In cricket, as a skill, you could say that getting players out would rank as fairly fundamental. Effecting a dismissal, if you will. A means of preventing a player with a bat from continuing to use that bat for as long as they desire. A way of advancing one of the two basic aims of the sport. That idea would be safe to contend.
I raise it only because the England women’s team have, going by recent and increasingly less recent history, entirely forgotten in one format of the game how to take the wicket of Australia’s captain Meg Lanning.
Twenty-over cricket is not Lanning’s most comfortable metier. She’s very good at it, of course, but she’s even more at home in the 50-over game. That’s where a combination of time and timing has brought her more centuries than any woman in the sport in a disconcertingly low number of attempts.
She hasn’t been at her best in any format the last couple of years, first playing through a shoulder injury, then sidelined by surgery before having to rediscover her touch. The Lanning of old has been seen in fleeting glimpses with the odd scoring shot, but until the other day hasn’t had the same dominance.
Nonetheless, throughout that whole period of time, one team has not been able get rid of her.
The year 2015 was the last time an English bowler dismissed Lanning in a Twenty20 international. Last Sunday’s not-out knock was just the latest in a sequence. At three wickets down there was a hint of concern for Australia, but it was quickly allayed as she stroked 43 not out from 37 balls to continue her team’s unbeaten streak in the multi-format series.
The previous match on Friday night was higher octane, as Lanning powered through most of the innings on her way to 133 from 63 balls, slamming seven sixes over the fences and into the spectators. England had thoroughly abandoned the concept of getting her out by the end.
The time she met England before that? Just the World T20 final in the Caribbean last November, where an unbeaten 28 completed the formalities in a pretty straightforward run chase.
It was less modest the time before that, in a tri-series in India in early 2018, when Lanning battered her way to 88 from 45 balls and pushed Australia’s score up past 200. England had no answers. The match before that, the low run chase England had set was the only thing keeping Lanning to 41.
Date things back again to March 2016 and England did actually manage to dismiss her – but that was a run out. After she had already top-scored with a key 55. In the World T20 semi-final where Australia knocked out England thanks to that total.
From there you have to go back almost another year. The final match of the Women’s Ashes of 2015, a series Australia had already won, when Anya Shrubsole was able to pilot the ball on a dramatic swerve past a defensive shot and into off stump to bowl Lanning for two runs. Surprise surprise, England won.
On Friday at Chelmsford, Lanning and company took the same bowler for 50 from three overs, and Shrubsole was dropped for Sunday’s game. It was quite the fall for England’s premier bowler. But England need to find a way, and their World Cup champion has not been able to deliver.
It’s a long time between drinks. The two sides felt much closer in quality in 2015 than they do in this current series. But even while the Australians have had a strong but not completely dominant couple of years, the best batter in their game’s history has spent much of that time unable to contribute. Now she’s back and firing.
There is one ray of hope for England ahead of the third and final T20 in the series on Wednesday. It may have been 2015 when that wicket fell, but the fateful day was in Cardiff on 31 August. The final match of this Ashes series will be just over the Bristol Channel on… 31 August. Could this be an omen? An answer written in the numbers? It’s either that, or Lanning is about to complete a full quadrennial without being beaten.
