bowling in different positions, so it’s not a true reflection of our squad and a positive is that the bulk of our top order faced 40-50 balls, which is a great sign for our group, even though people will look at that score and go: ‘Oh my god, they got pounded’. In another sense, it might be a little bit of a wake-up call that we need to make sure we’re switched on.
GLOVES READY
SOME people might not have noticed, but I spent the first 20 overs of our bowling innings in that warm-up game on the bench, and Beth Mooney took the gloves.
It was probably a really good thing, to get back on the wagon for a little bit from a confidence point of view after she broke her jaw during the Ashes.
But just in case it has to happen throughout the tournament, she’s got that confidence, but it’s not every day that you see me stepping aside, so I enjoyed sitting on the bench for a bit.
COME IN SPINNER?
AN interesting question will be how many spinners we take into our first game with Amanda-Jade Wellington waiting in the wings.
We’ve only played one game at Hamilton and it was a T20 fixture and the pitch was really flat, so I don’t imagine we’re going to play a whole heap of spinners, I’d say we’d probably go in with two (Jess Jonassen and Alana King) simply because they’re also both all-rounders. But I think our pacers are going to have to do the bulk of the work.
Whoever plays against England, we go into our game well-rested and well-prepared.
SURVIVING HOTEL QUARANTINE
WE arrived in Christchurch about two weeks ago and went straight into seven days of hotel quarantine. Honestly, I absolutely loved it.
Seven days off was exactly what I needed, I mean, you hardly even saw me out in the fresh-air-zone where we were allowed for about an hour a day because I was just absolutely loving lying down and doing nothing.
Poor Meg Lanning was cutting laps around the exercise yard, but in all seriousness, I reckon, seven days’ rest was just what this group needed.
We probably didn’t realise how big of a summer it’s been, with the India series, then WBBL, then the Ashes, until we got the opportunity to sit down and have a break.
I got through watching documentaries about gold hunters and aeroplane disasters on the Discovery Channel, drinking some rose and dreaming about golf.
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