With no fewer than 15 ODI centuries to her name and swashbuckling ones at that in the shorter format of the game, there’s really no end to what Meg Lanning, an apostle of women’s cricket has achieved in the sport.
The Star That Twinkles, But Not On Hype
At 31, where she was still peaking in that she’d been scoring dollops of runs all over the world, she decided to call time on her career. The world was shocked. Not just the Southern Stars whom she helped attain northerly heights. And to say, Meg Lanning is to the Australian women’s side in its current firmament what the great Belinda Clark was back in the day won’t be an understatement.
In the last decade or so, Lanning’s commandeered a winning outfit whose greatest living all round cricketer is Ellyse Perry, whose greatest current white ball bowler is Megan Schutt and where both Beth Mooney and Alyssa Healy can now effectively be called the smash sisters.
A Legend In Her Own Right, Of A Team That Has No Parallels
Lanning has championed a team where an Ash Gardner can win games on her own and where the rising names such as Tahlia McGrath and Grace Harris can be effective on any given day with both bat and ball.
Moreover, Meg Lanning’s inspirational leadership has made Australia win a T20 World Cup on home and away in the land of the Proteas where both- the fire and the fireworks rested with her Aussies as seen a month back.
But truth be told the greatest victory for Australia, which came a few hours ago, didn’t just belong to the team from Down Under; it marked a moment of great triumph for the women’s game on the whole.
It wasn’t a bumper sticker expression. It wasn’t a promising expression spelt loudly on a marvellous PowerPoint. Not was it a smooth and winning line that rescued the women’s cricket from the shadow of dominance it’s constantly lived amid: that thing called the men’s game.
A brave new world
It was a bold statement and one that started a fresh new chapter for international women’s cricket.
When the Australian cricket board announced on April 3 that its Women’s side will be earning quite an impressive pay hike, you felt that you didn’t just belong to a world where Diversity + Inclusion were rabble rousing statements.
You felt that you were now witnessing a new era where Women’s cricket was truly coming into its own and whose illustrious achievers didn’t have to walk in the footsteps of its more popular male counterparts.
Here’s what the Guardian from the UK reported on the mega step forward for Meg Lanning’s mega Australian women’s team:
The majority of women’s cricketers on minimum contracts will earn more than $100,000 a year after Cricket Australia and the players’ union announced a landmark $634m pay deal on Monday.
CA and the Australian Cricketers’ Association on Monday revealed details of a new five-year memorandum of understanding that will see professional women players share $133m – an increase from $80m in the previous agreement – and benefit from a 66% increase in payments.
One hopes that such giant strides forward for the women’s game as seen in Australia will also evoke a similar action from some of the other equally commercially robust cricket boards such as that of India and England.
