Meg Lanning: the megastar of Aussie cricket
Cricket may be called the gentleman’s game but that was never going to deter Meg Lanning. Genevieve Gannon meets Australia’s much-admired captain.
In late June 2006, a cricket match is underway in Repton, south of Sheffield in the UK. The under-19 opening bowler for England watches the new batsman walk to the crease. Confusion flickers across the bowler’s face. His teammates snicker. The batsman is a girl. Fourteen years old, yet somehow she’s in the batting line-up of an elite Melbourne private school’s boys’ cricket team, a blonde ponytail sticking out from under her helmet. The fast bowler shortens his run-up, taking four steps before releasing the ball. Willow and leather connect with a crack and the ball shoots to the boundary for a four.
“There are things you never forget and I’ll never forget that innings Meg Lanning played,” former Carey Baptist Grammar School cricket coach Neil Williams, says, laughing as he recounts her focused attack.
“The bowler looked at her, hands on hips, walked back to his full run-up, came in and bowled his next ball. She hit that for four as well. “This little girl had just smashed those kids ... and that’s when we thought, wow, she’s very special.” When Meg reached a half-century, the English players, laughter banished, came to shake her hand. Then she made another 13 runs.
The visiting team was a development squad from Carey in Melbourne. Meghann Moira Lanning had arrived from NSW in Year 7 wanting to play cricket, and as no girls’ team was available, had joined in with the boys. After two years playing with the 7As and 8As, she was chosen to represent Carey in the Associated Public Schools competition. It was rare for a Year 9 pupil to be selected to play in the First XI. But a girl? Unprecedented. Nobody had done it before, or since. It was the first of many conventions and records the player who came to be known as “the megastar” would smash.
“She was a very, very special talent,” Neil says. “She was remarkable.”
Now 25, Meg is the captain of the Australian women’s cricket team, a position she’s held for four years. Elevated to the helm at 21, she was the youngest cricketer ever – male or female – to lead a national team, and it widely regarded as the greatest woman cricketer in the world.
Meg isn’t comfortable with the label. Sitting in the sun-dappled court yard of the Hugh Trumble cafe at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, she says she’s “not a massive goal setter”.
“I just tend to go along at the time. But I’m a very competitive person, so I just want to win everything that I play.”
Despite this fierce sentiment, Meg is warm and humble. Her account of her
cricketing career thus far is peppered with the word “luck”. “I got lucky,” she says, describing being picked for the Victorian team. “I was lucky,” she says, recalling early tours with the Australian team, nicknamed the Southern Stars. Yet look at her record. Luck has nothing to do with it.
In January this year she collected her third Belinda Clark Award – the top honour for an Australian international women’s cricketer. At the time, Southern Stars coach Matthew Mott said Meg was obviously the best batter in the world, and had been for an extended period. What’s more, she had been upping the ante, he said.
She always wants to improve herself, Melbourne Stars coach David Hemp tells The Weekly. “She wants to get better. She’s very driven. There’s a continuous development mindset. That’s the reason why she’s achieved what she has.”
In the weeks that followed the award ceremony, she collected another milestone, notching up her tenth international century. Asked if she is the world’s best female batsman, David doesn’t hesitate. “Without a doubt.”
Meg’s early years
Born in Singapore to father Wayne, a banker, and mother Sue, Meg was still in booties when the family relocated to Sydney. They settled in Thornleigh, about 25km north of Sydney’s CBD, where Meg attended Warrawee Public School. She loved all sport – both watching and playing – and, taking after her athletic mother, threw herself into AFL, hockey and cricket. “We were outside all the time,” Meg says.
The fourth of five kids, she was never short of a teammate when she wanted to hit a ball around the backyard.
“Me and my younger sister Anna, we’d always play different sports together. It didn’t really matter what it was, to be honest. We always wanted to be involved in the teams.”
Playing sport professionally didn’t seem to be a viable option for Meg. Women’s cricket wasn’t televised, so she made Ricky Ponting her idol. When she was about 10, one of her teachers suggested she try out for a regional cricket team. “That was the moment where I went and played proper cricket for the first time and realised that it was out there,” she says.
When she was a teenager, Meg’s family uprooted again. This time to Melbourne, where Meg was enrolled at Carey Baptist Grammar School in the leafy inner city suburb of Kew, and joined the boys’ cricket team.
“It was the first time a girl had played in any of the teams so it was a bit unusual,” Meg says.
Carey Grammar is part of the Associated Public Schools of Victoria – a cluster of elite schools that marks as its origins a “grand football match” between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College in 1858. You would recognise the names of the member schools from the CVs of politicians and business leaders.
They are competitive institutions.
When Meg came onto the ground, after changing alone in a staff room or umpire’s room, she was facing off against teams of boys who were bigger and more powerful than her. But she didn’t let them intimidate her. “I think the fact that I was able to hold my own in the standard of cricket made it a little bit easier for me,” she says.
She plays down her performance, but her former coach Neil Williams is effusive in his praise, not just of her game, but of her character.
“She had to cope with a massive amount, really. The [Carey Grammar] boys at first – well, you know what Year 7 boys are like – they ended up being really protective of her. When other teams would make comments, they made comments back. She would have copped a fair bit at different times, I would think.”
Meg credits the challenge for preparing her for life on the international sporting stage. “I was out of my comfort zone at times but I think that really helped.”
She insists she didn’t set the world on fire, but at 16 she was drafted to the Victorian squad, and by 18 she was playing for Australia.
She tells of misadventures on tour, like the time the team piled into a bus to make the journey to see the
Taj Mahal, only to have the bus crash into the back of their police escort.
“We chugged along to a service station where we could see them trying
to fix this bus,” she says. “Some things are better not seen – they were using bits of plastic and we were thinking, ‘that’s not going to work’.”
But it did work, and the bus journey continued without incident. As with her unconventional start in cricket, Meg views the challenges the team faces as a chance to grow. “Often when things don’t go your way it brings you together as a group,” she says.
“The Megastar”
In 2011, Meg made her one-day international debut. In her second game, against England, she scored an unbeaten 103, making her, at 18 years and 288 days old, the youngest Australian to score an international century – man or woman. A year later in a game against New Zealand, she broke the record for fastest century.
David Hemp says, in terms of skill, her male equivalent would be someone like men’s captain Steve Smith, who was the number one test batsman in the world when he was given the captaincy. “She’s a good player, but it’s more than that – she approaches the game with hard work and dedication,” David says. “Whatever she does, she’s very committed. She’s prepared to push those boundaries.”
Meg may be able to keep up with the boys on the pitch, but women’s cricket is far behind the men when it comes to remuneration. Cricket is a lucrative sport – the top male players command salaries in the millions.
Cricket Australia made a new pay offer this year that would increase international female players’ wages by 125 per cent. The offer is yet to be accepted, but would allow women players to focus on the sport, as opposed to having to balance playing cricket with another job.
Being a woman selected for the Australian cricket team still isn’t the golden ticket it is for the men, but
Meg prefers to focus on the progress that has been made.
“It shows how far the women’s game has come,” she says. “We’re getting to a point where – hopefully once the deal gets done – we can be professional and put all our time and effort into becoming the best athletes that we can and allowing ourselves to put in the time for that.
“It’s shifted pretty quickly,” she says, adding it hasn’t always been the case that the men were earning huge salaries. “Twenty years ago, they were in a very similar spot to what the women cricketers are now.”
For the past few years, Meg has fitted university around training. After leaving Carey Grammar, she enrolled in an arts degree at The University of Melbourne before swiftly defecting to exercise science.
When she chats to The Weekly, she is just about to sit her final exam. In a blue-green T-shirt the same colour as her eyes, she looks like any other university graduate. But she’s unlikely to be looking for a day job any time soon, as cricket tours take her away for up to six weeks at a time.
This is part of the reason she says she doesn’t let the salary gap bother her. She travels the world, doing what she loves. “I probably wouldn’t have been to India if I wasn’t playing cricket, so I’m glad that I’ve had the chance to do that.”
“I was out of my comfort zone at times but I think that really helped.”