Alyssa Healy: Built in the dark, seen in the light

An uncle, a niece, and how the game changed in between.

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Alyssa Healy just announced her retirement from international cricket. The interesting thing about a career like hers is that there are two ways of looking at it.

The first is purely on her record. So for the first part of her ODI career - which is seven years, so it’s not exactly a small sample size - she averages 16 with a strike rate of 92. The average of 16 is pretty poor.

And then after Australia lose to India in the 2017 World Cup semi-final, they make a change and decide to open the batting with her. I think the harder ball and the field being in allows her to get into her innings more without having to worry about the field already being spread. She becomes a completely different player.

So she goes from 16/92 to 45/101 - two careers, worlds apart.

Alyssa Healy, for a long time, looked like someone who just couldn’t successfully make runs at the international level. It was a similar thing in T20 as well. And then she went on to be just absolutely dominant for a very long time.

But the other fascinating thing about this is because of the way that women’s cricket has developed over the years, the first part was done almost entirely without any footage. Like, we didn’t see a lot of women’s cricket up until 2017, and so a lot of people don’t even know that she struggled for that long.

So the second period suddenly becomes way more important. This Alyssa Healy is the only one most people have ever known. The first stretch was completely in darkness, and this one was done completely in light.

As far as legacies go, that’s the absolute best way of doing it. Spend your time working on your game, getting yourself better, and then when the big lights and the cameras all come on, you go absolutely ballistic.

And Alyssa Healy did that for almost a decade.

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Alyssa Healy is not the only person from the Healy family to play for Australia. She has an uncle named Ian. And we had a conversation in one of our chat rooms where someone said that clearly Alyssa was better than Ian.

Of course, at Good Areas, that led us down a very interesting chat of how on earth do you even compare these two players.

The first thing you have to note is how many games they play. So Ian goes on to play 119 Test matches, which is a remarkable record, especially considering that he came into a team that was struggling. He himself struggled for a while, and then he ends up being a very good battle-hardened wicketkeeper who can bat a little bit as well.

There aren’t many players in the history of the game who’ve played more Tests than Ian Healy, but anyone who follows women’s cricket will know what’s about to happen next.

Alyssa Healy has played 10 Tests. I don’t know how you compare someone who plays 10 Tests to someone who plays 119. Of course, a lot of this is just to do with how women’s cricket is, but it’s very hard to look at these two records.

However, if you just looked at raw average, I think you do see something. Ian, after all those incredible Test matches, ends up at 27. It’s a decent record, especially for his era and I do think you have to factor that in.

Alyssa though, does actually average 30. Now it’s only from 10 games, and her record’s a bit spotty because of that. But it does give you a hint that had she played more Test matches, she could have made more runs than her uncle did.

It’s when you look at the raw one-day records, you realize these two are in completely different stratospheres.

We have Ian Healy averaging 21 at a strike rate of 83. Those are not exceptional numbers. Even for his era, I don’t think they completely popped. He was a handy one-day player.

Alyssa Healy averaged 36 with a strike rate of 99. We know that Alyssa was picked a little bit early and took a while, but also Ian took a while to develop. So both of them had very similar sort of aging curves.

Of course, this is desperately unfair to Ian Healy, because he played his ODI cricket way before the revolution and the scoring rates that we see now. We use something called Zulu Numbers to basically adjust them for era.

So when we look at Ian Healy’s Zulu numbers, we could see that he’s averaging 27 with a strike rate of 101, which again is still behind where Alyssa Healy was. She was just that good in one-day cricket.

But I think the more fascinating thing for us is you have this incredible cricket family over two different generations - an uncle and a niece who both happen to be wicketkeepers, and they’re not even that far removed from each other. And yet, the game has completely changed.

Let’s look at all the reasons why you can’t even compare these two.

One is that Ian plays men’s cricket and Alyssa plays women’s cricket. Some of you might have picked this up even before we got there. They are fundamentally different sports in many ways. You only have to look at the amount of Test matches that Ian plays compared to Alyssa to be like, okay, this is weird.

And following on from that, when Ian played cricket, the most important thing was Tests. That’s not the case for Alyssa, right? For a huge chunk of her career, the most important format was ODI cricket, towards the end it even becomes T20s, but it’s certainly not Test cricket.

And of course they are both wicketkeepers. There is no doubt about that. But Ian was a keeper batter. Alyssa is a batter keeper.

So you would expect her batting numbers to be better than Ian’s because she’s being picked more likely based on her batting skill. Whereas in Ian’s case, he was being picked on his keeping skill. (It’s also worth it if you ever get the chance to go and find some highlights of him wicketkeeping, because some of them absolutely bang.)

There is no way to compare these two players. They both play different sports, and different formats and were picked for different reasons. But there is actually one thing that connects them other than the fact that they’re both Healys who are wicketkeepers, and that is their mouth.

Ian Healy was well known for whispering things into the stump mic and having a go at pretty much any batter that was in front of him. Alyssa Healy was also someone who sledged a lot. In fact, at one stage, she used the phrase “bring the bitch back” to talk about what she was going to be like behind the stumps. And if you talk to any player who was around Alyssa Healy, they were used to her saying a lot at them. So that’s probably the only thing that is comparable between these two careers.

But one of the reasons I really wanted to look at this is just to show you how much the sport has changed. It’s like comparing cucumbers to a can of Coke. They’re nothing like each other, despite the fact they are both from the same family, played for Australia, had big mouths, and were wicketkeepers.

Another way of illustrating just how much Alyssa Healy was a batter who did very well, rather than just as a wicketkeeper, is looking at the fastest ODI batters of all time. Chloe Tryon is the only woman with more than 3000 runs at the moment who has a strike rate of better than a hundred. And it’s just marginally better than that.

But just under a hundred beside her is Alyssa Healy. You can see that these two aren’t that far from each other, and everyone else is a lot slower. Within the top 10, you have people at a strike rate of 85.

So being at 99, and let’s be honest, basically a hundred is a phenomenal effort. This isn’t someone who just does a little bit of batting the way that her uncle did. She does an awful lot of it, and very, very fast at that. She’s an opener who would often go out and just set the world on fire for Australia and let the rest of their batters cash in afterwards.

Of course, sometimes she would bat on. She made 170 in a World Cup final, which is one of the highest scores we’ve ever seen in a tournament closer. But the really interesting thing about that tournament was that she also made 129 in the semi-final, so a combined total of 299 runs. That’s got to be one of the best knockout performances we’ve ever seen in World Cup cricket. It’s just mind-boggling that you can do that well. She also made 142 in a chase of 331 against India in the last World Cup, which was the highest target chased in women’s ODIs till the semi-final between the same teams.

She’s done a lot of things that just no one else has managed to do. There are players who have made more runs, but when Alyssa Healy does something good, it’s either really, really fast or just really, really monumental. But for all of this, she’s never really been the face of women’s cricket and certainly not of Australian women’s cricket. And that’s because her career has overlapped with Ellyse Perry.

However, over the last three or four years, something else has started to happen. She’s become the voice of Australian cricket. Obviously in the women’s game, we’ve already had Mel Jones and Lisa Sthalekar, who have done lots and lots of commentary. But Alyssa Healy doesn’t just go on comms. She also does a podcast, which seems to be getting bigger and bigger. She’s talking about men’s cricket and women’s cricket, and is sounding like an expert at all times.

So at the moment, she has the chance of living way beyond her career - as impressive as it already was - and going on to be something much bigger within the game.

Why I find all this so interesting is when she was first picked back in that early period, she was obviously most known for the fact that she was Ian Healy’s niece. And of course, she’s married to Mitchell Starc. That is something that we’ve only started to get used to in cricket over the last few years. She’s really at the forefront of both of those things.

If you go back and have a look at all the coverage of her retiring and everything else, yes, Ian gets mentioned the way that we have here, and of course, Mitch Starc is also going to prop up from time to time. But basically, most people are talking about just how good a player Alyssa Healy was, and it’s exactly the same when she’s on a podcast or doing commentary. She’s just really good at what she does.

Alyssa Healy really was someone who started in the darker times of women’s cricket, and she’s now in a position to cash in after her career on just how much attention there is.

And a lot of that attention comes down to players like Alyssa Healy being as good as they were.