When the team captains walk out to toss the coin and be interviewed before the start of each Melbourne Stars WBBL game this year, Meg Lanning will allow herself a quiet moment’s reflection and relief.
For it was the captain’s ritual of the toss, putting on her uniform, getting her game face ready and heading to the middle that came to represent all the pressures of leadership that Lanning endured for nearly a decade before admitting to herself that she needed help.
Meg Lanning at the toss before the 2022 ODI World Cup final in New Zealand.Credit: Getty
“What I love the most, which is silly, is that I don’t have to get my uniform on early to go do the toss. I love not having to do that,” Lanning told this masthead.
“I don’t think too much about the games these days. I’ll rock up and play, and once I’m in the zone I want to be competitive and do well as I can. But it’s not as consuming all day, every day as it was.”
Lanning had, for a long time, seemed like a superhero. A great batter with the captain’s perfect poker face and an armful of global trophies, it was not until after her tearful retirement last year that she was able to open up.
She has spoken of how she had become so driven by performance goals that she was eating little and overtraining obsessively – sometimes running 90 kilometres a week while not refuelling anywhere near enough. Now, having finished up as an international, Lanning is experiencing a purer sense of enjoyment about cricket for perhaps the first time in her professional career.
“I’m meant to have everything under control all the time. That was how I viewed it and how I operated,” she said. “I almost convinced myself that I had everything under control.
“Actually getting people to help you is the thing that took me the longest, rather than trying to sort things out by myself, and actually how helpful it was when I did allow other people to help me and, I guess, listen to what I was going through. It’s all been a very positive response and, hopefully, it normalises things a touch.
“Without having the captaincy role, I feel like that is a natural barrier for people to open up and talk upfront. For a while, in the role I was in, I made it hard to let people in and talk to them.”
In parallel, Lanning is an advocate for reshaping how the national women’s program operates. In the aftermath of a surprise elimination from the Twenty20 World Cup in the UAE, won by New Zealand, her words bear consideration.
Meg Lanning at her retirement announcement last year.Credit: Getty
In essence, Lanning believes that now the calendar has begun to resemble the men’s schedule, women’s teams need to prioritise downtime as much as training and preparation. It is with a rueful tone, but also empathy, that Lanning explains she did not learn how to decompress from cricket until she relinquished the Australian captaincy.
“I was very bad at switching off,” Lanning said. “Even when we had days and weeks off, I didn’t really do that as well as I could have, or didn’t really know how to do it. So I think the messaging around that needs to be as good as can be in terms of allowing people to find other things they do enjoy away from the game.
“The game is so different now, we play so much more. It’s not ‘everybody plays everything’ any more. It’s going to have to be a bit of a shift in terms of what are the really important tournaments and series, and what does it look like for them to be ready to go, as opposed to ‘every tournament, every series everybody plays’, which is what happens in the men’s game now.
“Sometimes I look at the Aussie men’s team and think they’re taking the mickey a little bit in terms of their prep’, but then it’s like ‘well that actually makes sense’ because you’re trying to get them into the best headspace they can be when they need to be. It’s getting our heads a little bit around that, and not doing what we have previously.”
And for someone who was perceived for so many years as an infallible winning machine, Lanning’s most pointed advice is actually about embracing failure in order to learn.
“Let people learn by making mistakes,” she said. “They might go on a holiday for a week and it turns out that’s not the best prep’, but how do you know until you do it? Allow them to make decisions for themselves, rather than being stuck in the structure of cricket, which can be pretty full-on sometimes.”
