Shelley Nitschke has played a huge part in the success of the Australian women’s team, as a player and coach.Credit: Justin McManus
Shelley Nitschke isn’t a fan of the cliched modern use of “my journey”, but the coach of the Australian women’s cricket team has sure had one. It speaks to an evolution of the game that was a long time coming, in which she’s played no small part.
At 23 – the age national team star Annabel Sutherland is now – Nitschke was pruning roses in South Australia’s Clare Valley, nipping off buds, preparing for grafting, bundling yet-to-bloom stalks into lots of a dozen ready for sale. She’d stopped playing cricket at 16, with softball an easier sporting option to fit around university.
“I feel like it gives me a pretty good grounding. Because of my journey – I don’t like that word! – when I went back [to cricket] I knew that if it didn’t work out, that’s OK, I’ll be fine. It gives me a bit of perspective.”
We’re in Archie Roach’s Charcoal Lane territory, where boutique clothes shops and assured eateries like Arcadia Cafe, on Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street, are the latest face of a suburb that’s no stranger to reinvention. Nitschke is fresh off a plane from Brisbane, home now for the Adelaide native since she took on the women’s job in September 2022. She’s grateful for a snug denim jacket to combat a very-Melbourne morning chill; sharp yet understated, she slips easily through the crowd.
By the time her fritter stack hits the table there’s a buzz of locals dining and we’re deep into a great Australian cricket story.
Alyssa Healy gives Nitschke a spray after Australia won the 2023 T20 World Cup. This year they were knocked out in the semis.Credit: AFP
“After uni [where she studied sport and recreation management], I went up to the Northern Territory and the softball comp had just folded. My flatmate Chris, who’s now my partner, said why don’t you come and play cricket? So I got back into it up there in the men’s comp.”
When the couple flew to Adelaide for a wedding, Nitschke took up an invitation to try out for South Australia. “And got picked – good wedding!”
She debuted for her home state at 24, and was in the Australian squad and living in Katherine looking after the YMCA pool when the penny dropped that being based in Adelaide might improve her game and chances.
Nitschke chose a potato rosti with rocket and artichoke at Arcadia, in Fitzroy.Credit: Justin McManus
In short, one of the great late-blooming careers began with her Australian debut in 2005 aged 28. By the time the left-arm spinner and reinvented opening batter retired at 34, she’d won four consecutive Belinda Clark Medals as Australia’s best-performed women’s cricketer and was hailed as the best all-rounder in the world.
Perhaps more pertinent to the job she’s doing now, aged 48, she was much-loved, ultra-competitive and super-loyal to those around her.
“Sometimes I’m not sure they know how to take me, which I kinda like,” Nitschke says of today’s Australian players. “I can have a pretty good poker face sometimes!
“I like to be really supportive and they know I’ve got their back, and that I care about them as a person. I can be pretty brutal if I have to deliver a bad message – that’s the harsh reality of high-performance sport. But I always go back just to check you’re OK as a person.”
That she is currently preparing Australia’s women for the Ashes series – which also includes one day internationals in Sydney on January 12 and in Melbourne on January 14, and a historic first Test at the MCG, a pink-ball, day-night affair starting on January 30 – segues nicely into a story that speaks of a protective and caring nature. The recently retired Meg Lanning was playing just her second game for Australia when England’s cricketers subjected her to an uncomfortable verbal initiation. Nitschke was batting at the other end.
Did she step in?
“Shit yeah! They were picking on a kid, right? I was in my 30s, at the back end [career-wise]. They weren’t saying anything to me. Gutless.”
Nitschke (second from right) with Alex Blackwell, Belinda Clark and Lisa Sthalekar during the 2005 world cup final. Credit: AP
Among the current crop, only Alyssa Healy and Ellyse Perry played for their country alongside Nitschke; she laughs that the latter was “a baby” (now 34, Perry was 16 on debut). She loves that they’re “the old girls of the team now”. Their recollections of the teammate who became their coach are littered with humour and, via a Perry story of a bat that ended up in a bin after a Nitschke dismissal, a dose of early intimidation.
“I reckon on the field and to my teammates I was pretty laid-back, but jeez I used to get angry at myself,” Nitschke says. “If I’d get out, often it was my fault because I’d done something stupid. When you’re coaching it’s not the same – I get upset with myself with some decisions I might make, but I don’t fly off the handle.”
She never had a burning desire to coach, but after some post-retirement work as a country cricket officer in SA, Nitschke found herself back in high performance with the state team and realised how much she’d missed it. She progressed to assisting Matthew Mott with the national team, and when Mott was poached to coach England’s men in white-ball cricket, she stepped up and piloted Australia to a gold medal at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
Last October’s T20 World Cup in the UAE was a maddening game’s counter-punch, as Australia – seeking a fourth title in a row – lost to South Africa at the semi-final stage. “That was really tough actually,” she reflects, knowing it’s sporting insanity to think you’re always going to win. “You just hope it’s not on your watch.
“It was probably more gut-wrenching than I’d imagined, and even more than losing big games as a player. Maybe I’ve forgotten. But I think when you win there’s nothing like being a player.”
If she needed a reminder that coaching elite sport is fraught, it came when England sacked Mott last July after two years. “I don’t know if everyone does this, but when I went into this head coaching role, I resigned myself to the fact that one day I might get sacked,” Nitschke says. “If I’m OK with that, go for it.”
Lunch at Arcadia, in Gertrude St, Fitzroy.Credit: Justin McManus
Every work day, surrounded by women who are now fully professional athletes, underscores the changing landscape she has traversed. There is no envy, only a conviction that professionalism has been hard-earned, is well-deserved, but also brings a level of pressure she never had to master. As Nitschke notes, when you sign up to play the global franchise cricket that wasn’t a thing in her day, with the pay cheque comes great expectation.
“We probably demand more of them than was demanded of me. You just hope they have a good experience – it used to break my heart when people would walk away from the game having not enjoyed it. This has to be a great time in your life.”
She’s excited to know that the generation of girls who are coming through won’t be limited by opportunity, and even more, that their emerging male contemporaries will forever see cricket as a sport for boys and girls, full stop. “It’s always going to have been that way for them, that changes the whole landscape.”
Phoebe Litchfield offers a compelling view of what that could mean for Australian cricket. Just 19 when she made a half-century on debut two years ago, she has since had pundits in a dither about how good she could become. Nitschke admits you can lose perspective when you’re on the inside, “then you speak to people and they say how amazing Phoebe is. And you go, oh yeah, you’re right!”
Lunch is done and there’s a media training session on Nitschke’s afternoon radar, another reminder that the women’s game is fully immersed in the modern sporting machine. There’s time to reflect briefly on what she values having control of as a coach – “my temper!” – and what coaching has taught her. “Don’t do it! No – that I’ve got a good instinct for things, but I just need to trust it a bit more.”
She knows her coaching is a work in progress, and laughs to recall Collingwood’s Craig McRae, buzzing with energy, confessing at a leadership think tank that he didn’t know how to switch off. “It’s real for most coaches. It’s a skill for sure – one that I haven’t mastered yet.”
For all the wisdom and wit she has to impart, what her players won’t hear are hackneyed refrains of “back in my day” or “you don’t know how good you’ve got it”.
“Players 10 years before me could have said that to me – I didn’t know how good I had it either. The game continues to change and change and change. I’m the coach of the Australian women’s cricket team, in a pretty well-paid job, working full-time in cricket. I don’t know how good I’ve got it.”
