AUSSIES HOPE TO DRAIN CUP
Healy urges teammates to ‘seize moment’ against old enemy in final
STAR Alyssa Healy says Australia must “seize the moment” in the women’s World Cup final against England in Christchurch on Sunday.
Australia is aiming for a record seventh World Cup victory, while defending champion England is seeking its fifth. In this tournament, the Aussies have maintained an unblemished record, starting with a 12-run victory over England – their closest result – and building to a 157-run walloping of the West Indies in the semifinals.
“This team may not get another opportunity like this to win a World Cup together again,” Healy said. “We need to seize the moment.”
AFTER 30 games of cricket between eight teams, played over 30 days at 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 a pretty decent total, our batters have nailed it. And when we’ve needed to take an absolute hanger in the field, we’ve done that.
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.
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.
We all know opportunities like winning a World Cup don’t come along often and who knows what the future may hold. The 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.