The Big Five: Beth Mooney and Megan Schutt join household names

It used to be the Big Three but after Australia’s dominant T20 World Cup performance, you can add the names Mooney and Schutt to the list.

Australian opening batter and player of the T20 World Cup Beth Mooney with fans at Federation Square on Monday. Picture: Tim Carrafa

Lanning, Healy, Perry. Lanning, Healy, Perry. Lanning, Healy Perry. I was ga-ga for them. And them alone. Lanning, Healy, Perry. Lanning, Healy, Perry. I was cross-eyed for them. Complimentary of them.

Concentrating on them, and them alone, until the T20 World Cup turned the Big Three of Australian women’s cricket into a Big Five: Lanning, Healy, Perry, Mooney, Schutt.

What a good mob. Australia’s favourite sporting team? Breaking boundaries? Healy’s fours could have snapped a few pickets. Every junior athlete in the country, boy and girl, should be shown footage of Healy while the ground shook at the MCG. Not her batting. Nor her keeping. The smiling. The proof that sport can be enjoyed at any time, under any circumstance. Healy has played the entire match with a wide-eyed, bright-eyed, beaming expression that has said, how good is this! What a beautiful attitude. A brilliant attitude. A beneficial attitude. How good? So good.

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You’d pay a couple of bob to watch any of the Big Five, in any game of cricket, at any tinpot ground in the world. The same could not be said of the occupants of Australia’s men’s teams. Beth Mooney’s best interview came after the sudden-death win against New Zealand. She said: a batting crease was her happy place. She said: it was The place in this world where she felt the most calm, the most assured, the most peaceful, the most organised, the most authoritative. She said: it was a place where she felt truly like herself. Her trademark? The bunt and run. Tapping the ball at her feet and going like the clappers to the other end so Healy could have the strike. A bunt and run might not normally feature on a highlights reel. But Mooney bunted and ran with so much purpose, and she did it so often, and so successfully, and with so much concentration, that it took on a life of its own. I celebrated those bunts and runs more heartily than any of her boundaries. She was the final’s top scorer. She was the tournament’s top scorer. She broke the record for the most runs at a women’s T20 World Cup. She pipped Healy and Schutt for the player of the event award and looked so embarrassed she might have tripped up the stairs. A polished and prolific contributor. The sort of rock-solid and team-oriented personality Justin Langer would welcome into his fold. When she goes for her morning coffee at home, she ditches her phone and takes only her dog. How good is that.

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A spectators’ sign during one of Australia’s group games read: “We skipped United for Beth Mooney.”

Bravo to those young people for being such keen students of the game that Mooney was already their pin-up. Another headline during the tournament could have gone on a banner in Bay 13. Never Fear, Mooney’s Here.

“If I knew I’d try to sell it,” she said about the secret to her success. “I’m not sure what it is. I think it’s a clear mind. Being really calm. For me, batting is a happy place. I don’t really think about anything else, except for what is going on in the game out there. My mind is pretty clear ... If you told me six months ago I’d have the sort of run I’ve had with the bat, I’d probably laugh at you. Being able to contribute to the team’s success first and foremost is what drives me.”

Superstar. One of the five. Holding her player of the tournament medal like she was not sure she should keep it, Mooney said: “I’m a bit lost for words. It’s been an unbelievable tournament. The crowds have been amazing throughout and I just don’t have any words. We’ve got a pretty elite line-up so you know if it’s not your day then someone else will do it. Fortunately Midge (Healy) makes my life pretty easy up at the top by hitting as cleanly as she does. I don’t have to do a whole lot at the other end.”

Not true. Healy needs Mooney more than Mooney needs Healy. The combination is a perfect one. They’ve ended up with virtually the same run count but done it in ideally contrasting manners. Their 115-run stand in 11.4 overs took the final by the scruff of the neck – and then Megan Schutt took the new ball with the sort of glint in her eye that Fred ‘The Demon’ Spofforth would have saluted.

You knew she would get Shafali Verma. You just knew it. The force of a wild personality. Schutt was off the leash. Third ball, Verma was gone. The double fist-pump from Schutt, the roar, the 4-18 that made her the tournament’s leading wicket-taker. She’s the number one-ranked T20 bowler in the world. She took the wicket that won the World Cup. She burst into tears when she saw Ellyse Perry burst into tears.

When she put a rainbow flag outside her house during the same-sex marriage debate, and when her partner and now wife, Jess Hollyoake, was sheepish about it, she stood her ground. But someone might target their house. She said: f…ing let them. She said: I don’t give a shit. She said: We can’t hide. Superstar. One of the five: Lanning, Healy, Perry, Mooney, Schutt.

“It’s the stuff you dream about,” she said of coming off the long run to the roaring accompaniment of 86, 174 at the MCG. “I was soaking it up the whole time I was out there. We spoke before the game about trying to enjoy every moment and I genuinely tried to do that. I was a bit distracted a few times. Counting the Mexican wave. I was blown away when all the lights on the phones came on. I was one happy girl out there.”