While the men’s team are busy preparing for the upcoming T20 World Cup in 2026, the women’s team are gearing up for the forthcoming ODI World Cup 2025 set to be slated in India and Sri Lanka.
In this regard, the Australia’s women team practised well to defend the title by keeping their captain Alyssa Healy fit and fine for the upcoming mega event. The wicket-keeper had faced some foot injury issues for that reason she hasn’t kept the wickets since white-ball Ashes series against England.
She will begin in a slightly more upright position, which Healy described as a hybrid approach between what is often trained differently in Australia and England. Healy clarified that the alterations won’t be particularly noticeable.
“We’ve been taught how to keep wicket a certain way in this country for an extended period of time,” Healy said at the announcement of Westpac as a new partner with Cricket Australia. “At the end of the day, it’s not overly efficient on our bodies, and doing it at 35 is not ideal.
“We’ve just been looking at ways to make it a little bit easier for some ageing joints and trying to keep things moving the way they should. It’s been a nice learning experience later in my career, so hopefully it pays off.”
Healy explained in an interview with ESPNcricinfo how the adjustments were made after talking with a podiatrist she was seeing about her most recent injury.
“One of them actually worded it to me like when, and I’m not comparing myself to him, but when Cristiano Ronaldo started to get towards the back end of his career, they changed positions for him to make it a little bit easier on the body,” Healy said. “It was interesting and I said, well, how do we do that in the game of cricket? Like you can’t really change positions, but can we change things technically to make things more efficient? And we just played around with it.
“[Looking at] some of the stressful parts of my job and what it’s doing to some of the joints in my body and how do I get the best out of myself for the back end of my career. So we just tinkered around with it and it’s just really simple, it’s kind of like a bit of a hybrid model between what the English do and what we do.
“We’ve all been traditionally taught to stay low and come up with the ball and that’s fine until your knees and your feet can’t allow you to do that anymore. So just been playing around with how to get to my power position a little bit differently.”
Healy would hope to keep wickets during Australia’s A tour against India’s A team as the side will kickstart their preparation for the ODI World Cup from that series.
“I’ll get a red-hot crack at it in the ODI fixtures in that A-series, so we’ll get a better look at how things are working,” she said. “My goal is to be there and playing in the World Cup as a wicketkeeper, so hopefully that pans out.”
Since the WPL is now permanently in January and prevents them from playing during the school holiday window, Australia will not be seen on home soil until mid-February when they play India, despite the fact that they have a big prize ahead of them as the defending champions at the ODI World Cup
“Not having an international fixture in that school holiday period does hurt a little bit, but in saying that, it kind of extends the cricket season, which isn’t completely a bad thing for our sport,” Healy said. “At the back end of the Ashes [last year], I felt like that was really cool to have it at the end of the Border-Gavaskar, so hopefully there’s similar sort of momentum this year at the end of the men’s Ashes, that there’s still some more cricket to watch.
“We’re playing India, which is one of the biggest series for us, so we’ll wait and see how it plays out. I think it’s going to look different for a little period of time until we work out the right balance for us in Australia with WPL shifting.”
On the prospect of the pink-ball Test, Healy said: “Hopefully we get a nice fast, bouncy wicket, and we can show the Indians how good our pace stocks are.”
