World Cup final 2022: Alyssa Healy steps up big time to help deliver Australia title
Humbled at the 2017 ODI World Cup, Australia decided to reinvent how they played the game, and at the forefront of that plan was to get one player more involved. It’s worked wonders.
Women's Cricket
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Adam Gilchrist has paid tribute to Alyssa Healy as one of cricket’s greatest ever big-stage performers, after she eclipsed his own World Cup heroics in Christchurch.
Healy’s scintillating 170 off just 138 balls featuring 26 boundaries, single-handedly buried England in the final in Christchurch and delivered Australia its first 50-over World Cup trophy since 2013.
It followed the 32-year-old’s match-winning 129 in the semi-final, which made her only the second cricketer after Shane Watson to deliver the semi-final, final ton double in a major ICC tournament.
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Australia may have just said goodbye to one female sporting superstar in Ash Barty, but it now has another one to provide the poster on the wall.
Healy’s powerhouse performance in New Zealand adds to her legacy as the clutch moment queen, after she was also crowned player of the match in the 2020 World T20 final at the MCG and player of the series in the 2018 T20 World Cup in the West Indies.
Gilchrist’s 149 in the 2007 World Cup triumph over Sri Lanka had long stood as the benchmark innings in the history of cricket finals – but the baton has now been passed from one iconic keeper-opening bat to another.
“What a world-class operator Alyssa Healy is,” Gilchrist told News Corp.
“Tournament play, both as a team and individual is to slowly peak at the right end of the event.
“Scoring 210 runs through the preliminary stages was a steady start for her, but nailing back-to-back tons in the semi and the final just oozed class, skill and an appetite for the biggest moments on the biggest stage.
“Australia should be so proud of Alyssa and the entire team of champions.”
Gilchrist’s innings in the 2007 men’s World Cup final was of an equally breathtaking quality and it left him with a glow because it wasn’t just another day.
When you make a hundred in a World Cup final it means 10 times what it does in a routine match, because the entire world is watching and the game’s ultimate prize is on the line.
Healy was – by her lofty standards – below par in the summer’s women’s Ashes and under some pressure to deliver coming into the World Cup.
But when the knock-out games arrive you can almost set your clock to Healy rising to the top.
Her two hundreds in the two biggest games made her the highest ever run-scorer at a women’s World Cup, pipping opening partner Rachael Haynes, who had only broken the record herself earlier in the final as Australia powered to a total of 5-356 batting first.
For Healy and Australia it was a crowning achievement because the last 50-over World Cup in 2017 was a low point for the team, crashing out in the semi-finals to India.
It was a watershed moment for Australia who decided to reinvent the way they played the game, and at the forefront of that plan was to move Healy from No.7 up to opening – ala Gilchrist.
The shift has been a masterstroke.
Since that 2017 World Cup, Healy has averaged an astonishing 52.29 at ODI level, and has featured all five of her career centuries.
Her T20 average has also lifted to 30.81 – and Australia has collected all three world championship trophies contested in that time.
The clutch reputation comes in the family because husband Mitchell Starc – who was watching on in Christchurch having flown there from Australian duties in Pakistan – was man of the tournament in the 2015 men’s World Cup.
Like her uncle Ian, the game never stands still around A Healy.
Ian’s hustle and bustle out in the middle was his trademark, and Healy too has a presence about her where she sets the entire tempo of a match – and she has a cool head to match.
England’s chances were already dead in the water after her batting display – which for a moment threatened to finish with her making a double century, as nearly everything she swung at went to the fence.
But Healy showed her class with the gloves as well as she executed a brilliant stumping off the bowling of leg-spinner Alana King, who finished with 3-64 in her debut World Cup.
Unstoppable force: Meet Australia’s greatest sporting team
- Robert Craddock
Ashes to Ashes dusty to dust, if Thommo doesn’t get you Lillee must.
That was the famous old cricket battle cry of the 1970s when Australia took on England but if you were framing it for Sunday’s World Cup final which two names would you choose.
Lanning or Healy maybe? What about Mooney, Haynes, Schutt, Perry, McGrath, or Gardner?
They are all matchwinners.
That’s the thing with great teams … they come at you in waves. You get Meg Lanning cheaply and off goes Beth Mooney.
You successfully absorb Megan Schutt with the new ball only to be cut down by Ash Gardner.
Australian fans should celebrate the sight of their mighty women’s cricket team in action against England on Sunday because they may well be watching the collective peak of the best current sporting team in Australia and one of the greatest of all time.
Bookmakers have Australia $1.20 favourites which theoretically means if the game was played five times Australia would win four.
It sounds a short quote for a final. It’s not. If anything it overrates England’s chances.
Australia has not lost a match in this tournament and since losing to India in the semi-finals of the 2017 World Cup it has lost just two games in the format.
The Australians may have occasionally poor overs and modest half hours but not bad days.
They are to women’s cricket what the All Blacks are to rugby union — the absolute standard-setters, capable of mass destruction, daring comebacks and withering intimidation simply by their presence.
They are not unbeatable but to do so you had better bring you’re A-plus game and hold it from start to finish.
In a way it is appropriate that Annabel Sutherland is playing on Sunday because her father James helped Australia snatch a break on the rest of the world when he was chief executive of Cricket Australia, making the growth of the women’s game a priority before it was trendy in other sports.
The current side is a special one because it contains several of the pioneers like Healy and Lanning who have steered and driven the growth of the game for the past decade.
They were the last generation of women who grew up playing against males in junior cricket and whose idols were Australian male Test stars.
Now, a junior female cricketer is more likely to have a poster of Healy, Lanning or Perry on their wall as an Australian star.
Healy’s husband Mitchell Starc says Lanning’s batting technique is as good as anyone’s — male or female — in world cricket.
Australia is the best paid side in the world and it’s true that money talks in any sport.
Being full-time athletes has translated to more time training which equates to more power and more balls disappearing over the fence.
But even before they were full-time Australia’s women were ultra-professional in all ways bar their pay packets.
Many of them would rise with the sun and have 14-hour days juggling jobs and training in a way Australia’s modern male players never had to.
They deserve all they get.
Healy: The ingredient making this World Cup so special
By Alyssa Healy
After 30 games of cricket between eight teams, played over 30 days on six different venues … the ICC Women’s World Cup comes down to this: us playing England in a winner-takes-all match.
Thinking back over our eight games so far, I can pinpoint one moment when I knew we’d be hard to beat.
It was in our opening game — against the Poms — with them needing 16 runs from their final over.
Jess Jonassen taking that last over signalled our intent of how we wanted to play. I had the feeling that Jono wasn’t all that happy with how she’d bowled prior to that, but she quite literally walked up to Meg (captain Meg Lanning) and said: “I want the ball in the last over, I am going to win this game”.
That a player was confident enough to say: “I can do this, give me that ball, I’m going to get the job done” was so cool and for me, that set the tone for the rest of our World Cup.
Since then, there have been little moments, important batting partnerships, the awesome hundreds we’ve scored, the awesome catches, there have been so many little things along the way.
But Jono taking the ball in that last over just signalled that this was our World Cup and that we wanted to be there on April 3.
The three facets
There isn’t one side to our game that has got us into that final; it been an all-round great performance.
Sometimes if we haven’t quite batted as well as we would have liked, we’ve still managed to grind out a score and then our bowlers nail it.
And then when we’re chasing pretty decent total, then our batters have nailed it.
And when we’ve needed to take an absolute hanger in the field, we’ve done that.
It’s been a really nice all-round performance and we know that because there’s four Aussies in the top-five leading run-scorers this World Cup, there aren’t as many of our bowlers in the wicket column because they’re sharing the load equally.
When you look at those statistics, everyone’s doing a job for our side and that’s exactly how you want to play the tournament.
Mooney magic
But I’ve got to give some love to Beth Mooney who took a screaming catch against the West Indies in our semi-final win.
Meg and I laugh literally every time we’re out on the field because Moons drops absolute sitters at training.
Whether it be in the slips or whatever we’re doing, she’ll just cloth them for 20 minutes and then take a hanger and be like: ‘Righto, that’s me done’ and then she’ll come out in the game and catch everything.
Meg and I have a little giggle all the time in slips cordon when that happens.
But we work really hard on our fielding, it’s a part of the game that we pride ourselves on as well as our athleticism, and being able to change a game in the field.
After all, catches win matches.
Our special group
To be able to play in the World Cup final with this special group of cricketers means a lot.
I’ve played a lot of cricket with a lot of these players over a lot of years: Rachael Haynes, Meg Lanning, Jess Jonassen, Beth Mooney, Megan Schutt and the like. We are blessed to have that feeling of experience between us.
But in this World Cup we’ve also had a feeling of newness and excitement with players like Darcie Brown, Alana King and Annabel Sutherland coming in.
What I’ve loved about this tour — and it’s been a long tour, we’ve been in the road for three months including our Ashes campaign — has been the way everyone’s really looked after one another.
We’ve got a great feel around our team, we’re super professional but the funny moments are never ending. Every time you go on a golf course there are quite literally one thousand things that happen that are hilarious.
Even in the nets, there are always little moments that make you laugh. Just the other day, our assistant Shelley Nitschke completely let go of the entire flinger the other day and whoever was batting almost got bowled completely around the legs by the flinger.
It keeps you entertained when you’ve been on the road for as long as we have.
For us, we’ve shared incredible moments together over the years and this is a chance to create another great memory.
We all know opportunities like winning a World Cup don’t come along often and who knows what the future may hold.
There are team changes every year and Australia has so many young talented players coming through that this team may not get another opportunity like this to win a World Cup together again. We need to seize the moment.
The 2017 demons
A lot has been written on and spoken about our team’s 2017 World Cup semi-final loss to India and the way it’s shaped our side since.
To be playing in the 2022 World Cup final means a lot to this group and probably justifies everything we’ve been able to build up over the last five years.
It justifies all the hard work and effort that everyone’s put in, to reinventing ourselves and playing fearless cricket.
I’m one of those who’s had to reinvent myself, back in 2017 I was batting in the middle order and I’ve had to back myself after being given the opportunity to open the batting and cement that spot.
It’s been a cool little five years for me personally, but I guess to be able to see what the team has been able to achieve in that time is really special.
The old foe
To be playing against our oldest cricketing rivals — and the reigning tournament champions — adds a little bit more spice to the final, if it wasn’t already spicy enough.
England will be a formidable opponent and it’s a great opportunity for us to play them again in a big game.
The Poms are playing their best cricket at the best time after losing their first three games, with players like opener Danni Wyatt making runs and Sophie Ecclestone taking wickets.
Their middle order has done them well too, the likes of Sophia Dunkley.
INSIDE AUSTRALIA’S ‘RELENTLESS’ PURSUIT OF WC PERFECTION
By Tim Michell
The steely resolve has not left Meg Lanning’s face.
Lanning — and her Australian side — are on a relentless mission to conquer the world.
The ruthless captain has steered her team to eight consecutive World Cup wins in New Zealand, with the West Indian team their latest victim in a 157-run semi-final demolition.
Just when it seemed the world was closing on the Australians — and fast — Lanning’s side has powered to Sunday’s final with a series of clinical victories.
Tested by England in their World Cup opener, the Aussies responded by blitzing Pakistan (seven wickets), New Zealand (141 runs), West Indies (seven wickets), India (six wickets), South Africa and Bangladesh (both five-wicket wins).
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The Australians then turned things up a notch by annihilating the West Indies in a lopsided semi-final.
“I just think (they have) that winning mentality, there’s a ruthlessness there,” said Fox Sports commentator Isa Guha, who played 26 times against Australia during her international career for England.
“And I think in terms of the gap, it’s the depth for me. You could pretty much replace every single player in that team with another player and they’d still get the same result.
“Obviously you’ve got the big guns in Alyssa Healy, Meg Lanning, Ellyse Perry, I think Darcie Brown has been a real revelation on the world stage. I think she’s one of the most exciting cricketers going around at the moment. Tahlia McGrath as well.”
Seven members of the Australian squad were part of the XI which fell to India in a World Cup semi-final five years ago, largely due to an incredible 171 not out from Harmanpreet Kaur.
Injured pair Georgia Wareham (ACL) and Sophie Molineux (foot) were unavailable, but their absence has led to the emergence of Alana King and international return of Amanda Jade-Wellington.
The statistics from this year’s tournament back up Guha’s claim about just how merciless Australia has been.
• At the end of the group stage, Rachael Haynes and Lanning were ranked second and third for most runs;
• Lanning, Haynes and Healy ranked first, second and third for highest individual score of the tournament after Healy’s semi-final heroics;
• Beth Mooney has the most catches — including the screamer she took against the West Indies.
216 - Rachael Haynes & Alyssa Healy's partnership of 216 for @AusWomenCricket at #CWC22 today is the most runs by any pair in any @ICC Women's @cricketworldcup finals match, surpassing Lisa Keightley & Belinda Clark (170 for Aus v South Africa - 18 Dec 2000). Start. pic.twitter.com/eG2gpYKcrW
— OptaJason (@OptaJason) March 30, 2022
It’s no secret Lanning — and her team — love the thrill of the chase.
The Australians chased five times on their way to the semi-finals, crushing three opponents with more than 10 overs to spare.
In four chases at the 2017 World Cup, the Aussies only managed that feat once.
And on the rare occasion Lanning misses out, like against New Zealand, there’s Perry, Mooney, McGrath and Ash Gardner to contend with in the middle-to-lower order.
Having a player with Gardner’s power and matchwinning ability at No. 7 is a luxury no other team boasts.
Prior to the semi-finals, there were 16 players with more than 200 World Cup runs.
Four were Australian, three English (but none above 300 runs), two South African and one West Indian.
It highlights the formidable depth coach Matthew Mott has to call on and the Australians’ ability to lift when a teammate is down.
“Their preparation has been excellent and they have got a really excellent mix of players that can go big,” Guha said.
“Ash Gardner can come in and have an impact, but also players who can play smart innings and keep things calm and cool in the dressing room — Rachael Haynes, for instance.
“And everyone has contributed. I think that’s also a key when it comes to winning the World Cup, everyone contributing at different stages.
“They have just got so much depth, they have got plenty of options, they can go horses for courses on different surfaces and also rest people when they need to.”
Perhaps the greatest advantage Australia has had over its rivals has been its ability to manage stars through the tournament.
What other side in women’s international cricket would have the luxury of resting firebrand Darcie Brown, despite the teen phenom being one of the most lethal bowlers at the tournament?
On reaching the knockout stages, the Australians had only faced an average of 43 overs when batting, leaving their line-up fresh for a title assault.
And Lanning has also been able to share the bowling load, with Megan Schutt (63) the only Australian seamer to deliver more than 30 overs in the group stages.
England had four medium-pacers bowl 42 overs or more, while fellow semi-finalist South Africa leaned heavily on Ayabonga Khaka (57.1 overs), Marizanne Kapp (56.3 overs) and Shabnim Ismail (50.5 overs).
BETH MOONEY CAN FLY (and catch) 🔥 #CWC22pic.twitter.com/UOoymNC83y
— Chloe-Amanda Bailey (@ChloeAmandaB) March 30, 2022
The quality of fielding is another factor in Australia’s favour, with Lanning, Mooney and McGrath combining for 17 catches during the group stage.
In Australia’s semi-final, West Indies paid the price for dropping four simple chances to remove Haynes.
The West Indians’ catching woes were in stark contrast to the Australians, who boast one of the best catching efficiencies in the tournament — headlined by Mooney’s semi-final jaw-dropper and Gardner’s one-handed stunner against South Africa.
“The way Australia are playing I just can’t see them losing, I really can’t,” Guha said.
“It’s almost like they are destined to win this trophy. It takes a side at their very, very best and Australia having maybe a C day or D day to overcome them.”
AUSSIE DOMINANCE
Group stage rankings
Runs
2nd: Meg Lanning 358
3rd: Rachael Haynes 344
12th: Beth Mooney 225
13th: Alyssa Healy 210
Highest scores
1st: Meg Lanning 135 not out
2nd: Rachael Haynes 130
10th: Meg Lanning 97
13th: Meg Lanning 86
Catches
1st: Meg Lanning 6
Beth Mooney 6
4th: Tahlia McGrath 5
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