Australia: Still the masters of the universe

In terms of cricket, there are masters and then there is the Australian team.

After nine balls in the World Cup final, Australia had nine runs in their chase. Remember, they’re going after 151, so they’re not massively behind. But for a team like them, it’s not exactly the kind of situation you would expect. Then Lauren Bell saw Georgie Voll about to ramp, and she completely panicked.

She bowled the ball wide, and then it swung away. And so in the second over of Australia’s chase, Lauren Bell missed the cut strip, and the keeper and slip couldn’t stop it. Australia added five runs to the score.

And the next ball was heaved away by Voll as well. So it meant that after nine balls, Australia had scored nine runs, and then they scored nine runs from the following delivery. But Lauren Bell fights back, and she castles Voll.

Phoebe Litchfield comes in, and on the first delivery she faces, she smashes a four. They don’t really care, this Australian team. They just keep coming for you.

After the game in the UK, Sky are showing a Lauren Bell masterclass. And she’s very talented and skillful, especially with the slower ones. She deserves to have her own masterclass for the fantastic player she is. But after three overs in this final, she was 1/38.

And when it comes to masters in the women’s cricket universe, there is another level. It’s a lot higher, and it’s green and gold.

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There has been a feeling for a little while that maybe the Australian women’s team are slipping just a little bit. Perhaps it’s more hope than anything else, but they had lost the previous two World Cups, and India did well against them at home. You had the WPL and the Women’s Hundred coming through, South Africa playing lots of good cricket, and New Zealand just having won a tournament.

It suddenly feels like all these teams are having moments around them, and perhaps as a joint collective, they’ve just gotten a little bit closer to the Australian team.

Because of this, perhaps every loss is overanalyzed or overindexed on. Looking for little breadcrumbs or clues that tell you maybe this side is not as good as it used to be. However, they still came into this World Cup as favourites.

When you look at this Australian team, they are nearly perfect in their construction. Their batting order never seems to finish, and it feels like every single player can bowl. It means that at any time you look at them, they have two options.

With the new ball, they can rip through you, or they can suffocate you with dots. So whatever is needed in a game, they will go with that. In their spin, they have every kind except for left arm wrist, and they can chop and change on mood, matchups, pitch, game situation, whenever they need to, and everyone is good.

Annabel Sutherland gets them extra bounce and causes genuine cross-seam issues, especially when most teams don’t even have that as an option. And when they get to the death, they can basically choose whoever they think will work on that day.

Everyone’s always going to have overs left in this team. It’s like going to the world’s best buffet and not being sure what you want. Sometimes you look at their bowling figures at the end of the day and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t they use her?’ And then you go, ‘Oh, it’s because they’ve got her and her and her and her. I understand that now.’

When you look at their bowling, they have basically one of everything. In a way, it’s almost cheating. But they also bowl scarily straight.

One huge difference between the men’s and the women’s game is how straight you have to bowl the ball. You can keep the stumps in play so much more because the bowling actions are all lower. So you’re always really looking to keep the ball as close to possible as hitting the wickets.

And a lot of teams try this and struggle and have their own problems. As we all know, the stumps actually aren’t that big when you go out and measure them. So a normal bowler’s going to miss them a lot. When Australia bowl, it’s like they have magnets in them.

They’re always keeping the stumps in play. So when they make a mistake, it’s usually because they’ve gone a little bit too straight. There’s almost never any width there. They are at you the entire time. And with their batting, there’s something else going on here.

At the top of the order, they basically have automatic scorers and microwave scorers. So an automatic scorer is someone who’s always going to be chugging away and making runs. Like the fact that Beth Mooney averages, I don’t know, more than a hundred in T20 World Cup finals.

And they don’t just have her, they also have Ellyse Perry, who’s also won a lot of World Cups. Considering the men’s football World Cup is on at the moment, remember that Perry once kicked an incredible goal in the women’s edition too. And so one of Mooney or Perry is almost going to make runs every single time.

That means that Phoebe Litchfield and Georgia Voll could come in and just go nuts if they want to. Because they know that the others will make runs, and that their role is to cause a little bit of chaos.

If either of them go really well, they can win the game very early on. Voll went out in the final, and Litchfield just came in and scored so quickly that by the time she was dismissed, the match was over. The England players, and by that I largely mean Nat Sciver-Brunt, could barely hit the ball off the square, and Litchfield could barely keep it on it.

And then later on in the innings, they also have nuclear power. Ash Gardner can come in and clear the ropes from the first ball. And they’ve got so many other talented batters, although I can’t tell you who they all are because they never actually seem to have to go out and do the job.

So often it’s just the top-order dominating. But one of the reasons those at the top can go so hard is because their depth is insane. Kim Garth bats at number 10. She has top scores across formats of 49, 72 and 51. She is a top seven bat in most teams in this World Cup. When she played for Ireland, she even batted a fair bit at number three. She has mostly batted in the top seven in her entire T20 career.

And if you look at this World Cup, maybe the lowest that any team would have her would be a number eight, and she’d still be a great number eight. She bats at number 10 for Australia. Behind her is Lucy Hamilton at number 11, who has batted at number five a couple times in the WBBL and made 36*(19) coming in at nine on her WPL debut. This is not a normal cricket team.

I changed my mind from before. This is actually cheating.

A great innings, a great spell, a bad toss, dew, catches, whatever it may be, a fluke run out. The great T20 teams win about 66 to 70% of the time. And if you look at the Australian team over the totality of the T20 World Cup, they have played 56 matches and they have lost nine, and yet they have won seven titles.

In terms of cricket, there are masters and then there is the Australian team. They are masters of the universe.