Megan Schutt and Meg Lanning make history in Australia's ODI win
Megan Schutt bowled her way into the record books while Meg Lanning became Australia’s leading women’s runscorer as the visitors completed an eight-wicket ODI win over the West Indies in Antigua on Wednesday.
The right-arm medium pacer claimed a ODI hat-trick to become the first Australian woman to achieve the feat. Schutt cleaned up the tail in the last three balls of the West Indies innings, her 3-24 reducing the hosts to a moderate 180.
In reply, Australia reached their target with eight wickets to spare with Alyssa Healy (61 off 32 balls), Lanning (58 not out) and Ellyse Perry (33 not out) getting among the runs to complete a 3-0 series sweep.
Lanning’s half-century makes her Australia’s top run-scorer across all three formats of the game and the skipper said it was pleasing to close out the ODI series.
“It’s great, we spoke about heading into today that we finish off the job and stick to our game plan the way we want to,” she said. “We bowled first today which was different to the first couple of games and I though we bowled pretty well, obviously Megan with the hat-trick there at the end was great.
“To finish off so dominantly with the bat I think is really pleasing as well. I think we’ve got that dominant and brutal nature now and we want to make sure we don’t let teams back in and we keep playing the way we want to.
“I think the good thing is we have so many contributors in our side, everyone’s really hungry to do well and I think we’ve seen that throughout the series.”
The win earned Australia another two crucial ICC Championship points and a four-point lead ahead of secondplaced England. Australia travel to Barbados on Thursday ahead of the first of three Twenty20 Internationals beginning on Saturday.