Australia's women a symbol of durability on long world record road

In any area of life, women are told to wait. We cannot expect equality to happen overnight; we cannot rush change; we cannot move too quickly otherwise people won’t like it. Women who play cricket have experienced the same: waiting to be allowed to play at Lord’s, waiting to get media coverage, waiting to discard the skirts that amateur players were once made to wear. The professionals of the present day still get plenty of opportunities to exercise their patience.

When Ricky Ponting’s players set a record of 21 consecutive wins in one-day internationals, they did so in a burst. A tri-series at home against England and Sri Lanka, on to an unbeaten run through the 2003 World Cup, then four wins against the West Indies in the Caribbean before losing three more on the bounce. Those 21 wins came between January and May of the same year, with largely the same team getting on a brief and glorious roll.

On Sunday, Meg Lanning’s Australia beat that record with a 22nd consecutive win, downing New Zealand by six wickets. Ponting’s last loss came a matter of days before his winning streak started. The last loss for Lanning’s team came in 2017, the final ODI in an Ashes series that Lanning missed with injury. Assembling 22 matches since has taken close to four years.

The pandemic has played a part. Australia’s women had a tour to South Africa cancelled nearly a year before the men’s team followed suit to greater controversy. India’s women had a visit to Australia cancelled by their Board of Control that has responded to the strictures of the virus by entirely ignoring half of its country’s mighty population. And at the behest of various national boards, the Women’s World Cup, scheduled in New Zealand, was postponed by a year while men’s tournaments in India have gone ahead without hesitation.
But even before those ructions began in March 2020, it was slow going. After that lost Ashes match, Australia’s women waited nearly five months to play three ODIs in India, then another seven months for three more against Pakistan. It was March 2019 before their seventh match of the sequence, in a series against New Zealand.

In July 2019 they got three Ashes ODIs in England, then a reasonable run with a West Indies trip in September and a home series against Sri Lanka in October. That was when a focus on the upcoming T20 World Cup ran headlong into 2020’s global lockdown, and a full year passed between 50-over engagements. New Zealand has been the only opponent since, with three matches last October and now the series under way in March and April.

It means that the streak for the women’s team is of an entirely different character. It has involved winning through five overseas tours, and maintaining the quality over the course of an Olympiad. It has involved a substantially different team over that period of time. Australia’s last loss featured batting mainstays who are now part of the team’s distant past: Alex Blackwell, Nicole Bolton, Elyse Villani. The years since have seen a new generation of players rise through the Big Bash League 20-over competition at home, then into national colours.

Players like leg-spinner Georgia Wareham and all-rounders Nicola Carey and Sophie Molineux are now mainstays in Australian sides. The squad for the current tour includes a battery of young gun bowlers in Darcie Brown, Hannah Darlington, Tayla Vlaeminck and Belinda Vakarewa. Ash Gardner has gone from a luxury player to an integral component. This is a new and vibrant Australia at the far end of the streak, not a team of hardened professionals.

Those hardened pros are still an important presence, though. For all of Australia’s recent dominance in T20 Internationals, it is the 50-over format where the team’s very best players really stamp their dominance. Meg Lanning, entering the most recent match with 14 centuries from 82 matches. When she broke that record it belonged to Charlotte Edwards, with nine from 191.

Then there is Ellyse Perry who, since a move up the batting order in 2013, has notched 28 scores over 50 from her 53 innings, averaging 74. That was before this match, in which she tallied a 29th. She is also one wicket away from 153, the third-most for any player in this format. Jess Jonassen is rocketing up that list with 109, giving away 20 runs per wicket and fewer than four runs per over with her left-arm spin. Swing opener Megan Schutt is four wickets away from triple figures for herself.

These players have been the core through that winning period. But they have not had the luxury of getting on a roll with the same group. They have had to build on the run, initiating new players and raising them to the required standard while on the move. And of course, like a lot of jobs, there has been a lot less time on the move than there has been standing still. Change has to come in that respect – these players are too good to spend their careers waiting.

source: theguardian.com