#Sport

How Australia’s T20 Star Alyssa Healy Is Leading UP Warriorz This WPL

Alyssa Healy
The Women’s Premiere League is in full swing with several cricketers earning a well-deserved spotlight at the tournament which is in its debut season. With several overseas players making waves at the WPL in Mumbai, it will be interesting to watch how the tournament expands drastically and internationally in the upcoming seasons.

Among the many international cricketers playing this WPL, Australia’s Alyssa Jean Healy is surely bringing her years of T20 experience in the game and not just this, she is also leading the UP Warriorz team from the front.

One of the UP Warriorz’s six international players, Alyssa Healy is captaining the team this season bringing her T20 expertise to the side.

Alyssa Healy journey

Born on March 24, 1990, Alyssa Healy competes for the Sydney Sixers in the WBBL as well as the Australian women’s national team, and New South Wales in domestic cricket. Alyssa Healy is currently leading the UP Warriorz at the Women’s Premiere League at the tournament’s debut season which launched on March 4.

Alyssa Healy has improved from a shaky beginning in international cricket to becoming one of the most potent hitters in the world. She can quickly neutralise bowling assaults and is perhaps the best lofted on-drive player in the game. With an unbeaten 148 off 61 balls against Sri Lanka in October 2019, she broke the previous record for the highest T20I innings. In 2020, she played the pivotal innings in the T20 World Cup final in Melbourne. She is the daughter of Greg Healy, a member of the Queensland squad, and her uncle Ian Healy held the record for the most Test dismissals as Australia’s wicket-keeper.

For Healy to get to those levels, though, took some time. In her first 80 T20I appearances, she averaged 17.44 with a strike rate of 112, while in her first 52 ODI matches, she averaged 15.96. The Australian team’s 2017 ODI World Cup semi-final exit proved crucial, as it did for many teams throughout. She started opening the innings on a regular basis, a position she had previously filled sporadically and shown flashes of her potential in. She scored an unbeaten 62 in an ODI against New Zealand in 2012 and 90 off 61 balls in a T20I against India that same year. Since then, she has averaged 36 in T20Is with a 149 percent strike rate, and since 2017, she has averaged 55 in ODIs.

Her perseverance was on display at the start of the highly anticipated 2020 T20 World Cup in Australia when she had a string of five single-figure scores, and struck a half-century in the opening match, albeit a loss, before saving her best for the biggest occasion of them all in front of 86,000 spectators. She was a key component of the 2018 T20 World Cup victory in the West Indies.

The grab to knock Shafali Verma from the 2020 World Cup final is just one example of her increasingly smooth glovework that can hold its own against the likes of Megan Schutt. Healy is surely one of the most celebrated cricketers and it will be interesting to watch her journey going forward.


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