Five hours before the Women’s Ashes Test started at the MCG, a different match was happening a couple of kilometres down the road in St Kilda. The Afghanistan women’s team, made up of nationally contracted players who had to escape their home country in fear of their lives when the Taliban took over in 2021, assembled from their new homes in Melbourne and Canberra to play their first match as a complete side against a charity Cricket Without Borders team at Junction Oval.
They put in a decent showing to make 103, which might have been higher had their best bat, Shazia Zazai, not been run out in a mix-up on 40 from 45 balls. Then without fielding at the highest standard, with a few catches going down, they took three wickets and managed to push the chase into the final over, going down with four balls to spare. None of them were deflated by the result, instead elated to have the chance to play, and mobbed by family and friends on the field during the post-match presentations.
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They hope that this is just the beginning of their cricketing work. This is a team that have had to scrap and scrape by for everything they have, before Cricket Australia provided the support to get this match up and running and to invite all the players as guests at the Test match during the afternoon. The Australian women’s team, meanwhile, have a degree of luxury at the opposite end of the scale.
It was reflected in the peculiar XI that Australia put together for this Test. The captain, Alyssa Healy, is a wicketkeeper and an opening bat. She does both jobs in the white-ball sides, and more recently has dropped down the order in Tests to better focus on that first task. But despite hobbling around in a moon boot through the Twenty20 portion of the multi-format series, selectors decided that Healy was fit to play, but not fit to do either of her usual tasks.
That means that she is listed to bat at No 5. Beth Mooney, who would normally open in Tests, had to keep and therefore drop down to No 6, while Georgia Voll was brought in on debut to open the batting. Which also meant that Healy was taking up an extra batting spot, because Annabel Sutherland and Ellyse Perry were a lock to play. Ash Gardner was pushed down to No 7, and Tahlia McGrath to No 8.
It left Australia with only four front-rank bowlers: Gardner, Kim Garth, Darcie Brown, and Alana King. Australia do have seaming all-rounders aplenty, with Sutherland as a quality fifth option, but McGrath’s bowling is increasingly occasional, and Perry, despite being the highest wicket-taker in Women’s Ashes cricket, rarely bowls these days, sending down two overs across the six preceding white-ball matches.
The leg-spinner Georgia Wareham has been brilliant with ball as well as bat in her four matches this series, but was still the player pushed out. For a team that have spoken of ruthlessness, accommodating Healy in this way was a sentimental pick that doesn’t live up to the word.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Right now Australia could pick eight players and three lucky-dip winners from the crowd and still come out on top. Wareham’s fellow leg-spinner King had 14 wickets at 11 across the white-ball games, and followed up here with 4 for 45, denied a chance at a five-wicket bag when England’s No 11, Lauren Bell, was run out. She bowled England’s best player, Nat Sciver-Brunt, on 51 with classic turn, took out two more danger players in Sophia Dunkley and Danni Wyatt-Hodge with a return catch and a snare at silly point respectively, then had the lower-order hitter Sophie Ecclestone caught at cover.
That does suggest that Wareham’s leg spin would have been a handy double act, but Garth took two at the top with seam away for a slips catch from Maia Bouchier and back in for leg before against Heather Knight; Brown trapped Tammy Beaumont in front and later got Lauren Filer at slip, and Gardner bowled the keeper Amy Jones. England ground out nearly 72 overs but made only 170.
So by stumps, despite 90 minutes of bowling in the evening session that is notionally the more difficult time to bat, England had extracted only the wicket of Voll for 12, and Australia finished at 56 for 1, behind by 114 with most of their deeply stacked batting lineup yet to come. A crowd of 11,643 was decent and loud although the massive MCG looked mostly empty, so with any luck more will come in through Friday and the weekend. It will need England to find something special to prevent that crowd seeing an Australian team running the match on their terms, leaving the irregularities in team balance as a footnote to the result.
