It’s a rare privilege when we get to play a Test. The pinnacle of Australian cricket is putting on your baggy green and this one is even more special and historic as the first day-night Test at the MCG. The opportunity to showcase women’s Test cricket on the big arena will be really important, not only for the game itself but for the group that gets to run out there on Thursday.
It’s always like a carrot dangled in front of us when there’s a Test match to be played because we don’t do it that often. It brings a lot more energy and excitement to the group. The vibe is high at the moment, just around the occasion itself and having all our family and friends coming to watch. Hopefully the public gets right behind us and comes out in droves too.
I would absolutely love to play more Tests, whether that is in standalone three-Test series or adding more Tests to multi-format series. But I understand we’re bound by the ICC future tours program and the different boards around the world that are willing or unwilling to play women’s Test cricket. If that changes in the next five years, that would be great, but I’m under no illusion to the fact that it’s not a viable revenue option for all the countries to commit to three-Test or five-Test series. Maybe in 10 years that will look slightly differently.
The desire to be out there on the MCG no matter what ailments or injuries you’ve got is the same for everyone, including our skipper. It’s unfortunate for Alyssa Healy that she’s been under an injury cloud the last 12 to 18 months, but she’s found a way to make it work when she’s needed to. She’s desperate to get out there in the whites and have an impact on the series, even if that’s just as a batter.
It’s going to be a different challenge for me, keeping wicket and batting a bit further down the order than I have in the last few Test matches. I’ve been mixing between keeping and fielding across my career, and I feel confident enough to do either. I’ll have a couple of days in Melbourne to prepare for the pink ball but because I do a lot of keeping in club and franchise cricket, it’s pretty easy to just get back on the horse. But I haven’t kept in a Test before, so I might be in the foetal position after 100 overs behind the stumps.
When we retained the Ashes in that first T20 there was a sense of, “right, that’s one box ticked”, then we quickly moved on to making sure we won them outright. There has been a lot of chat around the 2023 Ashes and that we let England back into the contest to tie that series. We wanted to make sure we didn’t give them a sniff this time. We’ve responded really well, both on and off the field, to the disappointment of the drawn Ashes series and the T20 World Cup at the end of last year. The whole playing group has gone to another level and we’ve raised the bar of what we can achieve in the white-ball forms. I’ve been pretty happy with my own form. At the start of the T20 leg, I thought it was a good opportunity for me to lay down a marker and take the game on and take England on more.
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We want to keep winning and England will want to play for a bit of pride in Melbourne. We certainly don’t want to give them any reason to find confidence for when they come back to our shores. If we can do that by winning the Test match and getting all 16 points, that will go a long way to psychologically burying them. We want to make sure that in the future they’ve still got that hanging over them, where they think, “well, we went over there and couldn’t even get a win”.
It has probably been a tough series for England. We’ve managed to find a way to win every game so far, but I can understand the desperation from England to try and get a win and redeem themselves. The scrutiny that they’ve been under from their own fans and followers of the game should be taken as a real positive. When you’re watching an international team, you’re expecting high performance. If a team’s not quite meeting that standard, then questions get asked and rightly so. It’s a great thing that people care about the women’s game that much that they’re willing to have an opinion about what they see and what they think needs to be better.
